UKC

I do a max strength session on my fingerboard roughly once a week at the moment and have done some frequent finger board work for periods in the past. I've actually done it for long enough this time (couple of months) to be able to add more weight. So how quickly would be reasonably safe?

I was on +22kg about a month ago. I added another kilo recently and then another today to make +24. I don't imagine an extra kilo every two weeks is sustainable, though.

For reference, I've been climbing for about twenty years, max boulder around 7a.

Whatever you do here, do it slow. 

And out of public view. 

Sounds reasonable

Eh?

Out of public view. Because he's giving you 24 carat  golden advice, in fact as ligaments, tendons etc strengthen more slowly than muscles, once you are securely past the novice/noob stages you should progress at a rate that seems way too slow, stupidly wrongly slow, that way it's sustainable. Very boring.

But if you post about all this publicly, a heap of internet weirdos like me will give contradictory advice and distract you from his excellent advice. The best approaches aren't always the popular trendy "hack" to suddenly jump a level, those are the ones everyone likes to talk about

In reply to Cake:

Personally I’d keep adding the weight and enjoy the gains and just back off if you get any tweaks. Presumably you’re doing a progressive warm up, not doing it when already tired etc. I’ve never had any finger injuries from max hangs and do it at my absolute limit as my belief is that’s most likely to elicit the strongest training response.

In reply to CantClimbTom:

The guy isn’t a novice/noob - he has been climbing for 20 years and at a reasonable level. Unless he has a history of finger injury he’s at no particular risk

after 20 years of consistent climbing, they are at risk through overuse and wear & tear, even when warmed up. There are limits on just how much abuse those pulleys, tendons etc. can take, especially if they are or have been stressed through poor technique, build up of new or old scar tissue and so on. 

Adding 1-2kg per week until you plateau is absolutely fine and more than cautious enough. You could accidentally add that much just by eating a big pizza the day before training. The gains will naturally taper off and you'll train with the same weight for a while before being able to add more again. 

I disagree with summo. Evidence suggests that consistent moderate overload over the long term increases collagen fibril size, density and number. A practical takeaway from this is that consistent careful finger loading results in tendons which are more resistant to injury. 

source:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637912/ 

What size edge are you on? +22kg is huge. You could always try going down to eg 10mm whilst adding less weight? 

I have avoided finger problems largely, which is great. I've had some shoulder problems, so I'm really careful to have good form, particularly on the board. 

So I guess I'll reach a limit soon enough and continue just below that. Makes sense. Thanks all.

Is +22 huge? Or huge for someone of my low standard?

It's about 20mm, maybe 18, having just measured. Your idea sounds good as with less weight there will be less on the shoulders, which do feel like I'm pushing them a bit.

I don’t think 22kg is huge. I can do about 60kg and am nothing special.

Somewhere around 40kg becomes a right ball ache though and one arm plus assistance makes more sense to me.

I definitely think it’s ace to mix up max hangs with min edge stuff though.

18/20mm is a good edge depth to train on for max hangs IMO

Yes exactly, because he is so very much NOT a noob, that's why the progression needs to be so slow. Progressive overload (Milo of Croton and all that) is a fantastic tool but simple linear progression for an already well adapted athlete can only be at snail pace to be sustainable and becomes a diminishing return as a person becomes increasingly better trained.

In some cases a better approach is periodised training. Carefully planned periods of training one attribute over another for long enough to elicit adaption but not too long so as to unadapt too much to from the previous attribute's gains. But exercise programming is a bigger topic than we can cover in forum posts.

I thought I had reasonably good finger strength for my level but I've managed max hangs at about 18kg (half crimp on the 20mm Lattice edge). I'm not sure what to think now.

I used hang time achieved to regulate weight.

On the last hang if I managed 11s rather than the normal 10s target then I’d add 0.5kg next time, if I managed 12s (or more) then I’d add 1kg. Equally if I only managed 8s (or less) I’d drop the weight 1kg for next time.

I only got up to 18kg so perhaps my advice isn’t worth much…

In reply to Shani:

More good ideas, thanks

60kg added on a 20mm edge for 8 seconds? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you’re 70kg - that would be a max hang of 185% BW 

That sounds special to me but then, I am a certified weakling!

Then again I just put some rough estimates into an online finger strength calculator and it predicted v11/8a grade - which is about what you climb right? So I guess that is about right after all! 

Sounds like I need to up my two-arm hang game (I’m much better at assisted one-arms; something to do with shoulders I guess)

7 sec so near enough, and 74kg.

Yeah it’s about “average” I think, according to the Lattice and other calculators.

Its not normally finger strength that stops me doing a route, normally power endurance / efficiency.

Out of interest, how tall are you? I've been told (by a very reliable source) that I should aim to get down to 74kg myself (I'm 180cm)

Thought the "getting down" is not simply dropping weight through crash-dieting, but restructuring the way I eat to support training whilst simultaneously achieving body recomposition so my body fat % is under the c. 15% mark.

V11 and French 8a?

That feels a very mismatched level of equivalence!

185% is enormously overspec for French 8a. 

You're about the same height as me, and 74kg is in the ball park for me (the heavy end of what I'd want it to be, probably the lighter end of what it is!)

I agree, that sounds bonkers to me. Maybe good for selling fingerboards.

I wonder if it's supposed to be V11/font8a, not french 8a. 

Anything that suggests a boulder:route equivalence (V11/8A = french 8a) always rings alarm bells for me.

Too far beyond me to know what to expect. The profiles I looked at were more relatable grade-wise. But obviously would make more sense; Font not French.

I would have thought F8b+/c would be a reasonable route project for a V11 boulderer. Although obviously people tend to excel in their main area, so somebody who does plenty of both.

https://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/topic,31697.25.html#msg653903

Some data breakdowns...

Really interesting stuff. Surprising too.

"For climbers who have logged at least N=100 boulders and the same amount of redpoint ascents, it seems like the typical bouldering strength required to climb an 8a route is about 7B+ whereas 25% of those who can do 7B have also done 8a. The lowest bouldering strength required for someone doing a fair amount of bouldering to do 8a is 7A."

I need to lose weight, that's a total of 130kg which I can do ok. 

Whoops my bad, that should have been V11/Font 8a (the webpage I was using only does boulder estimates)

In reply to Shani:

If you are doing max hang sessions you re-test your max every session

It is interesting! 

"As we can see, the best performance ever on fully worked routes has a somewhat bell-shaped distribution with median around 7b and with a premium for climbing a route graded 8a. (Much like there are lots of Marathon runners finishing just under 3 hours, but not many in just over 3 hours.)"

not that surprising, when you think about it (but interesting to see it mapped out by the data)

""For climbers who have logged at least N=100 boulders and the same amount of redpoint ascents, it seems like the typical bouldering strength required to climb an 8a route is about 7B+ whereas 25% of those who can do 7B have also done 8a. The lowest bouldering strength required for someone doing a fair amount of bouldering to do 8a is 7A."

Makes me feel good - 7A Font boulder feels like something I will achieve given enough injury-free training and focus in the reasonable future. 7B+ does not! (Because as above, I'm a weakling) 

7B+ felt a bit high, but then I've always been better at route climbing than I have bouldering and at the time when I was redpointing my hardest routes I wasn't spending much of my outdoor climbing time bouldering. Although I now spend a lot more of my time bouldering and I still suspect I could get back to 8a before I could do a (non route length) 7B+!

"with a premium for climbing a route graded 8a"

Funny to see the relative lack of interest in F7c+.

Yes, I was an outlier on those stats, f7A best boulder when I did my first F8a route. I'm more of a route climber anyway so not unexpected to be better at routes. Also I boulder on grit and sport climb on limestone so hard to compare with just grades.

Except by Americans, for whom 7c+ is the magical grade of 13a!

7A+ I think for me, if I look at actual boulders rather than route length linkups.

You can always convert for some inspiration.

194cm. Approx 6% body fat. Naturally a skinny runt!

Best sport 8a+, best boulder 7B+.

In reply to Shani:

If only it weren’t for a complete lack of talent.

In reply to Shani:

Yeah, well, I'm about 7% body fat, but I've never got past 7a. Never tried, mind.

Flipping heck! Taller AND lighter than me. So unfair. Also, 6% body fat?! 

Oh well, genetics be genetics. I'll just aim to do the best with what I happen to have!

Then you, sir, need a different user name! Clearly not much cake going into you!

I can’t seem to be able to hang two 20mm edges with just body weight for even a second, though to be fair I’ve never been bothered to try it properly. I’m relatively light for my height (68kg, 180cm). Not sure where the calculator would place me… though I don’t boulder outdoors, so no idea what my bouldering grade is.

I’d consider 74kg to be very heavy for me and would probably feel it. Now here’s the thing, if you can hang 20mm edges with weight at your 74kg+ weight, your finger strength is clearly much greater than mine, so you should climb harder sport routes (clearly there’s a lot more to trad). So I have questions around the idea that fingerboarding is key, though it clearly helps.

Yes but I suppose also depends if it’s a Euro endurofest 8a or a short bouldery Peak lime special 8a…

this is it, isn’t it. Finger strength clearly matters, but what really matters is applying it to rock - not a hangboard. Hangboarding has made my fingers stronger, and thus made me a better climber. But for sure, there’s a hell of a lot more to climbing than being able to hang an X sized edge for Y number of seconds with Z amount of weight attached to you!

Having said that, a fair amount of hangboarding at first is neurological and just learning how to hold the edge with a certain body position. I bet if you wanted to learn that (a couple of sessions, max) you’d be hanging considerably more than BW, given the grades you climb. 

Fingerboard technique 🤣🤣🤣 There will be a technique for walking to the crag next. But I know what you mean. I would try fingerboarding if it wasn’t so boring and I wasn’t so lazy. That said, I’ve put up a Beastmaker 1000 (might even use it) and bought Beastmaking (might even read it beyond the intro).

l tried a couple of Peak 8as last year and had a definite sense that my finger strength wasn’t what it should be for the cruxes. Might have to lower my ambitions to 7c for the time being - the ones I’ve tried have felt tough but a lot more achievable and more about power endurance than finger strength (i.e. linking long sections between rests / doing cruxes when tired, rather than not being able to make moves at all). The top tip with sport though is just keep turning up…

7B+ was the median "max boulder grade" though, and peak limestone overgrown boulder problems seem unlikely to be very representative of the 8a.nu (I'm assuming that's where the data was sourced) user base.

Repeaters are great for power endurance. But even improving your max finger strength will help because the moves won't feel as hard.

As long as you still enjoy turning up. Otherwise it can be good to take a break.

One way to get some fingerboarding done is to do a short warm up before leaving home to go to the crag which also gets your fingers recruited for the day ahead. This for me involves using an edge (could even be a door frame) with feet on the floor and pull for a few secs alternating hands with 20/30 secs between pulls building up to pulling as hard as possible. I also do some one armed speed pulls where your feet briefly leave the ground but that’s something to build towards.

More on these exercises here: https://www.trainingbeta.com/the-simplest-finger-training-program/

This works really well for me now I've got a fingerboard in the garage. I can get warmed up for the actual climbing and squeeze in some training. Fingers and shoulders. Managed to maintain a decent level of strength even when I was mostly doing relatively easy trad climbing.