Breaking Through Bouldering Grades

December 2012

Climb Training



Hi Steph,

I am trying to break through some bouldering grades and I am struggling with my training program at the moment. Do you offer any advice or are you doing any coaching at the moment? I could really use a sound female program to follow. Let me know if this is possible and will follow up with more detail.

Thank you!

Vanessa

Hi Vanessa,

I’m not sure what you are doing for training, aside from climbing or the gym? My main advice is to target finger and core strength. Core strength can be any kind of abdominal exercises, from floor crunches, to hanging leg raises. Also, plank pose and slow yoga flow are very good for core building.

To increase your finger strength, be very careful, but I highly recommend starting to use a campus board, mainly because I have started doing this myself a month ago and have already noticed gains. My friend Kingsley is trying to talk me into adding hangboard workouts with weight assist, and as soon as I get around to rigging up the pulleys under my hangboard, I’m going to get more beta from him on his workout.

Again, when targeting finger strength, you want to be super careful. This is especially true if you are a newer climber. Right now, I’m warming up by climbing on my bouldering wall for an hour before doing my campus workout, and I would recommend a very long warm up followed by a mindful workout (I’ve heard you want to limit campus workouts to no more than 2/week, and about 15-30 minutes for the workout itself–and when I say mindful, I mean pay attention to any signs of pain and stop immediately if you feel them) and followed by a small cool-down (for me, doing leg raises with the large holds of my fingerboard).

So, again, not knowing what your climbing/training routine is like right now, I would recommend that you add a campus board session once a week, and try to incorporate core exercises to your schedule. You can’t do too much core training, so you could literally do it every day if you want to. But if time is an issue, try to do some twice a week. Do this for 4 weeks, and see if you notice any results.

Good luck!

Steph