Many climbers are under the impression that climbing is a full workout, and that the only exercise needed to climb well is to climb more. While climbing is still probably the BEST training for climbing, it’s important to realize that it shouldn’t be your ONLY training.
Muscle imbalance is one of the biggest pitfalls for climbers. With so much pulling down and standing up, muscles that contract the arms and extend the legs pull all the weight (literally). Muscles designed to extend the arms and contract the legs don’t play an equal role, and can subsequently be underdeveloped.
The muscles most targeted by climbing are the forearms (which contain the flexor muscles for the hands), upper back, abs, and quads. Often neglected muscles include the pectorals, hand extensors, triceps, many leg muscles.
Besides the hope to avoid injury, you’ll see these muscles come up occasionally, but necessarily when climbing. Moves like heel hooks, mantles, bathangs, toe hooks, and underclings are less common, and often require strength obtained outside of regularly climbing to execute.
Some exercises you may want to add to your regiment:
Muscle imbalance is one of the biggest pitfalls for climbers. With so much pulling down and standing up, muscles that contract the arms and extend the legs pull all the weight (literally). Muscles designed to extend the arms and contract the legs don’t play an equal role, and can subsequently be underdeveloped.
The muscles most targeted by climbing are the forearms (which contain the flexor muscles for the hands), upper back, abs, and quads. Often neglected muscles include the pectorals, hand extensors, triceps, many leg muscles.
Besides the hope to avoid injury, you’ll see these muscles come up occasionally, but necessarily when climbing. Moves like heel hooks, mantles, bathangs, toe hooks, and underclings are less common, and often require strength obtained outside of regularly climbing to execute.
Some exercises you may want to add to your regiment:
- Push Ups - Meet a lot of the upper body needs of a climber, hitting the triceps, deltoids, and especially the pectorals, which are not commonly used in climbing. Push ups are basically the opposite of pulling yourself towards the wall. If you find that you’re able to do a large number of pushups, consider bench pressing or dumbbell presses.
- Hand Opening Exercises - There are a couple ways to go about this. If you have access to a rice bucket, you can push your fists down deep into the rice and fully expand your hand. The rice offers some resistance to this, and it’s effectively the opposite of grabbing. Another thing that I like to do is put a rubber band around all my fingers and try to open my hand. Both of these exercises are excellent to do if you are suffering from “Climber’s Elbow”, which is caused by overdeveloped flexor muscles (which do the gripping) and underdeveloped extensor muscles (which do the expanding). Most people have incredibly weak extensor muscles, because they are hardly ever heavily used. Try grabbing all you fingers with one hand and trying to open out of it the other, the flexors win every time.
- Abs - I think this is a chicken and egg problem for a lot of climbers. It’s hard to develop the abs needed for climbing by just climbing. Many get limited by their inability to control their core and rotate their body in a stable manner. Core strength is one of the biggest exercises a climber can do outside of climbing, that both improves their climbing and doesn’t cause further muscle imbalance.
- Legs - I won’t delve into legs too much, but keep in mind that climbing rarely involves contracting the legs (at least while your body is vertical!). Pretty much every leg machine has something to offer, and I would recommend just going down the line. I haven’t met a climber yet with overdeveloped leg problems, but I’ve met many that haven’t had the strength to complete leg-dependent moves (including myself).
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