How Strength Training is Misunderstood by Climbers (Part 1)
This post was originally published on Climbing Magazine here and here.
Climbing isn’t that special… physiologically, that is.
I’ll start by reminding the readers that climbing is no different than any other sport. I know we all love the semi-arrogant suggestion that climbing is a “skill sport,” but if you’ve ever tried to hit a baseball or dodge a kick to the face or drop into a half-pipe, you can appreciate just how skill-based those other sports are too.
One of the problems with the “skill sport” suggestion is that it paradoxically complicates the way that climbers think about training, driving a lot of climbers to do random skill-based strength exercises with their training time rather than simply practicing the skill (i.e. climbing).
The goal of this article is to convince the reader that doing random exercises will produce random results, and to demonstrate that supplemental strength training is a way of improving our ability to generate and recruit strength while climbing
Athletes from all sports can benefit from strength training.
All sports involve multi-joint, multi-directional tasks that require a number of muscles working in synch to produce a powerful yet smooth and efficient movement. Because multi-joint tasks coordinate many muscles and tendons, we never use only one muscle group, which means that no muscle group gets overloaded to its maximum intensity. That last statement is the primary justification for supplemental strength training: It allows us to expose the tissues we rely on for our sport to a stress greater than the sport itself.
Strength training must involve progressive overload to be effective.
If you stop and ask yourself why you’re strength training in the first place, you’ll probably say one of the following things: (1) to climb harder; (2) to reduce injury risk. The good news is that strength training can achieve both if done correctly. That’s because these two outcomes result from the same thing: progressive overload. Both the concept and the application of progressive overload are simple. Over some time, usually months to years, you expose the tissues to a progressively more intense load. As a result, the tissues have a greater “envelope of function.”
I like to use the gas tank analogy: the more gas you have in the tank (i.e. the stronger you are) the greater distance you can travel (i.e. the more climbing moves you can do) and the more roads you can travel on (i.e. the harder the moves can be). But in order for the strength to translate to climbing, you also need to simultaneously practice your skills on a climbing wall. Remember the following few lines if you need to remember only one thing from this article: Refrain from approaching strength training with the mindset that increasing strength will automatically increase your climbing grade, because it won’t. Instead, approach strength training with the mindset that strength training improves both the quality and quantity of climbing practice. It allows you to practice harder movements with more control and consistency.
Strength training exercises are NOT SPECIFIC. Their adaptations are.
There are five main adaptations to training. As we run through each adaptation, I challenge you to think about it in the context of the movements you’ve done or seen climbers do.
Coordination. The initial adaptation to exercise is coordination. You must become coordinated with the exercise before gaining anything else from it. This is especially true for less stable exercises such as rings, TRX, balls, etc. If there’s too much coordination demand, almost all the adaptation you’re gaining is getting good at the skill. But don’t be confused by that last sentence: The coordination adaptation is so specific to the skill that we shouldn’t expect it to transfer to climbing, even if the “movement pattern” seems to match what we do on the wall. It is simply different.
Recruitment. After the coordination adaptation comes increased muscular recruitment, specifically of high-threshold motor units, which is what will actually help improve our climbing. To train recruitment properly, we must increase the intensity of the exercise to recruit the largest and fastest fibers in a muscle group. The science is clear that recruitment increases best with stable exercise (bench press), not unstable exercise (rings or TRX), because even though unstable exercises feel intense, that perception of intensity does not directly reflect muscle recruitment. The important thing to note here is that recruitment gains will transfer directly to rock climbing even if the exercise doesn’t resemble climbing. If we teach our brains to communicate with more fibers in a muscle group, we will have access to those fibers when we climb. That works great so long as we are maximizing recruitment levels and not simply changing our perception of effort by doing less stable exercises that take our bodies a long time to coordinate to.
Hypertrophy. Another adaptation with long-term strength training is hypertrophy changes—i.e.changes in muscle size. These increased size changes come with the additional benefit of increased energy storage for climbing practice. This change in muscle size is real-time capacity building. I would even go so far to say that building muscle size is way more productive long-term than doing year-round capacity training on the wall. Too much on-the-wall capacity training can be a real power suck for climbing athletes. A very sneaky fact about low-intensity, high-volume exercise is that they are quite fatiguing for the system and run many climbers into a cycle of overuse injuries which can be avoided with better strength training.
Tissue stiffness. One of the most important adaptations to proper strength training is changes in connective tissue stiffness. There is a limited amount of science on connective tissue responses to loading; however, we know these stiffness changes happen due to qualitative (material) changes to the tissue, not quantitative (size-based) changes. The science currently suggests that slow, heavy loading over long periods improves the quality of tendons and ligaments. From the tendon’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter how it gets the load, which means you can choose the exercise of your preference; it only matters that it gets the load regularly. If we contrast heavy and slow strength training with light and fast training (i.e. light weight, fast movements, high reps), the latter does not load the tendon adequately to create an adaptive response. Tendons respond best to properly dosed (progressive) heavy loads.
Power. The final adaptation I want to cover is how strength training makes you more powerful. You may have heard the old adage you should “train strength before speed,” and that’s still best practice today. That statement concerns multiple adaptations we’ve already covered, but it is important to tie them together here. By activating the fast twitch fibers with strength training, we can access more fibers that naturally contract fast (power). First, however, we’d need to coordinate them at the speed of our sport (this is the subject of the next article in this series). Then, by making the tendons stiffer, we can shorten the joint at the rate of the muscle. Finally, all we need to do to gain a power increase is do more powerful movements (mostly climbing) on and off the wall. So the final specific adaptation to strength training is that it gives us the ability to increase our power output.
How to implement a simple strength training regimen
Choose a handful of exercises and use them for a handful of months. Remember, your chosen exercises don’t have to look like rock climbing. For example, the movement pattern involved in horizontal pulling (dumbbell rows, seated rows, inverted rows) doesn’t resemble that of vertical pulling (pull-ups, lat pull-downs, etc.), but they are basically the same from a strength training standpoint, especially for athletes new to training. You do, however, need some variation in the exercise itself.
Here’s what I mean:
Exercise variations are necessary in the long-term to reduce the repetitive nature of training movements. The goal is still the same—overload a muscle group and its connective tissues—but the intention is to not “over-grease the groove.” For example, because shoulder injuries are so common in climbers, it makes sense to do more than just mimic the range of motion used in our sport while training. The variation allows us to continue overloading the tissues with less risk of repetitive injuries, because any motion done at too high of a dosage can be toxic.
Some exercise variation examples:
Full range of motion: The most familiar form of weight training—in which you complete the full movement. For example, if you’re doing a lat pulldown, you’re pulling from straight arms until the bar is roughly level with your sternum.
Isometric holding positions: Instead of focusing on movement, you’re focusing on holding a position, just like holding a lock-off. I suggest two joint angles (90 and 120 degrees); each rep is 2-3 seconds long.
Partial range of motion: By doing either the bottom half or the top half, we target different portions/muscles of the movement. For example: pulling from straight arms to 90-degrees in a lat-pulldown, or only focusing on the upper half of the movement on a bench press.
Full-range with a hold/pause at the bottom (or top) of the movement: This is typically a hypertrophy-building protocol that adds muscle size in the stretched position. In a bench press, this means holding with the bar just off your chest; with a lat pulldown, it means holding with the bar in a lock off position.
Full-range with accommodating resistance: In this version, an athlete will use elastic bands or chains to modify the intensity at different ranges of motion while performing a full range of motion.
To be clear, I don’t include the variations here to confuse anyone or make it seem complicated. Quite the opposite is true. Understanding exercise variation should make it more simple. For example, I don’t need three different pressing and pulling exercises to train for climbing. I can get away with having one for each movement, then using the exercise variations to keep exposing and progressing the muscles to a mechanical load greater than my sport. What I don’t want to do is jump ship and focus on new exercises just because they feel more challenging, since all we’re doing here is training specific skill coordination rather than overloading our tissues.
What not to do: You’re wasting time if you’re trying to strengthen the pushing and/or pulling muscles and your intensity is less intense than your bench press and pull-up loads. You are doing nothing more than getting coordinated at a movement that isn’t your sport. You’d be better off climbing instead. There are too many movements to train, and you’ll never hit them all. So don’t try and re-create climbing movements off the wall. It just doesn’t help.
What exercises does science suggest?
Listed below are the most thoroughly researched strength training movements. For 90% of climbers, using a selection of these movements (one from each category) is enough to supplement your on-the-wall training. Pick one exercise from each category, get coordinated at it, progress the load, be patient, and climb more than you lift. The underlined exercise is the most commonly used one.
Pushing: Barbell bench press, Smith machine bench press, Machine chest press, Dumbbell bench if you have to.
Pulling: Seated rows, Lat pull-downs, Dumbbell bent over rows, Weighted pull-ups, Barbell bent over rows.
Triple extension: Barbell deadlift, Barbell back squat, Hex-bar deadlift, Barbell step-ups.
Shoulders: Overhead press, Landmine press, Lateral raises.
Fingers: Check out my article “Are Most Climbers Getting Fingerboard Training Wrong?”
If you’re uncomfortable with the movements, get a coach to show you how they’re done. But trust me: lifting is relatively easy. If you can climb up a wall on random plastic holds, you can lift something heavy off the ground. Unfortunately, most climbers I consult with are intimidated by strength training. If that’s you, contact a weightlifting coach like Natasha Barnes; they can show you what to do and help you avoid getting hurt. Once you get started, you’ll never look back.
A simple training progression
Once you’ve chosen your exercises, your next step is to progress the load over time. I recommend aiming for two strength sessions per week for the initial month, after which you could push it to three or more days per week. Once familiar with the stimulus, you can strength train every other day with no downside, whereas (for most of us) climbing every other day will eat the soul out of your forearms.
Here’s a simple progression:
Block #1: Weeks 1 through 6
Strength train 2 times per week. Do all movements in each session. If you’re lifting on the same day as climbing, rest for 4-6 hours between them in order to be maximally effective in your recruitment. If you’re new to training, lift on a non-climbing day because you’ll be sore at first.
4 sets of 5-7 reps/set. Each set should be around 60% intensity for 6 weeks. Pick a load that is challenging to complete for 5 repetitions on the first set, then take a long rest (3-4 minutes) and try to hit 5 reps again every set with the same weight. If you don’t get 5 reps exactly, that is OK. Rest long and try again. Don’t just drop the load in order to complete a predetermined rep number. This phase aims to gain coordination with the exercise, expose the tissues to more intensity, and let the body adapt to the stress. You’ll be able to push more reps (and weight) as you adapt.
Block #2: Week 7
After your first 6-week block, take a week off from strength training. Then we’ll increase the intensity.
Block #3: Weeks 8 through 13
5 sets of 2-4 reps/set. Each set should be around 80% intensity, so the load here is your 3-rep max per day. After warming up, find a load you can complete for 3 reps. Then take a long rest (3-5 minutes) and try to hit that same rep number for 5 total sets. Each week you should see increases in starting weight. Again, if you don’t hit three reps every set, that’s OK. Make sure your rest is adequate and have intention with every rep. The quality of the reps does matter.
Remember the point
As you can see, you don’t need a magnificent strategy to use strength training properly. For those who are really into strength training, there are plenty of nuanced methods that will help you make minor incremental improvements, but for a rock climber looking to produce more force on the climbing wall, once you’re coordinated and gaining recruitment, those additional small improvements probably won’t help you see increases in your climbing performance.
The next time you do a strength phase, if you’ve plateaued in your gains, use one of the noted exercise variations, modify the load according to the variation, and keep the intensity up. Don’t waste your time learning random skills off the wall. You’d be better off climbing.
In the next article, I will discuss using these same movements to increase power output. We mentioned briefly that strength could make you more powerful, but to do that we have to become coordinated at speed.