The Training Plan (Strengths and Weaknesses)

Last week I focused on figuring out my strengths and weaknesses, and came up with a list of each. I did this by first writing a list of what I thought to be my strengths and weaknesses, and then added to the list as I was climbing and figuring out why I was falling. I also starred the weaknesses that kept causing failure on routes. As you can see above, the half crimp grip and core tension were my most prevalent weaknesses, while toe hooking and posterior chain flexibility were secondary. You may also notice that body positioning is on both side of the chart. This is because I am good at figuring out and using body positioning to my advantage on angles that I thrive on, though on more overhanging terrain, my body positioning falls apart and contributes to my failures.

My style of climbing has always been the technical sport climber that open crimps everything, uses beta and efficient movement rather than strength and power, and thrives on vertical or slightly overhanging routes. I’m also freakishly good at heel hooks and despicable at toe-hooking.

Flexibility has always been a mixed bag for me. I am great at getting my feet above my head if I can open my hips (like in a high heel hook), but am poor at high steps due to extreme tightness in my posterior chain. I used to think that I just had tight hamstrings and couldn’t do anything about it, but there is so much more at play. The more that I have been stretching, the more that I realize that I need to stretch better and more often. I’ll talk about stretching more in the future.

For the majority of my climbing life, I neglected my weaknesses and only climbed on routes or boulders that played to my strengths. I cannot say that I didn’t know any better, because I did. When I was ~13 year old I attended a clinic with professional climbers Daniel Woods and Paul Robinson. The focus of the clinic was determining youth climbers weaknesses and developing strategies to target those weaknesses. They heavily emphasized the need to work on your weaknesses if you want to become a better climber.

So why have I not done this? Why have I shied away from the things that I am bad at and put so much time towards the things that I am good at? Because working on the things that you are the worst at are the hardest things to work on. This applies to all aspects of life. All climbers understand failure through falling, but not everyone understands the level of failure you experience through trying to improve your weaknesses. I sure as hell don’t.

Enough of this jibber jabber though. Lets get to my weaknesses and the plan.

My Weaknesses

The half crimp. I am bad at it, very bad. My go to grip is the four finger open handed position, and if I need to bear down on a small edge, I’ll roll the open hand into a full crimp. This avoidance of arguably the most important hand position in climbing has left a massive void in my climbing skills (especially on steeper angles).

To catch up on my many lost years of half crimping, I will attack on multiple fronts. During my warm up and while bouldering, I’ll half crimp as many holds as possible, to get my tendons and finger muscles used to that hand position. This should be a good way to introduce my hands to the grip without blowing all of my tendons at once.

Second, I will be hang boarding with the half crimp position twice a week. Through scouring the web and podcast lands I have found 3 main hangboard protocols that people do. Max weight two arm hangs for ~10 seconds, one arm hangs for ~5 seconds, or some variation of repeaters.

What I have settled on to train half crimp, is 3–5 sets of 5 reps of 7/3 repeaters. This means 7 seconds on the hold, 3 seconds rest, 5 times in a row. This comes from Steve Maisch. It seems like he knows a thing or two about training for climbing. My goal with this is to build finger strength and some strength endurance. I was out bouldering outside over the weekend and realized I was also pretty limited on how many powerful moves I could do in a row.

Weakness number 2: Core tension. I have a difficult time maintaining tension throughout my core and down to my toes while climbing. While I can place my feet well, keeping them on during strenuous moves is difficult for me. I am much more used to being as relaxed as possible through moves, after all I am a sport climber at heart. I’ll level up my core tensions through strength training. This will consist mainly of deadlifts and a toes to bar variation, with some intentional climbing as well.

As with the half crimps, I will be tailoring my warm up and bouldering sessions to work core tension. To do this, I’ll focus on pushing through my toes and tensing up my whole body while climbing, and utalize the moon board after I am warm. Short, hard, overhanging problems are what I need to get this flimsy old core in shape.

The deadlifts will be performed twice a week and shoot for 10–20 total reps for each session. I’ll be using enough weight so that doing 3–5 reps will be about 1/3 to 2/3’s of my max reps for that weight. If that makes sense. So realistically, this will start with 3–5 sets of 3–5 reps around 140lbs (roughly my body weight.) As the reps at that weight get easier, I’ll be increasing the weight to keep the intensity consistent. The purpose of these are to help my core tension by strengthening my back abs and butt.

Between sets of deadlifts, I’ll be doing a variation of toes to bar where you shoot your knees up to the bar after your toes get there. Doing this makes it hard to do many more than 5 reps. This is more specific to climbing than the deadlift, similar to getting your feet back on the wall after they cut. I picked these two exercises, deadlift and toes to bar, because they can be done at a high intensity to build strength, and 3–5 sets can be done in 15–25 minutes.

So that’s pretty much it. I’ll keep you guys posted with a post next Monday to reflect on the first week of this program.

Thanks for reading. Follow me on Instagram if ya want. I post pictures and videos there.

-The Lazy Climber