UKC

What one exercise, would you do to improve upper body strength?

In reply to The Lemming:

Rock climbing

In reply to The Lemming:

Chin ups, and assorted variations thereof.

In reply to The Lemming:

Press ups. If you're a climber already then you'll be doing enough 'pull' exercises. You almost can't do too many of them.

In reply to The Lemming:
If you want a formal exercise rather than a generic prescription of 'climbing' I'd recommend muscle-ups or handstand press-ups. A further idea would to be to look at planches and levers (using a skin-the-cat to transition).

In reply to The Lemming:

Press ups. Can be done without a bar, you can do incline, decline, different distances between your hands, if you have the strength you can do plyometric press ups too.

In reply to The Lemming:

hard to say just one as you need pull and push.

deadlifts
bench press
bent over row

take your pick

In reply to mark s:

Muscle ups do both push and pull.

In reply to stp:

even people that can do them wont be able to do many so that writes it off as a useful exercise

In reply to The Lemming:

The good ole snatch or clean and jerk work everything in one go and activates fast and slow twitch fibres for me there best exercise you can do

In reply to Kassius:
Both excellent exercises, but require training to do safely and without injury. Push ups and pull ups on the other hand are fairly idiot proof.

In reply to Shani:


Many people will find it difficult to do even one repetition of either of these exercises.

In reply to mark s:

Well I'm not sure that this question was intended to have any practical application beyond mere attention on these forums.

However you can do variations of the exercise like negative only muscle ups, baby muscle ups (with feet support) etc. A friend of mine does negative only muscle ups and rates them as a very useful climbing exercise.

And some people are strong enough to make them a useful exercise with standard reps. A recent video showed Alex Puchio doing six consecutive reps.

Some people (admittedly very few) can do one arm muscle ups.

In reply to stp:



I'm not sure how to reply to that?

I asked a genuine question, and am getting some interesting reply's which I had never heard of before. Isn't that one of the reasons to ask questions from such a large pool of knowledge?

In reply to The Lemming:

In guessing that you're not at a stage where you can do muscle ups. It's a big exercise that requires a bar to do, unlike press ups, which can be done using just the floor, or for greater variety you can throw a chair into the mix.
I've done lots of handstand push ups and they're a hard exercise with very little relevance to climbing, they can quickly lead to pain and poor mobility in the shoulder.

In reply to The Lemming:

Pushups with one hand on a medicine ball / basket ball. If you can do more than 5 each side at first that is actually quite good. I've seen some guys who can lift a lot initially struggle with these as there is a little coordination involved.

Dips, pref on rings.

If you climb leave most of the pulling exercises alone as others suggested.

All the talk of muscle ups and hand stand press ups and the like just bear in mind the closer you are to an exercise of which you can only carry out 1 rep the closer you are to injury. Those sorts of things can be minimised with some help when learning with people cupping knees/holding feet. Doing "the hardest thing you can do" brings fast strength gains but a 6+ week lay off doesn't . For the best return on increased strength with an acceptable risk of injury most studies identify set ranges of around 5-8 reps for benefit to risk.

In reply to The Lemming:

I think it's an interesting question to make one think about exercise theory. But I can't think of any situation where or why one would be limited to just one exercise. So I'd assumed it was more for forum banter than practical application (which is totally fine btw). If that's not right then it would be good to know and interesting to hear why just one exercise.

Back to the question: in modern sports theory there is the idea that the best exercise is the one that is most beneficial to the sport being trained (functional training). So I suppose it depends what the purpose is. Is this for climbing, or bodybuilding, general fitness or something else?

For instance if it was climbing I'd probably go with fingertip pull ups but for bodybuilding the clean and jerk/snatch or even deadlift might be better.

Then again you might want to invent a complex compound movement that incorporates as many different muscle groups as possible. Multi-planar training is popular at the moment. This is training with exercises that involve movement in 2 or more of the 3 movement planes.

In reply to stp:


Is that the correct terminology? - I thought that 'functional training' usually refers to multi-disciplinary exercises for 'general physical preparedness', eg CrossFit and the like. That would be quite different from exercises based on the principle of specificity.

In reply to planetmarshall:

Yeah, I found out I could do a muscle up straight away as I had a bit of climbing hustle. But it was not easy (and in fact was very ugly). I can knock sets of them off now on both rings and a bar (the latter is much harder).

HSPUs are still a struggle. I can do one - and sometimes two - but sometimes I seem to totally lose the ability. What is good about the HSPU is that you can do it pretty much anywhere with a wall - and requires no kit.

For an upper-body-only workout, these two exercises are hard to beat in terms of compound movement.

In reply to ultrabumbly:

The most gains in strength are made when working at very low reps - but it is risk/reward. It should go without saying that you should do preparatory work before attempting a new and potentially very hard exercise. You should always look to do supplementary variations of an exercise to build up and prepare for the harder variation (this is why, when you start climbing, you'll likely tackle a Diff rather than hiking up to Cloggy to tackle an E8).

But the OP didn't ask for advice on how to build up to an exercise. The question was "What one exercise, would you do to improve upper body strength?" to which I reiterate, MUs and HSPUs offer massive bang for the buck when it comes to upper body training.

In reply to Removed Usergilesf:


This is a consequence of poor programming in your training. It is not a problem of HSPUs per se.

In reply to planetmarshall:

"Functional Training" is current used to describe non-sport specific training, the phase used to increase base fitness before moving into a more specialized specific training. However lots of crossfit style places use it to describe anything and everything across the entire scale of useful to useless.

In reply to planetmarshall:

There's definitely several definitions of the term out there so it's a bit confused.

From a book 'The Complete Guide to Functional Training':

The definition of ‘functional’ refers to something being able to fulfill its purpose or function, and so in relation to exercise prescription or fitness, functional training could then be described as training that means you are able to fulfill your purpose or function.

A more complete definition of functional training is:

The execution of specific exercises that have a positive carryover or benefit to health or the performance of the person’s daily tasks, their occupation or their sport, or for improved resilience to injury.

In reply to Shani:

Yep, I was really referring to just going ahead and trying handstand push ups without any other traing to build up to them, the nature of the exercise makes it hard to do an assisted HSPU. If I wanted to do one exercise to improve my upper body, that wouldn't be it!

In reply to Removed Usergilesf:
Lots of good vairitions are available such as piked pressups, piked HSPUs with feet resting on a high platform etc.. which server to strengthen the shoulders - along with simple walking on hands (www.startbodyweight.com/p/handstand-push-up-progression.html).

The other big factor is appropriate rest and cyclical deloading.

In reply to The Lemming:

Somewhat controvertially, let me just add that all climbers should also train legs. Training Only the Upper Body Will Increase Arterial Stiffness and Thus CVD & Stroke Risk:

Mattace-Raso, Francesco US, et al. "Arterial stiffness and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke the rotterdam study." Circulation 113.5 (2006): 657-663.