Training Won’t Make You Climb Harder. Here’s Why You Should Still Do It.

Is is easy to make false predictions about the effect that training will have on our climbing. While it may seem logical to conclude that more strength will equate to more success on rock, performance outcomes are influenced by many other interconnected factors, with strength being nowhere near the top of the list. You may need to be able to produce force more quickly through your finger flexors in order to pull a specific move, but that is not all you need. You must also be familiar with the timing of the movement, how much pressure to apply through your feet and when, how cold it needs to be to gain friction with the rock, the time of day when the climb is in the sun, the confidence in your ability to execute the move, and so on…

Climbing, or any sport, involves a tremendous amount of skill. Therefore, we should not expect increases in strength alone to automatically improve our performance. To develop our skills directly, we must spend time on the wall. 

The term “sport specificity” is the idea that in order to train for the demands of sport, exercises must look as close as possible to the actual sport. This may be possible in sports like powerlifting, where the training is the sport, but in something like climbing, there is far too much variability to account for with off the wall training. Therefore, if the goal is to improve our climbing directly, our time is better spent practicing our actual sport.

The simplest way to think about strength training is to understand the SAID principle, or “specific adaptation to imposed demand”. In other words, we develop adaptations (both neurologic and physiologic) which are specific to the demands we impose on our body. We only get better at what we spend time doing. Therefore, if our goal is to increase our force output in a specific movement, we should choose a style of training for that movement which allows us to consistently produce as much force as possible. And if our goal is to get better at climbing, we should get specific about what aspect of our climbing we want to improve, and spend time practicing this skill in a climbing-specific context. What we should not do is try to mix the two.

Moreover, for trained athletes, just climbing is not a sufficient stimulus for strength gains. To gain strength in a movement, we must train at an intensity that is high enough to elicit tissue change, and to do so effectively, the coordinative demand of the exercise must be relatively low. Rarely in our climbing do we reach that “max strength” threshold which is necessary to stimulate change, and often, we are unable to do so given the incredible complexity of climbing movement (i.e. if too much of our attention is devoted to coordination of a movement, we are unable to focus solely on force production). For something like a bench press, squat, or deadlift however, while we must learn how to execute the exercises initially, there is still far less going on in any of these movements than in our climbing. So, if our goal is to improve our maximal force output in a specific movement, taking our training off the wall is a much more efficient strategy.

Likewise, if your goal is to improve your climbing directly, your time is better spent on the wall, as this obviously equates to more practice. However, skill acquisition depends not only on the duration of practice but on the quality of that practice as well. Therefore, having the right intention is crucial to getting the most out of your practice. Want to get better at climbing on crimps? Spend time grabbing crimpy holds. Do so at an intensity that is low enough to allow for quality practice, and incrementally increase the volume of that practice over time. (Volume = load x sets x reps)

More finger strength will not help you climb harder unless you know how to effectively apply that strength. Often in our climbing, we do not need to access force levels as high as those we are exposed to in our training, and as we get better, we learn how to offload forces in more efficient ways, such as by weighting our feet more effectively, initiating more of our movement with the lower body, relying on passive tension in our upper body, and so on. However, having more strength overall gives us more bandwidth to practice our sport more effectively.

The main goal of off the wall training is not to directly make us climb harder. It very well might, especially if strength is a big limiting factor for you, but that is not the point. The goal of supplemental training is to make our tissues stronger and more resilient so that we can spend more time on the wall, and hopefully, get injured less. Injury occurs when loads exceed the capacity of our tissues to tolerate stress, either over time or all at once. The more strength we have in a particular movement, especially in extreme ranges of motion, and the quicker we are able to access that strength, the higher or more frequent that stress must be to be injurious. Having a more robust system overall means more of our time can be spent climbing.

In this way, strength training should expose our tissues to demands that are more stressful than sport in order to prepare us for the stress we are exposed to on the wall. Therefore, our supplemental training does not need to look like climbing (and in most cases should not) in order to be useful for us as climbing athletes. Having a higher degree of strength and muscle mass have also been shown to reduce all-cause mortality. Therefore, strength training has health benefits that go far beyond climbing and may help facilitate a more sustainable climbing career.

It is also worth noting that there are certain movements that we receive more or less exposure to on the wall. Climbers do a ton of pulling, therefore it makes less sense to spend the bulk of our training focused on pulling. Accumulating too much volume too soon is a major risk factor for injury. So why would we want to add more volume on top of the thing we already spend a ton of time doing?  Instead, it might be a better use of our time to train the movements that we are not as often exposed to on the wall but nonetheless need to be prepared for. 

Our goal as athletes is to become as strong and literate in as many different movements as possible. This is one reason why I feel that lower body work is a neglected aspect in most climbers’ training. Not only must we be able to produce force through extension of our hips, legs and ankles in order to propel ourselves up the wall, we must also be prepared to fall. While we often think of climbing as an “upper body sport”, the significance of lower body injuries in our sport cannot be understated. While we cannot prevent every single injury, nor should this be our goal, there is more that most of us can be doing in our training to prepare us for when we inevitably hit the pads.

For most athletes, the majority of your time should be spent on the wall. Off the wall training should be treated as a supplement to your climbing practice, and it should be aimed at addressing your specific needs as an athlete. Your training should be loadable, progressable, and have a relatively low coordination component so that you can reliably produce force. It must be intense enough to elicit change, but not so intense that it introduces more stress than your body can tolerate. Finding that sweet spot often involves some trial and error, but the sooner you start, the sooner you will get to know your body’s needs and what you respond to best.

Climb smart.