When looking at how to work hangboarding into your training schedule on a large scale it is usually a good idea to focus more on structural adaptation phases throughout the year and shift focus to phases of neuromuscular and/or metabolic adaptation at strategic points to prepare for trips or other specific goals. That doesn’t mean you can/should only work on one thing at a time. You can address multiple adaptations at the same time, but the more things you try to improve, the less you can improve in each. The more you focus, the more you can improve. It is also important to keep in mind that the more experienced you are the more you have to focus on single avenues of adaptation to see significant improvements. Generally the idea is to alternate the focus of phases between structural (building the muscle) and neuromuscular (teaching the muscle) adaptations.

The amount of time you spend in a hangboard “phase” depends on the type of adaptation you’re focusing on. A phase focusing on structural changes could last as long as 10-20 workouts, while a phase focusing on neuromuscular changes could be as short as 6-10 workouts. You'll notice towards the end of your phase that your improvement across workouts will start to level off. This is normal. If you are still making significant improvement across workouts, you can keep going, but once you hit that area of diminishing returns... it's time to rest and switch it up. People seem to get this confused and often think they should not climb, train, or do anything at all during these “rest” phases. This is incorrect. During a rest phase, it is important to continue to climb and give periodic high intensity effort. The “resting” is simply reducing overall volume, frequency, and intensity to allow your body to repair and recover from the demands of the previous training phase. Actually taking 2 weeks entirely off of climbing every time you finish a training phase is counter productive. If you were training 5 days a week during the training phase, climbing 2-3 days a week and resting 4-5 days a week would be a “rest”. That being said, taking a few longer complete rest phases per year IS beneficial and important.

How a hangboard phase looks is specific to the type of adaptation you are focusing on. For a structural phase, I usually like to perform 2-3 structural workouts for every 0-1 neuromuscular workout. When in a neuromuscular phase, I either completely eliminate the structural workouts or do 1 structural workout for every 2-3 neuromuscular workouts. When planning this out, keep in mind that different workouts require different amounts of rest to recover from in order to have another productive workout. This is really the main information you need when deciding on the actual schedule of your workouts and overall training plan. This applies to hangboarding and anything else you’re doing for training. Ideally, you train every time you are appropriately recovered from the previous training. Sometimes you want to create a cumulative fatigue across workouts, sometimes you want to fully recover between workouts, most of the time, it is a mixture. For structural adaptations, I like to build some cumulative fatigue across a few workouts, allow for a more complete recovery, then repeat. For neuromuscular adaptations, it is important to be relatively recovered before each workout. This typically means that during phases where you are focusing on structural adaptations, the overall volume of hangboarding is higher, but the load is a lower percentage of your max. It is okay to have 2-3 workouts that compound on one another, but then you need to let yourself recover more fully before the next bout of 2-3 workouts. If you notice that your hangboard numbers are getting progressively worse over 2-3 mini cycles of 2-3 workouts, your work:recovery ratio is off balance and you need to do less work and/or increase your ability to recover. When focusing on neuromuscular adaptations, the volume of hangboarding goes way down, but the load goes way up, and the main thing you have to keep an eye on is how frequently you are actually able to have a quality hangboard session. You don’t want that frequency to drop to less than once every 10 days, every 4-6 days being a good window to shoot for. I find that it is often better to rest in preparation for a better workout than to force yourself to complete a sub-par workout just because it is on the schedule.

A quick aside about “recovery”. The 3 most important things you can do to recover are: hydrate, eat, and sleep. If you aren’t doing these three things as well as you can, stop wasting your time and/or money sitting in ice baths, strapping yourself into compression systems, shooting yourself with lasers, scraping at “adhesions”, stabbing yourself with needles, etc. In the immortal words of Samuel L. Jackson: “Go the f*ck to sleep!”. If fact, not sleeping well is one of the main reasons I’ll postpone or cancel a hangboard workout or even whole climbing session for myself. Anyway, back to hangboarding...

The whole time you are in a hangboarding phase of any type, you are also climbing! Getting stronger is essentially worthless if you aren’t also learning to apply it. Trying to just get super strong and then learn how to use it later is not a good idea. I’ve made this mistake myself on numerous occasions (...and still do). Climbing concurrently during hangboarding phases is also important because you need the stimulus that climbing provides, both the volume, and the novel/specific grip positions. Whether or not you climb and hangboard on the same day is more a value judgement than a safety judgement. Sometimes it makes sense within your schedule and sometimes it doesn’t. Yes, you should be smart about it, but you can absolutely hangboard and climb on the same day.

Not only should you be climbing, but you should be thinking about how your hangboarding and climbing stimuli are going to interact: If you’re planning on doing a neuromuscular hangboard workout tomorrow, it may not be a good idea to climb on limit finger intensive boulders today. If you just did a hard hangboard workout and are climbing afterwards, it may be a good idea to make sure you are targeting some of the grip types that you weren’t just working on the hangboard (pinches, slopers, etc.). Not that there are any rules etched in stone, but the more effectively you understand how all of the different things you are doing are compounding and interacting, the more effective your training will be.

Yes, it is a lot to keep track of, but failing to do so is to be on the fast-track to injury and/or underperformance. Some people have a knack for feeling this out and instinctively strike an effective balance. Most people don’t. The best way to learn how to do this is to WRITE IT DOWN. Do your best to come up with some sort of loose plan for a single training phase, then record what you do every day and adapt based on how things feel. At the end of the phase, go back over what you wrote down and see what seemed to work well and what didn’t. Make a new plan and repeat. That’s it. The only catch is, you have to actually do it for it to work, but the more you do it, the better it works.