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by Steve Bechtel
If you’ve spent any time on social media looking at climbing content, you’ve probably come across someone commenting on the essential need (or absolute uselessness) of supplemental strength training for climbing.
The arguments against doing any supplemental training are well-intentioned. Most of us got pretty darn good at climbing by just going climbing more. Although this works like gangbusters when we are novices, the value of climbing more and more and our ability to get out and do so become limited as we advance through the sport. Add to this the fact that as we improve at climbing, we actually overload our muscles a little less frequently and a little less intensely for any given grade, as we improve our technique.
Beyond climbing, science heavily supports resistance training for all human beings as a method for improving bone health, overall metabolism, resisting aging, and any number of positive outcomes. My honest belief is that people that don't get into a resistance training habit are those that are uncomfortable with their skills in the gym and haven't stuck with it long enough to feel the benefits of said training. The most critical aspect of strength training that is ignored by most gym users is intensity. We simply go into the gym and move around a little bit, but we don't do it under heavy enough loads to stimulate strength improvements in our bodies.
If you're a climber and you do want to see some benefits of resistance training but are afraid of losing some of your climbing time or ability, this article is for you. Below, I am going to outline a simple way of bringing strength training into your weekly routine without having to build out completely separate sessions or even go to a different facility than your normal climbing gym. Although many gyms feature a fitness area that has an assortment of kettlebells and barbells, we can also see great improvements in strength without these specialized tools.
Although I am going to highlight some very specific exercises and a pretty specific schedule here, you can easily extrapolate this to fit with whatever tools are available to you, and I will explain how that happens.
Importantly, I am going to insist that you don't add another training session to your week. Here, we are going to see the best results and highest compliance from athletes who simply add a few exercises to an existing climbing training day. And although lifts like squats, overhead presses, and deadlifts are excellent choices, an athlete doesn't need to move into complicated movements to see strength benefits.
Step One: Movements, Not Muscles
A challenging part of prescribing strength training is helping athletes break the association with bodybuilding. Although strength trainers and bodybuilders use the same tools, and there is some amount of crossover in the physical benefits, strength training needs to be thought about in a different way. Instead of trying to focus on a specific muscle or body part, we want to think about helping our bodies move more effectively in some fundamental movement patterns. Although there are many ways to categorize these movements, the most simple includes five broad categories:
Upper body pushing
Upper body pulling
Hinging at the hip
Squatting down
Core tension
Most of us have some idea of an exercise or two that would fit into each of these categories. It's a rare person that hasn't done a push-up at some point in their life, which is one of the classic upper body pushing exercises. We've all squatted down to a chair and stood up. We are all familiar with pull-ups. Many of us understand core training, where we create tension in the midsection. And although strength training is a very advanced field, you don't need to use the most advanced exercises to start benefiting from it.
Pull-ups are a fine exercise for upper body pulling, and many of us can understand doing an inverted row on a racked barbell or a set of rings. Although squats are an excellent exercise, I have found that learning to do a split squat or a lunge is much simpler and plenty effective for many athletes. Climbers can also benefit from a simple step-up exercise. For core movements, there's nothing super special about advanced exercises. Many of us do fine with some kind of plank variation, and for my climbers, I really feel like a basic hip flexion exercise, such as a hanging knee raise or a hanging straight-leg raise, fits the bill for the first few months.
Although a complete exercise session might include all five movement patterns, we are going to start very simply and try to get in the habit of adding some strength training in and making sure we are feeling the benefit before we dedicate too much time to it.
Step Two: Go Climbing, Plus.
The next thing I want you to do after you have a general idea of a couple of exercises in your head is to just go do your climbing session. We are going to climb the exact same amount that you have been and not make any modifications to this part of your program. Once you have finished your climbing, go ahead and take off your gear and pack up your bag, but stop off in the climbing gym's fitness area if you've got one. To make sure you are getting enough rest and getting into a habit of addressing strength rather than pursuing fatigue, I want you to set a rolling 1-minute clock on your phone.
We are going to pick two exercises. At this point, it is going to be a single upper body exercise and a single lower body exercise. Since they are the simplest ones and exercises that you probably already have experience with, I am going to recommend doing push-ups and lunges.
The first day's workout is going to be 4 minutes in length. Start your timer. Drop down to the floor and do 5 push-ups. At the end of those five push-ups, assess whether you did all five of them well and whether they were difficult or very simple for you. When the phone beeps, I want you to do another set of 5 push-ups, but adjust the intensity so that you can do all 5 of them well, but with effort. If the first set of 5 were very difficult for you, incline your hands by putting them on a bench or chair to reduce the load on your upper body.
If they were very easy for you, you could put your feet up on that same bench and decline the body to make the load more difficult on your upper body.
When minute 3 starts, we are going to switch to lunges, and I am going to have you do 5 lunges on each leg. Again, if it's very easy for you, grab a set of dumbbells and get them ready for the next set. If these were very difficult for you, let's regress them a little bit and do a simple split squat, or even brace yourself by holding on to a squat rack upright or the back of a chair.
The final set of today's workout is one more set of lunges, adjusted for load.
You probably won't feel fatigued or tired, or maybe even that the exercises did anything at all. This is fine.
Step Three: Intensification
A mistake many athletes make is trying to do more repetitions or reduce rest in the pursuit of feeling the exercises more intensely. When we are trying to generate force or strength, however, we need to address load as our primary method of creating difficulty. With this in mind, we are going to go ahead and do our next climbing session of the week, just like before, and we are going to do the same two exercises: pushups and lunges.
This time, we are going to stick with that 1-minute rolling clock and 5 repetitions per exercise, but try to make sure and adjust the difficulty to where 5 reps is hard but just doable, and your form looks good on each repetition. Strength coach Charlie Manganello always reminds his athletes that the first rep should look exactly like the last rep.
The only difference in today's workout is that we are going to do 3 sets of pushups in a row, followed by 3 sets of lunges in a row, all on that rolling clock.
Although we could add more sets each time we come in and train and continue to increase the time commitment of this strength training, my primary goal with this plan is to help you see the results of getting good training in and the small amount of time required. We are going to stick with doing just 3 sets of each exercise.
I want you to follow this protocol for two more sessions before we make a slight adjustment.
Step Four: Going Heavy
Around your fifth workout, you are going to notice that you might be maxing out your ability to decline the push-up. At this point, I would suggest we switch to a simple bench press exercise, which allows us to do the same movement pattern but adjust the loads more specifically. If you're not familiar with this exercise, it's worthwhile to practice a little bit, but the range of motion is the same. Go to a barbell bench station or set it up in a squat rack. Take the barbell, lower it to your chest, and then push it straight up. Obviously, it's best to have a spotter for this exercise, and it's going to take a little while to get used to.
If you already know the bench press exercise, let's go ahead and work on intensifying the load to where 5 reps is in our zone of hard but doable, with each rep looking similar. We don't need to push to the point that the last couple of reps are strenuous or slower at this point in your training.
Since the loads are increasing, we are now going to switch between the lunging exercises and the pressing exercises. Minutes 1, 3, and 5: you are going to do 5 reps of bench press. Minutes 2, 4, and 6: you are going to do 5 reps on each side of lunging, adding load as necessary to make those 5 reps hard.
This next part is critical.
After each climbing session for the next 3 weeks, I want you to do this same 6 minutes of exercise, as intense as possible. Sometimes you might not advance. Sometimes, we even see a slight regression in strength for a session or two. Most of the time, though, we will see a slow and steady progress.
Step Five: More Patterns
If you have been consistent, you will have seen some really substantial strength gains in each of these exercises. There's nothing wrong with just sticking with these same two exercises for a few months and continuing to push those loads up. If you're enjoying yourself and would like to see even more improvements, consider adding just one more exercise for those same 5 reps and add it into your on-the-minute clock.
Let's say you'd like to add a little bit of core strength. Your new clock would be:
- A set of bench press on minute 1
- A set of lunges on each leg during minute 2
- A set of hanging straight leg raises or knees to elbows for around 5 reps on minute 3
You could then simply repeat this three times for a 9-minute workout. The biggest friction piece here is that so many athletes feel that doing more volume is really the key, and we can double our results by simply doubling our time.This is not the case, and I would way rather see you dedicate the majority of your time to going hard in the bouldering gym and just letting this strength simmer forward for 6 to 12 months, and watch what happens.