Want to see improvements in your climbing? Get some training time in this winter, and you’ll soon see the benefits. Adrian Berry is here to kick you off the couch.
The first climbing wall I ever used was in the corner of a sports hall at Swansea University. It was at least thirty feet high, and consisted of lumps of highly polished rock cemented into place between bricks. Compared to the climbing on offer at a modern wall, this offering from the late 1970’s was tough: getting to the top involved moves from 5b to 6b depending on the line you followed. To make things harder, ropes were always frowned upon, leaving your security in the hands of a few slim mats. But I never heard of anyone getting maimed, which just goes to prove something.
For all its crudity, the Swansea University wall was actually a good training facility: the holds were made of real rock, the angle was right, and the moves were always technical, requiring precise footwork, and you always did your level best not to fall off. I’d turn up each Wednesday night, put my shoes on, and climb until I was thrown out at closing time. I didn’t realise it then, but this was the best training I could have done - the volume of climbing developed good local forearm endurance, and the moves themselves, whilst not hard, built a solid base of vertical climbing technique that is the bread and butter of British climbing.
Modern climbing walls are, of course, far more fun, and ostensibly, less dangerous places. Over the last ten years, climbing walls have moved from being training gyms to being indoor crags. As the walls have changed, so has the way we use them, and in consequence, the benefits we get from them. So what follows is a guide on how to use a climbing wall to train. I’m going to draw a distinction between training and climbing: training is the means to achieving a performance goal through exercise. Whilst climbing has a very good effect on your climbing, it is the end result. Training can often feel like hard work, but remember - if you’re focussed on a goal, it shouldn’t feel like a chore!
What’s your weakness?
Climbing is a complex sport, with many factors affecting performance. Those factors are both physical and mental, for example a fear of falling that goes beyond sensible self-preservation can be a greater limiting factor than your physical limits. But chances are you’ll recognise one of the scenarios below:
“I’m quite new to climbing routes, and have mostly bouldered – which I’m reasonably good at. Despite this, I find I get pumped quite quickly on routes, even though I find the moves easy”
Being a strong boulderer is a really good place to start for being a good route climber, but the physical demands made by routes are quite different from those made by boulder problems. Your body will be used to using (recruiting) lots of muscle fibres to do powerful moves, but it won’t be used to relaxing on holds and recovering as you climb.
The blood supply to your forearms requires a network of capillaries to deliver blood to your forearm muscles. When you boulder, you condition yourself to use short bursts of energy which use only the energy that is stored in your muscles, when this is low, you can easily rest and recover between boulder problems on the ground. Routes are physically very different, with a lower intensity, and higher duration of that intensity. To be able to recover on routes, you will need to develop a more efficient blood supply by increasing the number of capillaries bringing the blood in.
To increase your capillarity, as it is known, you need to work for extended durations, at a very low intensity. The key point here is ‘mileage’, getting on long routes that are within your grade is perfect. In terms of duration, expect to be climbing continually for upwards of fifteen minutes, the intensity should be enough to feel that you are doing some work, but you don’t want to be getting pumped. The best angle to use is vertical, or slightly overhanging - steeper walls will require you to use jugs, and it will be your arms getting the workout, when it’s your fingers that need it. Of course, indoor walls are inherently limited when it comes to height, so you’ll have to get creative. An easy boulder traverse is a good way to climb for extended periods - don’t worry if you have to get off and walk back to the start, or if you slip off a hold and have to get back on, just keep on going, and make sure you get the right level of intensity. Not so hard that you’re getting pumped, not so easy that you can’t feel it.
Routes are better than traverses as you’ll be making upward progress, and so working your arms and shoulders more effectively. Aim to keep climbing for fifteen minutes and more. Now, unless you are the world’s slowest climber, you will soon run out of wall. When you do, just reverse to the ground, and then climb back up again: if you can’t reverse your route, it may be too hard, but don’t worry about lowering all the way and climbing back up, a couple of seconds of rest isn’t going to harm. If you can’t get on a route of the right level of difficulty, then get on one that is a little too easy, and make it harder by missing holds, or just using the edges of large holds. If you can only get on a line that’s too hard, you might be able to reduce the intensity by using all the holds available, rather than just the colour coded routes.
Bouldering walls can also be used for capillary training, but they need to be at a very low level of intensity. If you are training with a partner, consider the ‘stick game’ where your partner chooses and points out the hold to move to next, but remember that the intensity has to be below the level at which you’re going to get pumped.
“I’m a reasonable all-rounder, I can recover well when I get to big holds, and when I’ve had a good rest, I can do hard crux moves, but when there are a series of moderately hard moves in a row without a rest, I quickly run out of strength even though I’m not pumped!”
There’s a difference between getting pumped, and running out of strength. When you’re pumped, your arms feel heavy and solid, and you lose your finger strength. This happens because your muscle has built up lactic acid, and has been unable to get rid of it quick enough. Running out of strength occurs at a much higher level of intensity, it has traditionally been referred to as ‘powering out’, but really it’s your strength that runs out (unfortunately ‘strengthing out’ just doesn’t sound right). Strength endurance is key for climbing sustained, hard (for you) sections where there are no rests, and the moves are hard too! Features like sustained cracks or arêtes are prime examples.
The best way to improve your strength endurance is through circuit training. A circuit is basically a long boulder problem that typically ends up back where it started. In terms of length, start at around twenty moves, and add more later. The moves should produce climbing at a consistent level of difficulty, with absolutely no rests. In terms of time, you should last about two minutes, again, as you get better strength endurance, you will be able to stay on the circuit for longer. The angle that your circuit is set at is important – consider what sort of angle of rock you’re training for - it should be at that angle – not some insanely steep cave where you have to swing around on jugs. The last few moves of your circuit should feel very hard (though of course that’s only because you are running low on strength, not because the moves are any harder). Your circuit should feel like doing four reasonably hard boulder problems in a row, so if you can’t make a circuit, then simply do that instead.
A good way to make your circuits more like routes is to slow down and spend a greater proportion of your time one-handed. Putting clips into a circuit (with a short length of rope tied around your waist) will slow you down and make it much harder. Take a good rest between circuits, and repeat until your performance level starts to drop, then stop. When your circuit starts to feel easy, you need to add moves to it. If you can get up to thirty moves, you need to make a harder circuit.
“I have a good level of endurance, and climb routes throughout the year. I would like to move up to the next grade, but find I get stuck at moves because I can’t use the holds, or can’t reach them!”
If you only ever climb routes, you will develop good endurance, and fluid technique, but it’s easy to find yourself reaching a point where the moves themselves will stop you in your tracks. There are two factors affecting your ability to do hard moves (apart from technique of course), these are strength and power. Strength is the ability to move smoothly from hold to hold, and to maintain awkward positions. Power is the ability to move quickly between holds, using an explosive, dynamic style. Your fingers only require strength (no such thing as finger power), your upper body requires a combination of strength (e.g. locking off) and power (dynamic moves).
The very best way of improving your strength and power is through hard bouldering. Climbing routes alone is a painfully slow way of improving your ability to do hard moves. Climbers who avoid bouldering limit themselves significantly. Bouldering also has the advantage of teaching new techniques, and forcing us to reach deep into our mental as well as physical reserves. With a bouldering session, aim for quality rather than quantity. Warm-up gradually and then climb at your limit, varying the angle and style of problems. If you started off on a hard vertical problem, it would make sense to do a steeper problem next, then return to a more vertical problem. Between problems, make sure you take good rest: you need to feel strong to reach the limit of your strength, and you need to work at your limit to make gains.
If you can’t get to a bouldering wall, or need a more specific finger workout, campus boards and fingerboards are beneficial. A campus board is essentially a compact bouldering wall, with simple, yet powerful moves guaranteed to boost your finger strength and upper body power - just take care to warm-up and not push yourself to the point of injury. Fingerboards are best used for dead-hanging. Warm-up thoroughly, then find a hold you can hang for a couple of seconds before failure, rest and repeat. Initially you will use both hands, then as your strength improves, you can move over to one hand. A bungy cord should be used to reduce the intensity, and is an essential accessory.
Planning
There’s a lot of information out there on how to plan your training for the best results, but for most of us, it’s fairly academic. The three ways of training mentioned above each have different levels of intensity and duration, from low intensity, high duration local endurance training, through to high intensity low duration strength and power training. Throughout the winter, if you are training towards improving your performance for the spring, consider starting with a break – Christmas is an obvious time to let any niggling injuries heal, and build up your motivation for your training. And if you are a reasonably balanced climber, you might want to plan your winter training something like this:
January (mid onwards) - Start your training with a couple of weeks of light capilliary work, as necessary.
February & March - Now then get stuck in to a couple of months of building strength and power through bouldering, and maybe some specific weight training that targets your shoulders and arms.
March & April - After a period of concentrating on bouldering, you can move into strength endurance, by making the problems longer, but a bit easier.
April & May - As the winter training comes to an end, and you want to prepare for getting outside, bringing local endurance training into your wall session is the icing on the cake.
Throughout the winter, you can of course mix up your training, in fact it would be unproductive to concentrate entirely on one thing. If you were training strength and power through bouldering, you might have two sessions of this in the week, then do routes on the weekend in order to maintain your endurance. Individual sessions can also be mixed, with local endurance training being a good warm-up and warm-down. But if you are going to mix endurance training with strength and power training, you will find it more productive to do the higher intensity bouldering before the lower intensity routes or circuits.
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