UKC

Josh Hadley, one of the lead coaches from Lattice talks us through how to transition your training from the climbing wall to the home fingerboard when needed. Many of the exercises and sessions detailed below can be found in the free Crimpd app, which is available on both iOS and Android.

Tom Randall will also be live on the forums between 5-6 PM today (06/05/20) to answer any questions you may have on the topic of home training.

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Get your questions ready for Tom. He'll be on the forums between 5-6 pm this evening and popping back in over the next few days.

I will indeed! Looking forward to seeing what people want to know more about. 
 

See you all at 5pm...

As you may/may not know I've not been able to climb for a few months due to major abdominal surgery. Throughout the process I lost 12kg and most likely all of my muscle. As a result I'm probably the weakest I've ever been, but on the bright side it's probably ironed out all the other injuries and imbalances I've had for years. With that in mind, where/how should I start training again?

I'm aware this is a somewhat substantial question to get you started, so feel free to ignore if others come along!!

Is there any benefit to prioritising either big holds with more weight, or small holds with less weight whilst fingerboarding? Obviously you get cool points for small holds and cool points for loads of weight. So is there one that's better for improving basic finger strength?

Hi Rob, yeah you did a pretty good job of knocking yourself for 6!! A good sign that you're a resilient trad climber at heart

For anyone wanting to start back out (basically from relatively limited levels of conditioning) then we see good results from initially working the largest muscle groups, with a full range of motion and across the entire body. What you're doing here, is conditioning the muscles for some of the more climbing-specific work that you'll do in the future. You're aiming to increase some muscle bulk again (likely you've lost a fair bit) and also increase its capacity for work.  

By working the larger muscle groups initially, it's a slightly more conservative approach and sets you up for the months after when you get more specific. It's tempting to go straight in with the forearms, but I think this could be a mistake if rushed. I would definitely take a broad approach as well - both upper and lower body! 

This is a classic question that gets posed when people are wondering if it's better to train 20mm decent sized edges with loads of weight or tiny sub-10mm edges with minimal weight. The answer is that both have their place. The forces that you're able to apply are much greater on 20mm, but eventually you may lack the specificity or familiarity with small edges if you never ever use them. Our approach at Lattice is to work the majority of the time (this is with both adults and juniors) on larger sized edges (20mm being the most common) but bring in the focused work of minimal edge training at the right parts of the year or if certain individuals are inordinately rubbish at the size compared to anything else AND it's a limiting factor in their climbing style. 

There are also some practical implications with this stuff - it'll affect weight held, skin quality, session comfort, ability to do single arm work etc. Quite a bit to think about! On the whole though, we like to use both. No single method is "better" than the other. 

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Is power i.e campus boarding or similar, worth adding into training when there isn't a particular goal in mind?

Is it something that can be increased year on year through consistent training or is it something that should be trained in a certain period running up to a trip or target climb?

Just wondering whether its worthwhile incorporating into my regime now or whether to stick to the weighted pull up and more typical strength exercises.

Thanks in advance. 

Hi Tom. Having suffered from persistent rotator cuff problems for a couple of years, I've been using lockdown as an opportunity to focus on building strength and stability in my shoulders. It seems to be going well. For example, I've built up to be comfortable doing some finger hangs on the doorframe as well as carefully doing exercises like wall walks. I've been happy to take my time with it and am feeling positive about progress, but I am always wary of overdoing things and triggering an injury. Do you have any general advice about taking care of problematic injury areas during training? Can you suggest any effective home based shoulder specific exercises with limited equipment that are good for progression and could promote some long term climbing benefit?

I've used this lockdown period to heal a quite slight but lingering finger injury (it didn't effect outdoor climbing performance that much but stopped me from gaining finger strength via hangboarding). This meant completely abstaining from fingerboarding for the last month or so. What is the most effective and safe way to reintroduce hangboarding so that I can get back to improving finger strength? Max hangs or repeaters? Open or closed grip?  How quickly should intensity be increased?

Cheers Tom, that sounds good. I think it’s going to be a case of slow and steady wins the race (well, maybe not win it, but at the very least finishes it 😂).

Perfect excuse to use some of those weights at home you've been ignoring for years too! :-D

The campus vs pull up argument can normally be solved by looking at what part of the year you're in and what type of climber you are in relation to your goals. If you're a climber who's in peak season (not the "Peak" District!) or approaching it, you're already adequately conditioned to campus work and you want to improve both contact strength and the ability to transfer strength gained previously into usable power then it's great. If you're a climber who's in base season (non-peak) lacks basic strength, and wants to work larger muscle groups before building the specificity later in the year, then the pull up option is ideal. There are of course, loads of variations to this answer but that's about as simple as I can make it, if that helps??!

In this kind of scenario, I could never suggest the best way forward for you as a recovering climber who's at a distance (read, on an Internet forum) from me or another specialist. In my opinion, your best way forward in this case is to see someone in person, talk through your history in detail and really play a conservative game with it. 

Okay sounds sensible, thanks for the honest response!

Hi Tom,

I've put together a smallish 45 degree board for the lockdown. I have all the moves on my circuit pretty dialled now, in both directions, and not enough holds to set more than small variations. Should I move all the holds regularly, or should I just try to do more and more laps before getting pumped? I don't have any specific climbing goals at the moment, just trying to stay fit & strong.

Cheers!

I would say that in most cases, the increase in skill, technique, movement pattern variability etc is the bigger long term game. For sure, you could just do more repeats, add more weight, use worse footholds etc.... but, you're in this for the long haul right?! So if it was me, I'd keep changing things around. Also if you can drag a friend into it, try and get them setting things for you in your "anti-style" which can be really helpful if consistently worked on

Hi Tom. I’m prioritising finger strength in lockdown as it seems most important in the long run and I’m quite weak. Plus there’s no pesky bouldering wall to distract me from maximising my efforts and recovery.  I’ve done two sets of three weeks with a rest week of just running. Do you think it makes sense to keep on doing multiple cycles of max hangs / minimum edge stuff and one arm progressions, maybe mixing it up but all on strength? Or is it best to focus on longer duration stuff for a cycle now and then? Hopefully just one more cycle! 

Any chance of linking the Crimpd App and UKC diary, so we don't have to manually enter everything?

It'd be nice to have everything consolidated in one place, especially with all the UKC logbook data. 

Hi Tom, I might have missed the boat on this one but maybe you're still checking this? 

I think I have weak arms relative to my finger strength and core so I've been trying weighted pull ups for the last few months to address this. I've been doing 5x5 weighted pull ups at about 90% of my 2rep max test but I'm not seeing much in the way of strength gains. This feels hard and I often fail on the last rep of the last set so I think it's about the right intensity. Would I be better off upping the weight and doing less reps, 5x2 or 5x3 maybe?  (like most people I don't currently have access to a campus board) 

Thanks. 

No there's nothing like that in the plans I'm afraid. Lattice and UKC do chat about this kind of stuff, but there's a lot to be said for staying independent and both doing a good job at what you specialise in

I am checking now! Thanks to Nick who pointed out there were a few late questions... 

If you're not making improvements from following a 5x5 weighted protocol, I would suggest your problems are likely to lie elsewhere. I've seen a lot of climbers assume that there needs to be a tweak in the methodology, before checking in on a few VERY common factors! I've listed some classic ones below that happen year after year in the climbing population. 

1. Are you eating enough? Operate in a calorie deficit (lots of climbers do this consciously and unconsciously) and you'll struggle to increase strength

2. Are your sessions high quality? Do them too late in the day, after climbing etc. 

3. Are you recovering and de-loading your training frequently? Too many climbers forget about periods of rest to properly prepare for the next block of hard work for 3/4/5 weeks. 

4. What's your life stress & sleep like? These both can massively affect training adaptations. Lack of response to strength training in people I've worked with who do 40+hrs a week, have lots of stress and also may be managing a complicated travel or family life struggle here. 

Depending on the athlete, we'll typically do 2-3 mesocycles of a particular protocol. So for example if it were max hangs, single arm, half crimp, 85%-95%, that could run 3 blocks of 3 weeks of work. Then we'd typically change it up.