UKC

I've been hangboarding twice a week for four months now and I have another six months before I get to climb on real rock again.

I have only the smallest and most basic of home bouldering walls, a hangboard and a pull-up bar available to me. 

I started with a month of fairly random exercises where I'd train six different hold types, followed by more and more structure creeping in. Then 8 weeks of max hangs, followed by 8 weeks of repeaters and I'm currently 3 weeks into an 8 week block of max hangs. Currently I am training my half-crimp (Beastmaker bottom outside edge) and 'small drag' (Beastmaker top row, outside edge).

Over the course of four months I have seen significant increases in my ability to hang from a Beastmaker (in terms of weight added, at least). Whether this will translate to improved climbing ability remains to be seen.

My question to UKC is; I want to maximise strength gains. How should I periodise the next 4.5 months? I won't see rock till April 2021, so I'll train endurance for 8 weeks leading up to that. 

Should I stick with max hangs/repeaters in eight week blocks, as I have been doing? Should I just do max hangs? I've read online that repeaters cause forearm hypertrophy but I can't find a source for this, so it could be 'bro science'. It has been suggested that I do max hangs as one of my weekly sessions and repeaters as the other.

What are you training for? Sport? If so then yes, a block of repeaters at the end is probably wise. Otherwise, if you’re seeing #gainz then I’d just keep at it. No need to over complicate things.

If you have done three back to back 8 week blocks i would take a couple of weeks off to do either easy climbing only (might be difficult currently depending upon your circumstances) or complete rest. This rest will help you in the long run letting your body recover completely before your next block of training, it will also hopefully prevent you potentially getting injured due to over training.  

As for fingerboarding I would typically do 4 week blocks of either strength training with very short one armer hangs <5 seconds with lots of rest after a warm up. Or 4 week blocks of repeaters to train power endurance depending upon what i am training for. I find any longer than 4 weeks and the adaptions from training tail off for me (you may be different in this). 

I'm sure you've seen it already but just in case you haven't, Neil Gresham's instagram has loads of specific exercises for different stuff(sport, endurance etc) maybe have a look at those and bring them into your seissions as you're approaching your trip?  I'm a total begginer at this kind of thing but  like an earlier poster has suggested, if you're seeing improvement I'd keep at it?  

Interestingly a friend and I did beastmaker sessions via Zoom pretty much every other day throughout lockdown, doing a variety of exercises but usually using an app.

We went on a trip to Kalymnos and were interested to see how we climbed after this.  Interestingly the big thing I noticed was that my footwork was much better this year, despite the fact I've done less climbing this year than any ever before. 

I realised that this was because I had so much more confidence with my hands, I could reach up grab a small crimp and know I was strong enough to hold it, get my head down, calmly make the foot move, look for the next move and go on.  In previous years I might have grabbed the small crimp, panicked that I couldn't hold it, desperately looked around for a better hand hold , reached up too far, forgot all about my feet and fallen off!   

So yeah, hangboarding is great for your footwork.