Hold On!

So this is week two (I may have cheated a little and actually started climbing last weekend) and I’m just back from a bouldering session at the wall.  In my last article I was talking about strength and in particular grip strength.  Well something else that is very closely linked to grip strength is stamina: the ability to hold every hold, hold after hold.

That was my main training aim today.  I started of with some really easy climbing around the wall, keeping it low, slow and on fairly comfortable hand holds.  Basically a warm up, and my advice to you is, you should always start your climbing session this way.  Its easier to avoid an injury than recover from one.

After spending about 15 mins warming up, I slowly started ramping up the intensity and the difficulty of my routes.  These are two concepts that you’re likely to encounter when you begin climbing.  For example you could climb a difficult route that is to say, it has a move or a number of moves which you find technically difficult.  By this I mean you have to move your body in a particular way or make the holds in a particular sequence.  On the other hand, an intense route might be said to be more sustained, tending towards your climbing limit for most of or all the route.  The individual moves might not be that hard but the hand holds could be open handed or ‘slopers’ for example.  This type of climbing in particular can be pretty sore on your hands and forearms.

Using these two ideas you can start classify routes.  You might overhear climbers talking like this: “its a nice route but there’s just an ‘interesting’ move above the fourth clip” - meaning you’ll most likely find it comfortable but will probably need to think about the ‘difficult’ part in order to get past it.  When talking about an intense route you could also overhear climbers saying this: “my arms are like jelly after climbing that! The holds look good from here but they’re awful!” - meaning this route is all about grip strength and endurance with maybe less emphasis on climbing technique.

As you might imagine, in order to become a better climber all round, you’ll need to work on both of these areas.  I spent roughly an hour at the wall and finished it off with an excellent training technique called repeaters.  This is a simple time based training exercise and is particularly good and building up grip strength and what I’ll call ‘grip endurance’ i.e the ability to grip repeated holds with little recovery time.

Ok that’s enough for today.  I’ll be back very soon with and update on how all this is helping my own climbing.