By Steve Bechtel
In every sport, it seems like there is a metric that ties in with great performance, and that athletes tend to fixate on. In endurance sports, it’s the VO2 Max, in golf it might be your drive. In climbing, it’s starting to be our straight-arm finger strength tested on a large edge.
In baseball, pitchers are judged on the speed of their pitch. In this world, one of the true legends of speed was Steve Dalkowski. In a career that spanned the late 1950s through mid 1960s, he was considered the fastest pitcher in the game. Many still claim that he’s the fastest that ever lived. Never heard of him? Here’s why.
Steve Dalkowski pitched nine seasons in the minor leagues racking up an impressive 12.63 strikeouts per game. Some batters claimed they never even saw the ball. In the 995 innings he pitched, he struck out nearly 1,400 batters…but he also walked 1,354.
In one game, he struck out 24 batters, and his team ended up losing the game 4-8. Why? He’d also walked 18, thrown six pitches that the catcher couldn’t even get to, and hit four batters.
What does this have to do with climbing? It’s this: If we took all of the climbers who sent 9a+ in the next year, plus all of the climbers who podium at the World Cup, plus all of the climbers who send V15 or harder, it’s a safe bet that many of them would not be in the top 5% of pure finger strength among climbers.
Likewise, if we could take the top 5% of all climbers everywhere according to their finger strength, we’d see names we’ve never heard of all over that list.
I’m not saying that having strong fingers is bad, nor am I saying a fast pitch is not helpful. Where we get into trouble is when we laser in on one tiny part of performance to the neglect of other, essential, factors of performance.
But What If My Fingers Are Truly A Weak Link?
Within any movement or position, we have a limited amount of improvement we can make within any timeframe, despite the effort we put in. This leads us to look at what our optimal loading should be. Rather than thinking in terms of “How much hangboarding can I fit in?”, we should think in terms of “What is the least I have to do to keep the ball moving in the right direction?”
In practical terms, a person might see very similar gains from doing hangs twice per week for 10-15 minutes as they might see from doing it 4 times per week for sessions twice as long. Even if there were a marginal difference in strength, the 4x greater time investment would not be worth the cost of losing all that time that could be spent productively elsewhere.
It’s not wrong to bring in regular, progressive, and long-term finger strength training into your program, but it would be wise to do so with an investor’s mindset. Instead of having insanely strong fingers and nothing else in your bag of tricks, you could have sanely strong fingers, and be able to match them with your climbing skill.
The trick with all of this is not being foolish with where you spend your time. It doesn’t matter if your love is hangboarding, Kilterboarding, yoga, or vegan cooking…deciding that just one of your facets of training is the “way and the light” is shortsighted and ultimately will leave you on a plateau.
The 75/25 Rule
This is a good rule of any sport, but it’s helpful to hold in your head when you’re designing your training. 75% of the work you do should be climbing shoes on, movement based stuff. Boulder. Do drills. Climb some pitches. Three out of four hours should be spent here, all the time. Yes, there are those that will argue against me in both directions, but I’ll say that climbing is essentially a movement sport and movement needs to be coaxed along constantly.
We also need to climb at a level that allows for many hours of movement practice in a week. If your climbing experience is limited to a fixed 40 degree Moon Board, you’re probably not going to be able to do this kind of volume without racking up a bunch of injuries. So… find some easier movement to do somewhere.
That fourth hour of 4, you can lift weights, hangboard, run campus laps, or even go mountain biking. The same idea applies, though: Don’t go all crazy doing a different sport in trying to build fitness for this one.
This is where the idea of the minimal effective dose should come to the front. How much work do I need to do to do enough? And at what point am I doing way more than necessary?
I’ll take you back to a N=1 experiment I did a few years back. Through the month of August, I trained finger strength 2 or 3 days per week. I went from a Peak Load at the beginning of the month of 185 to 198. It was a good feeling. In September, I backed off to once per week training, and tested at, happily, 202 at the end of the month.
I trained 3 days total in October, with fewer sets per position, and tested at the end of the month at 200. In November I did hangs twice. End of month test: 199.
I did a hangboard workout on December 10th. Tested December 30: 196.
No hanging at all (still climbing) in January, Tested January 29: 194.
This suggests to me it is possible to develop a facet of strength intensively a couple of times a year and then maintain it at a fraction of the effort the rest of the year.
My movement and footwork and economy can always use work, so it’s great that I don’t feel compelled to keep chasing finger strength all the time at that level, and instead can work on technical boulders and movement drills.
I can shoe up, and not feel like I’ve left something important behind in the weight room or on the hangboard.
My friend Jonathan Siegrist prides himself on being the weakest climber to tick off the world-standard routes that he does. Although this might or might not be100% true, the fact is we’d all do better to maximize skills to a point where we didn’t need to be so damned physical to get up things.
Ted Williams is a household name in baseball. Babe Ruth. Willie Mays. But not Steve Dalkowski. Sure, Dalkowski probably had some pride around his speed, and he might have wanted to throw even faster. What I’m sure of is this: he would have loved to be great at the whole game, and not just one facet of preparation for it.
Hold Fast,
Steve
ABOUT STEVE BECHTEL
Steve is the founder of Climb Strong, and is proud to be the worst coach on the Climb Strong team. A climber for nearly 40 years, he has traveled the globe bouldering, sport climbing, and doing first ascents of some of the world's biggest walls.
He is co-owner of Elemental Performance + Fitness, and is the author of several books on training for climbing. He lives in Lander, Wyoming, with his wife Ellen and children Sam and Anabel. He includes low-intensity training in almost everything he does these days...since it feels pretty tough.