UKC

I’m trying to find some beginner fingerboard training plans. 

Now, when I say beginner I MEAN beginner. 

Theres is lots of faux beginner stuff out there, some even requiring you to be able to do pull ups. To me that isn’t beginner. I can’t do pull ups (yet...) and I’m sure there are heaps of women who find pull ups really hard or impossible to do. 

I’m not a new climber but I want to find a training plan that doesn’t make me feel ridiculously weak. 

Any tips or links much appreciated. Thanks!

In reply to pennyhale:

Hi penny, when I started finger board training I looked online and didn't see anything suitable so I made up my own plan, starting cautiously. So, big holds, large rests, few reps, 4 fingers etc. Then gradually increased difficulty.  Set up a pully system to reduce your load if you can't manage the largest hold with 4 fingers. Once you get better then you can start looking at online training suggestions. That would be my advice. 

I found using the pulley system to take weight off really helped make the move to smaller holds and reducing number of fingers as you can slowly reduce the weights until you are taking your full body weight and even add weights later!

In reply to pennyhale:

You just need a pulley system to allow you to subtract enough weight that any plan you fancy becomes manageable.

I'm still a fan of the beastmaker app repeater plans. Start at the begining, lighten the load as much (if not more) than required and then slowly over time decrease the amount of weight you are subtracting.

Making it 0.5kg per session harder worked quite well for me.

In reply to pennyhale:

Assisted pull ups with a view of working up to pull ups. Hanging from your arms when you don't have enough strength in them can be bad for your shoulders so you should work on strengthening the big muscles first. Try resistance bands and when your muscles are strong enough to engage while hanging then move onto the finger board.

In reply to pennyhale:

I started on a metolius simulator (but might have been an old model) before going to a wooden on and personally found the metolius one a lot easier as it was textured giving more grip with some big jug holds at the top of it. Then started doing 5seconds hanging then 4 seconds off, doing 6 of those, resting a minute and a half then repeating that 6 times. There's an app called 'hangtight' which lets you set your own hanging and rest times and amount of you  

but probably worth saying even when I started on it I could do 3 pullups, but I still think the grip on it is more beginner friendly compared to wooden ones.

In reply to pennyhale:

Ideally:

Find out what the maximum weight you can hang on a 20mm edge for 10 seconds.  It might be that you need to take weight off using a pulley system.  If you weighed 70kg and needed to take 5kg off, then that would give you 65kg as a max.  Max hang tests are hard!

Then train at 90% of that.  So 65kg x 90% = 58.5kg.  So you’d need to take 11.5kg off using the pulley.  Do 6 hangs of 7 seconds each with 3 mins rest.  The idea is that you’re doing less time an less weight than your max, so less risk of injury but apparently similar stimulus.

Warm up plenty beforehand.  I go through a 20 minute routine that works for me.  Do that twice a week.  Retest your max every couple of months and change the weight accordingly.

It’s best to learn good form - half crimp and engaged shoulders is a good place to start.

Factoring when to train and how to mix in with actual climbing can be complicated but don’t climb hard o small holds and train hard on small holds on consecutive days or if your fingers feel ‘tweaky’.

There are loads of ways to over complicate things but keep it simple for now.

In reply to pennyhale:

I'll reiterate what other people have said. Make a pulley system to attach to your harness so you can take weight off and follow something like afx22's methodology. 

Do make sure engaged shoulders and a slight bend in the elbow. The exercise should be just about comfortable, not struggling to finish. Don't do it at the end of a session or when tired. 

I started taking 20Kg off  with  the pulley at the start of  the year (lattice edge) and now I'm down to just about managing 10  seconds with no pully so I  use 5Kg off for my exercises.

Always listen to your body/fingers and don't do  fingerboarding to failure - if you think you're coming off, let go (best if you're close to standing position so  you can just put feet  down)

In reply to pennyhale:

Download and try the Crimpd app. I think the 20mm fingerboard exercises are a good place to start, with good advice to go with it. Try the max hang test and see what you can manage, either adding or removing weight. Just start with one session a week until feeling confident. 

Thanks for all the advice.

Need to figure out how to fix up a pully system, have a good resistance band I can use to start with.

In reply to pennyhale:

Alternatively you can stand on an analogue scale and gradually take weight off.

It's a very effective way to control the weight you'll be training with

In reply to pennyhale:

Pull ups shouldn't be part of a fingerboard routine in my opinion.

Fingerboarding is a controlled way to train finger strength. Pull ups and other bodyweight exercises can be trained separately without stressing the fingers.

In reply to pennyhale:

I had exactly this problem and lockdown made me do something about it (at long last). Also, I had help from my partner who knows more about these things. As others have said, being able to set up a pulley system was the key for me.  I also use the crimpd app as it had good instructions for how to do a test and then work out how much weight you need to take off. Like you, I found that a lot of the stuff out there just assumed a level of strength that's unrealistic for a lot of people. And you're left wondering how you can ever start (or how you can start without just instantly injuring yourself).  It was tricky to figure it all out and it was also a bit of a challenge finding a way of hanging sufficient weight off the other end of the pulley without it totally getting in the way. But it is doable if you persevere. Before making the effort to use the pulley and work out the weight thing I tried standing on one leg on a stool and it was just a bit naff really.

We have a mounting board made by crusher holds that allows you to fit a fingerboard onto a doorway and this also made it easier to set up a pulley as you can use the holes along the bottom of the mounting board for the pulley. We don't have a proper pulley but we use a dmm revolver and that does the trick.  I'm really glad that I've got somewhere with it ... and have now even got my very own fingerboard.

In reply to pennyhale:

If a pulley system is too much faff then stay standing on the ground and pull hard on your chosen hold alternating hands for as long or short as you choose. A single edge can do the job. Good idea to also do the pulls using the three main grip types - open hand, half crimp and full crimp.

In reply to pennyhale:

I was in a similar position. Despite climbing for a long time, I'm very weak, had never tried fingerboarding till lockdown and still can't do a pull up. A pulley system to take weight off will work but I just started doing standard repeater hangs in different grips and holds with a foot on an aerobic step that I had lying around from physio exercises as suggested in this handy video Dave MacLeod put out in April:

youtube.com/watch?v=Z5HZTN4MR-o&

Its less precise than a pulley system but also less faff to get set up. You can adjust the difficulty by using one or both feet, moving whatever you have your feet on away from you or positioning your ass differently. Lattice also discussed it a bit in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLPY0pb80q0&t=1s

I think my main problem was dodgy/weak shoulders so I've also being doing a lot of separate conditioning on them and I'm now managing bodyweight hangs.

In reply to pennyhale:

It is confusing to start so I wont add much to what has already been said.

One thing worth establishing is exactly what is good form? If you are hanging off your skeleton and not engaging your muscles, then you are asking for injury and more importantly not training what you intended to. As others have suggested, it is better to take a long time getting there the right way than hoping to improve quickly.

I personally would recommend working up to at least a couple of pull ups using a resistance band to assist initially. This will teach you the correct way to engage. If you can't engage, you can't hang properly.

By engaging, I mean when you hang your position will be the same as the starting position of the pull up, i.e. your muscles are contracting and starting to pull but when hanging you stop short at the pulling up part. Good luck.

In reply to pennyhale:

Hi there, just chipping in that the most low-tech to take some weight off when you start is to put one foot up on a stool. Alternate feet so you don’t create an imbalance. It’s surprising how easy it is to control how much force your fingers are experiencing. After that, transition to taking weight off with a theraband attached to the bottom of the board. Never train when you’re tired and never slump where your arms have gone straight and your shoulders pulled up.

Sore skin is often a limiting factor to how long and/or often you can train. Wooden boards like the Beastmaker are great in this respect, and the lower friction also develops contact strength. The 1000 also has a couple of jugs which are ideal for pull ups. The Beastmaker s take a bit of time to break in, but is well worth it.
 

In reply to pennyhale:

Lots of good advice on this thread ranging from the most scientific to the most low tech, all will work.

Just to share with you some encouragement - at the start of lockdown my other half couldn't do a pull up she can now do 3 with a short rest in between each one & I couldn't hang unassisted on the 20mm edges at the start of lockdown and can now.

Our board is on our stairs so you we can just do a super low tech assist by putting one foot on the higher step behind us (ive rigged up a pulley too but usually can't be bothered to faff) seems to work...

Good luck and remember not too overdo it!

In reply to pennyhale:

I'm in a rented house with nothing solid enough to put a pulley on or mount a fingerboard properly. Here's what I found works for doing the Crimpd max hangs with minimal equipment - hope this is useful (and you may want something more scientific / high tech):

- pullup bar over doorframe with Lattice fingerboard hanging from this via doubled/tripled short slings (the board is free hanging, but when weighted it hangs basically straight down)

- weights (ok, weights and bottles of wine) in a rucksack, with abseil cord tied to the handle, then passed up and over the pullup bar/fingerboard, and then tied onto my climbing harness

This means you can very gradually increase the load by removing one wine bottle at a time. I have been doing this with the Crimpd app max hangs workout and the very gradual increase in load every time I comfortably complete the session really adds up over a relatively short space of time if you stick with it and do it say every 3 days.

I'm sure the kgs won't be perfectly comparable to other people but I doubt it's too far off and it works well for comparing against your past self. I personally found the other methods like putting your foot on something really hard to get consistent between sessions and have that controlled, gradual increase in load. They'll all make you stronger though.

In reply to pennyhale:

One last thing, reflect on what you’re doing it for. Before I discovered bouldering and sport as an end in themselves, I did a couple of decades of trad at a reasonable standard, and never touched a fingerboard and certainly couldn’t crank out pull ups. Subsequently took up training to progress at bouldering and fight off some of the down sides of getting old. It helps to have some goals which will bring joy if you can identify them, as a outcome from the training.

In reply to pennyhale:

if your fingerboard is above a doorway, you can fit a pullup bar in the door frame (even the removable ones if you don't want to screw it in) - you can then throw a sling over it, attach it to your harness, and hang weights off the other end to act as a pulley system.

You can also use it to work on developing pullup stength - even if you can't do a full pullup, it's worth starting with something like scapular pullups to strengthen some useful muscles and train the correct engagement for doing fingerboard hangs.

(https://trainingforclimbing.com/the-best-exercise-youre-not-doing-the-scapu....)

In reply to pennyhale:

youtube.com/watch?v=vTVQKiwV4b8&
 

GB coach video about starting finger boarding 

In reply to pennyhale:

My personal experience with it was that I got as much out of learning how to hold a rung and hang as I did out of strength gains. Very quickly I understood how long I can hold onto things. I would say it's probably irrelevant how you start, as long as you do. If you are as weak as you say, I would go for a really really large rung and practise doing hangs on that for a start. A bunch of 10 second hangs (5-10) should  just bejust fine. If you find you are completing all the hangs, make the edge a bit smaller. Regarding what fingerboard to use, I am personally a fan of pieces of wood scraps in assorted thicknesses screwed to a small board above a doorframe. That way you can add and and change the rungs as you progress. It's cheap and versatile.

In reply to pennyhale:

Some great stuff here I would say pay for the lattice fingerboard plan if you can afford it. My climbing partner has been coached by them and he can now half crimp with 40Kg. 
I am not with them or work for them I am just genuinely impressed with how he has progressed.

If you can’t I would recommend what others recommend about initial Max hang test followed by 90% hangs. I would also consider Max hangs for time to improve endurance. 

If you can’t rig a pulley system you could use therabands to reduce your weight to achieve both max weight and endurance training. 
I have climbed hardest when I’ve combined fingerboard work with boulder projects but I can see how this could go wrong without proper training - can you do reps in a group outdoors?

Anyway best of luck. 
 

In reply to pennyhale: you could try pinch blocks or an edge rigged up to some weights.so its like a dead lift type move with one handed crimps.

Or as shark suggests, just stay on the ground and pull. 

Just be very careful as a bust pulley or tendon is 3 months to heal.