The Dilemma

Another week down!

With midterms this week, all the students at school (myself included) were a little hectic and no one seemed to get out of the madness unscathed. I ended up doing well on the four tests I took (one to go), and put in a decently solid week of training.

With the training, I've had some thoughts on things that I may tweak. Typically my workout looks something like this:

• Warmup (30 minutes tops)
• Dynamic Stretching (see The Climbing Doctor)
• Warm-up Pyramid
• This is just climbing 5 x V2s, 4 x V3s, 3 x V4s, 2 x V5s, and a couple attempts on my boulder problem projects to get my "try hard" attitude on board for the day. I try to do the pyramid as quickly as possible without sacrificing technique, it kind of doubles as a volume workout because I'm putting in about 120 moves or about 180 feet of climbing (I would debate that the vertical distance is less important than the number of moves).
• Workout (between 30-50 minutes, depending on how pressed for time I feel and how guilty I feel taking up all the time I want to procrastinate studying)
• This switches between limit bouldering, 4x4s, and volume workouts
• Hangboarding (20 minutes)
• Just two grips with two sets per grip
• Climbing Workout of the Day (CWD, about 10-12 minutes)
• This is when I come up with something that is awful, hard, and makes me wonder why I picked a hobby that's physically demanding.

The things I'm debating are:

1. Throwing out volume days and focusing exclusively on limit bouldering and 4x4s. Fridays are typically volume days and I feel that it is almost "wasted mileage" on the rock wall. I know people talk about ARC training and long, low intensity workouts are good for capillarization, but I've felt like I've had stronger benefits from my warm-ups and the 4x4s I've done. Instead, I would switch off weeks between having two 4x4 days or two limit bouldering days.
2. Tossing in campusing for one day instead of the hangboard workout. I've already tried this once and... I'm not sure. I feel like I can train power and precision that relates closer to climbing by actually climbing, but maybe that means I should move to smaller rungs to increase the amount of recruitment I'm demanding of my forearms.
3. Turning the Climbing Workout of the Day into an antagonist training opportunity. This is mostly due to my weak shoulders. I recently realized that I'm setting myself up for a chronic shoulder injury if I don't get them taken care of, so I've been doing a variety of shoulder strengthening exercises each day (not unlike physical therapy exercises), but I might need to start incorporating other things such as gymnastic ring workouts or something with free weights.

Anyway, I'll put some more thought into it and see what comes out.

It's In the Fingers

Over the course of the years I've decided that, at least at my level, finger strength is the number one most important factor for improving climbing. I think we could argue that there are many climbing moves out there that must be done with high levels of pull-strength and power, but I think that if you have fingers capable of crushing everything you touch, that will be more beneficial in the long run than being able to do a one-armed pullup. Not that pulling isn't important, I just think that finger strength edges out everything else as what the top priority should be.

I've experimented with a few different approaches to training this all-important aspect of climbing. From heavy finger rolls to deadlift blocks to classic hangboarding (all sorts of routines here, from Rock Prodigy to the suggested Metolious workouts). Maybe one of these days I'll give an exhaustive recounting of everything I've tried and what I felt worked or didn't, and why.

Recently, however, I've been reading different articles and listening to interviews on the subject, and it seems to me that everyone agrees that finger strength is slow to develop and takes steady, consistent work for steady and consistent gains in finger strength.

With that being said, one person who's idea on hangboarding that I really like and am currently implementing is Steve Maisch. He's done some great research on all things climbing training, but he encourages doing between 15-25 minutes of finger work at the end of every training session. It maybe sounds like a recipe for injury in the fingers and shoulders, but I don't think it's really meant to have enough intensity for that. I think the idea is to walk away at the end of your workout with exhausted muscles that will continue neurological and muscular adaptation.

What I currently do is 4 total sets of (10 second hang x 3 second rest) with 2 minute rests between sets. Two sets are a half crimp (because isometric strength gains seem to translate to angles within 20 degrees of the angle that is trained) on an 18 mm edge and the other two hanging from a deep, two-finger pocket from my middle and ring fingers. Usually I haven't been able to hold my body weight for the last rep or so on each of the sets, so I'll put a toe on the ground to keep myself from falling while keeping the intensity high. So people may argue that this isn't quantifiable progress, but I'd say that it is sure as heck a lot less stressful and tedious as dealing with a pulley system to take weight off!

Anyway, it seems to be working well for me and my grip strength is steadily improving. I think my next step is just to work on hangboarding form so I don't end up screwing with any of my joints. Here's to getting that crushing finger strength!