UKC

Afternoon all,

I thought it would be a fun project to design a quantitative test of climbing specific strength and fitness. I'm thinking of a short test of a few exercises that can be completed without much equipment and give climbers a way to compare their fitness. Perhaps it could break down to a power/strength and endurance score. By referencing it with your maximum sport grade it could also give an estimate of how good your technique is.

If anyone is interested in collaborating or sharing ideas please register some interest below.

Cheers,
Greasy

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Tom Randall has already done this and validated a database against of boulders/climbers up to the current hardest known grades.

From his trainingbeta podcast he said it boiled down to finger strength as these would be the rate limiting step. Roughly it equates to a 5 second one handed hang in half crimp off an 18m edge at body weight meant that physically your forearms could hack bouldering 8A, 110-120% body weight under the same conditions translated to about 8B.

This was all offset against height, taller climbers needed to attain something near 95% of this target strength whereas shorter climbers needed to exceed it by 105%.

I am most probably paraphrasing horribly his work however it would appear that he has enough datapoints gathered to have a statistically robust model that his Lattice training company uses this plus much much more.

In reply to alx:

We did something similar with Dave Binney many years ago when I worked at the BMC. Basically out of a wide variety of quite primitive metrics (VO2 max, core strength, fingers, flexibility, pull-ups, etc.) the only thing that was correlated with climbing performance at national elite level was finger strength and/or finger power endurance (I don't remember exactly)

I have no doubt that many other factors will provide marginal gains, but if you really want to see big gains (assuming you haven't trained very specifically for some time already) you really need to focus very specifically on fingers.

In reply to alx:

Thanks. Has anyone done this for non elite climbers?

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

I think Tom's dataset goes to about 7A, (again badly paraphrasing a really good podcast...)

At this level (7A) unless you have an obvious massive skewe in your ability or strength any training plus climbing more is going to help.

In reply to alx:

Thanks again. I'll have a look around for that pod cast. Still think it might be a fun project. I'll have a poke around for some good data as well.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

I think devising the study in a completely different way to Tom's would still be very worthwhile. There are just so many variables in climbing, the angle of the rock is a pretty major one I'd have thought.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Yes. Here's a German study (google translate is your friend) in which they found a strong correlation between maximum finger strength, measured by %age of bodyweight hung one armed on a Beastmaker small edge, and bouldering ability from around font 4 to font 7C.

http://blog.klettertraining.de/fingerkraft-beim-bouldern/

I tried it and I'm bang on their curve at 65% and 6B/C.

In reply to AlanLittle:

Thanks that's a really useful link.

What I'm thinking at the moment is combing three tests into one score. A finger strength test like the link you posted, a "powerslap" test and some kind of endurance test.

Comments welcomed on these ideas.

(A powerslap test is something I found in other research. It consists of hanging from the bottom rung of a campus board and slapping one hand as high as possible).

In reply to stp:

If we assume benchmarking finger strength against grades has been performed, what else?

Number of body weight pull-ups has never really helped me, being able to do 5 sets of 3 pull-ups with 60kg added has. Would you consider benchmarking %bodyweight in two successive pull-ups since hitting the one rep max is not feasible.

Core would be difficult - perhaps time holding a half or full front lever, split or full flag?

In reply to alx:

Why core? Famously Sachi Amma couldn't do a front lever, and he's climbed 9b

In reply to jsmcfarland:


I think here you have the issue, and why finger strength is the benchmark of choice. You can probably get loads of examples of the above. Dave Mac, for example, can't do a muscle up.

In reply to jsmcfarland:

That settles it, you should stand naked in front of the mirror every morning and repeat,

"I am Sachi Amma and front levers mean nothing to me"

Do this for 6 weeks then climb 9b.

In reply to alx:



Well obviously finger strength is just one type of strength relevant to climbers. Studies that only look at finger strength don't say anything about the importance of other strengths. And therefore they can't even show how important or not finger strength is relative to other strengths.

It might be, and almost certainly is to some degree, that those with stronger fingers also tend to be stronger everywhere else too. So any study that looked at, and compared, the different strengths climbers need I think would be really interesting and valuable.

In reply to jsmcfarland:


Not sure if that's just a flippant remark but if you're in any doubt there's a great article called 'The Importance of Core Training' here:

http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=7059

In reply to stp:

Sounds like the work John Arran has mentioned above?

In reply to stp:
Completely agree, my point that I failed to get across was that other systems are as important but perhaps not so limited by their speed to adapt.

Although probably completely unrealistic, the notion that you can do 2 pull-ups with X % bodyweight, 10s one handed dead hang with X% bodyweight, etc = 7B boulderer, 8a sport or E5 trad ready.

The under pinning skill element would then really be the deciding factor whether you had the technique and the mindset to support the execution.

In reply to alx:



First thing in a morning my old chap is normally doing a front lever though

In reply to Wsdconst:

I heard it was easier for the short

In reply to alx:


I think that's just what your missus tells you to make you feel better about your low angled front lever.

In reply to Wsdconst:

I know, it's all that weight, so far away.

It's never stopped me having fun though so I guess that's what is important.

In reply to alx:


Ha ha, are you sure you haven't been admiring someone else's front lever by mistake ?

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Just read this one on a German forum; apparently it originally come from Guido Köstermeyer.

Stand with feet pointing forwards, toes 23cm from a wall. Hands flat on the wall at shoulder height & width. With supporting foot and both hands remaining flat on the floor/wall, how high can you touch the wall with one foot? The foot cannot go outside the width of the hands.

Standard values are:

UIAA VII (6b): 102 cm
UIAA VIII (7a): 108 cm
UIAA IX (7c): 114 cm

I just tried it from cold: 109 left 112 right. Will try again later with a proper warm up.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:


I'm interested but like some of your other replies, I think it's a complex subject and doesn't boil down to one simple thing like finger-strength. Apart from anything else, though there may be a relationship between generalised climbing ability and finger strength, that might just be because people who climb a lot excercise their fingers a lot and so they tend to develop strong fingers.

If you want to do this properly, your biggest challenge is going to be how to manage the complexity and account for different styles of climbing, the relationship between strength and stamina, the part played by skills such as climbing while conserving effort and things like that. If you can master all that, I'll take my hat off to you.

In reply to Andy Morley:

I think the best anyone is going to be able to do is identify minimum levels in individual things (ie if you can do a one armer you don't need stronger arms/back to climb 8a, you need to work on something else, that sort of thing) and which variables have the highest correlation with climbing performance (for Tom this is probably the lattice board, with less specialised equipment its probably finger strength).

In reply to Andy Morley:

Thanks for the interest Andy.

I agree it's a complicated subject and I may have bitten off more than I can chew! What I'm thinking is to remove stamina from the equation I'll focus on bouldering to begin with. My assumption is that the maximum grade someone can reliably boulder at depends mostly on two things, the climbers strength and their skill. As the two factors combine to give your maximum grade a way of measuring strength could also give an idea of a climbers skill.

For simplicity say we find that the number of pull ups you can do correlates to what grade you can climb. If the average number of pull ups a 7a boulderer can do is 15 and I can only do 12 then strength training would be a good idea if I want to climb 7a. However if I can do 18 then I know I need to focus on technique, not strength.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

For bouldering I'd suggest going for max hang as a % of bodyweight on a given size edge and % of bodyweight assistance required to do a one arm pullup.

A stamina exercise like number of pullups is going to be less relevant for strength rather than stamina based difficulty.

If you can come up with a standardised measure for power (if only all campus boards were identical) that would probably be the third...

In reply to AJM:

Thanks for the ideas. What I've thought so far is a percentage body weight each hand can support on a 20mm hold (or closest there is on a beastmaker) for finger strength. The second test being a power slap test on a large campus board hold. (A powerslap test is going from hanging from the bottom rung to dynamically slapping the highest you can with each hand). Any thoughts on that welcome.

In reply to Andy Morley:

I would agree that up to a certain point strength in different systems will have a greater role. However a point comes when finger strength dictates if a boulder problem or climb is feasible. If you can't hang the holds then no amount of core, arm strength or technique will get you further. To AJM's point about style/rock type for the grade, that point where finger strength becomes the limiting factor will be reached to a sooner or lesser degree.

Finger strength takes a lot longer to cultivate, hence is the rate limiting factor in this model. However I would not be disheartened thinking that this precludes you from ticking high grades. It's really interesting to compare 'old school' vs current bouldering styles. In the 80-90's sheer brutal finger strength was seen as the means to climb hard grades. It's changed a lot, climbs are increasingly about using weird shapes in counter intuitive ways, flexibility, dynamic movement, finding unusual knee bar rests have become more important. So by comparison, the requirements of the body are very different.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:


Well, the first is just a straightforward clone of Toms strength measure. So yes, that'll probably work pretty well. The second could work, on the assumption that differences in hold size aren't the limiting factor above a certain hold size. I don't know if campus board angle affects things, hopefully not I guess.

Definitely an interesting topic and one I've wonderd about a fair bit over the years.

A cool way to get data for this would be to invite climbers at an indoor wall bouldering comp to participate - either immediately after the comp and/ or on a subsequent day. If you did it straight away, the advantage is you could get them all to do the same strength test on the wall's FB etc; downside being they'd be tired, so both overall fitness and effort level during the probs would impact strength results. If you could get a friendly wall to offer this, you could offer to email the results / data to all participants to get them to take part.

Having said all that, I tend to think finger strength will be the biggest driver at higher grades (as many have already said above). Partly because by the time you've put in enough work to get strong fingers, you've already accumulated the skills, and other physical strengths, needed.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

The challenge is going to be to keep it simple enough to be workable, but at the same time not to over-simplify and end up wasting all your time and trouble because your results might be skewed by some variable or other that you haven't accounted for. Taking stamina as an example, if you want to leave it out of the picture, you still need to control for it, meaning that you want to make sure that any measurements you make are on climbers at a similar stage of freshness or exhaustion. For example, as someone else has said, if you get a bunch of people telling you how many pull-ups they can do, if they all come from one indoor climbing wall and if those guys all count when they're fresh and then if you get another bunch doing it at the end of a session when they're tired, the results are going to be different. My guess is that if you enrol people from walls to give you data, out of preference they would probably count how many pull-ups at the start of their session but actually, I think you'd be better off getting them to count at the end because to my way of thinking, that would be a better measure of their overall ability as a climber. Some body builders with fantastic physiques can be very little use at real humping and heaving type jobs because they can't keep going for any longer than the number of reps they're used to.

You need a map of the territory, and I can suggest one for you to consider. I got it off the radio, it's not complicated but it gives you five things you need to think about in training and I've pretty much adopted it as my own personal model. It's called "The Five 'S's":-
- Strength
- Stamina
- Skills
- Suppleness
- Psychology (I'm hoping no-one will chip in with smart@rse comments about 'Ps' not being an 'S')

Even if you only want to focus on two of those things, you still need to be aware of the other three so you can control for them in order to stop them from accidentally messing up your results.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:


How many people even really know what grade they can actually climb? I haven't got a bloody clue! Standards differ so much from area to area, wall to wall and are we talking: '100% onsight success this season', '80% success onsight over a lifetime', '3 redpoints at the grade in a season', '95% success rate in a session'...
jk

In reply to jkarran:

Highest number ever regardless of overgrading

In reply to john arran:


Now that's a method I like
jk

In reply to jkarran:

All good questions. I think it would be difficult. Perhaps firstly we'd have to assume it was only going to be accurate to a certain degree. Maybe +/- 1 grade for instance.

In terms of what grade we climb perhaps the best one good do is give an honest estimate. I think most climbers know when they walk up to a route whether they've got a realistic chance at an onsight for instance. If you've onsighted that grade in the past and you're ability/fitness hasn't changed massively then that's probably about as accurate as we'll get. I think that estimate needs to be based in the present, rather than over a lifetime, because the fitness/strength tests will be in the present.

If someone really has no clue how hard they can climb then I think all one can say is that they're not a good candidate for this type of study.

I'm unsure about using pull ups though as a test. Those who do pull ups regularly are bound to have higher number of reps from those who don't. I've got a friend who is an extremely strong climber but claims he can only do a few pull ups. He never trains that exercise. Maybe a 1 rep max pull up would be a better indicator? Maybe something more based on finger strength like finger tip pull ups for instance. After all fingers are perhaps the most important strength for climbing. And grip strength is said to be a good indicator of overall strength.

In reply to Andy Morley:








This makes a lot of sense. It's Simple (another S) without being trite. And simple works best for me.

Was it Gerald Ford who said, "I can walk and I can chew gum. But when I try to walk and chew gum at the same time..." I know the feeling well - too well.

I'll use this; thanks for putting it on.

Mick

In reply to john arran:


John, you could make yourself a host of new mates - really quickly!

Mick