Climbing is much like most sports in the way that being stronger is going to help you. It is also like a lot of sports because technique is much more important than strength. Although it is much easier to train strength than it is to train technique. Climber technique can come from watching other climbers or from climbing yourself. You will learn new movements and find the times that they will be beneficial on the wall using both of these methods. Although even the best climbers can only climb for so long before their hands are torn to shreds. The fingers or forearms are almost always the first things to give out during a climbing session, and once this happens any serious climber will start their training for the day. If you lined up ten different climbers and asked all of them their training routine, you would almost never hear the same one twice. When training climbers may be focusing on strength, power, or flexibility. Although flexibility is often worked into other training routines the other two focuses can be broken down into many different subgroups.
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When working on a climber’s strength they could be working on their leg strength, finger strength, pinch strength, or many other types. When choosing the type of strength training that a climber wants to focus on, they need to be able to look and their climbing and see where they are struggling or what they could improve upon. The last training cycle that I went through was a finger strength training cycle to improve upon my ability to crimp. During this cycle I incorporated a lot of endurance hanging exercises on very small ledges which are often called dead hangs. These ledges would usually start around 20 millimeters and shrink until they were about 6 to 10 millimeters. The hangs lasted for about a minute each and would often end with a set of pull ups. Another exercise often worked into my finger strength training was max hangs. A max hang would almost always be done on the 20 millimeter ledge with as much weight as I could handle. Strength training routines are always beneficial and I noticed the effects almost immediately after finishing the cycle.
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My current training cycle is a power cycle although it does not have a focus. After taking some time off climbing during the summer I noticed my power felt low so I wanted to bring it back up. A majority of my power training is done on the campus board. Based on one’s strength level they will skip a varying distance when working on the campus board. Most of my training would be done skipping two feet with each movement like rungs on a ladder just without the feet. A campus board is about ten feet tall allowing for this movement to be done five times with every set. I would complete about 15 sets starting with each arm over a twenty-minute span. While this is not the only exercise done during my power cycle it is the one that was done most often
Your passion is evident in your blogging, but the paragraphs are little lengthy which is unappealing to the reader. There are numerous grammar errors, maybe read it over before posting. Great theme and pictures though!
This is a really unique topic and its very interesting to read about. When I wrestled in HS we had a couple climbers on the team and they were always some of the strongest guys, so I know your training programs are legit. When reading this blog however, I found myself wishing that the text stood out a little more, since with the small font and the large paragraphs it made it slightly challenging to read. Maybe changing the formatting or layout a little bit, and adding a little more variation to sentence structure would provide a better reading experience. Overall nice job though!