I started at 19 and by 27-28 I got up to a high level. 5.13. NIAD. Astroman. All by only climbing. I never trained. But by 29 I fell apart. 2 years of injuries. I wish I had trained to prevent injury. Tom is 100% correct. I'm 52 now and trying to tighten up the body so I can try hard again. Strength training is absolutely essential for me now. Esp shoulder, finger, and hamstring work.
I always understood "just climb" differently: - just climb = just climb more: the key factor for beginners is how often they climb at all - just climb = just do stuff on the wall: this can mean targeted drills - just climb = just do a climbing session: this does not exclude warm-up or stretching, for example - just climb = focus on the whole experience: this can mean to let go of researching climbing shoes or finding the best abs training and refocus on climbing as a whole - just climb = just have fun: be more motivated by doing mainly those things that you actually like to do I think there is a middle ground that both Tom and the "just climb" preachers actually mean when they think about a balanced training for beginners.
I also think for many climbing is not a sport it's a hobby. It's an excuse to move their body. It's a solution to wanting to exercise, but not wanting to exercise. For them focusing on what is fun is the best part, and for a beginner that will translate into getting better as well. so Win win. If someone is seriously trying to become a good climber in a sport sense, then Tom is absolutely correct. Tom talked about injury prevention, but I agree with you that this can easily be achieved by just climbing too.
I always took the just climb motto for true beginners. You want people just starting out with the sport to have fun and they will see huge gains just by being up on the wall. Some beginners will see what they can achieve and believe that training to climb instead of climbing will show an advance. For example their fingers feel weak and so they train strength in fingers and expect to be able to complete that route they couldn't before. They fail to realize it's not the finger strength holding them back but the lack of climbing ability.
Yes, absolutely! Also to add, simple, repeatable movement patterns are fantastic to build proprioception and granular control of your body. People new to sports as a whole won't be able to follow a cue like retract your shoulder on the wall without first learning the feeling of the muscle involed in a simpler environment.
100% agree on getting climbers interested in progression and longevity in the sport to begin training as early as possible, and not thinking training means never climbing. Some of the best ways to introduce this foundation is for climbers to have a resistance circuit for getting warm before a session and sometimes as a cool down, modulating the session intensity as appropriate. Plus, getting away from the "just" in "just climb". Many of the best almost only climb, but they never "just" because the sessions are focused and progressing. The vast majority of my training a month ago was off the wall, the vast majority of my training for this cycle is on boards and select boulders, and I rarely "just climb" anymore because I can have an intention wandering into a session.
Do you train to climb, or climb to train? I started climbing a year ago, at age 58. Climbing is now the main workout in my overall fitness regime, but still just a part of what I do. If I was younger and had thoughts of competing, advancing to much tougher grades, or to take on El Capitan, I would agree with Tom's perspective. For those who climb as part of a varied fitness regime or just for fun, climbing specific training makes less sense. For me, climbing is the workout. I spend time in warm up and look for movements that will challenge me and strengthen certain body parts, but that is the workout. Tom started by saying, "from my perspective..." and that is the point. What are Your goals? What is Your lifestyle? And what makes You happy?
imagine if a boxing coach advised you to just spar for 3 years before you started training! What Tom is saying is spot on here and applies to any other sport IMO
I’d love to hear thoughts about the weekend warrior. Personally I work full time with a family to take care of so I get to climb one day a week (I try to get a lot of quality in) during the week I work out 2-3 times doing workouts geared to climbing plus cardio 3-5 times a week since I’m a heavier climber 210 pounds at around 13-14% body fat. Am I over doing it? I don’t see progress climbing but I barely feel like I am keeping my climbing fitness
I was in a similar ballpark weight wise to you when I started climbing (I'm 6'1", was 210lb) and I was into weight lifting for about 10 years before getting into climbing so my body type is generally pretty thicc for climbing (especially my legs). I felt like I've progressed in climbing consistently after I got a hangboard for my house and was doing some basic hangboard routines 2-3x per week in addition to 1-2 climbing days. All the weight lifting / other exercise doesn't really help with climbing performance if you're already pretty strong, so I view it more as balance / injury prevention (lots of shoulder bands, knees, stretching, antagonist stuff). Doing a ton of cardio can be a negative for climbing recovery as well, esp if it's intense or super long, like running more than 1-2x/wk, but if you're just walking or doing moderate bike rides (I bike commute everywhere 5-7 days / week) then it shouldn't matter too much. Ultimately though I still was stuck at 5.10 outside until I dropped down to like 180lb... then suddenly I was sending 5.11 outside (both sport and trad) and knocking on the door of 5.12. It's ultimately a strength to weight game, and you certainly can get stronger fingers to offset being heavier but at least for me it was way easier for me to lose weight, even just 10-20lb made an enormous difference.
Im 64 years old. Ive been climbing since I was 10 years old. In the 1980's I was putting up new routes up to French 8a. I climbing professionally in the alps for a time for a guide book company. I still climb almost every day. I had a serious dog attack on my right forearm 4 years ago. Snapped tendon and main nerve and removal of huge amounts of muscle. I can only climb at French 6b now if it requires technique not strength. I have never trained a day in my life. Every single person I know who trains gets injured either during training or climbing at some point. I put it down to mental attitude. I climb for fun. So some days I climb very easy routes and some days I may push myself. I ride a bicycle to the crag and I always have a hike in. Often Im doing new routes so I physically have to garden the climb. All of this is a balanced work out (training).The guys who train, always train hard and always push the limits. They climb on routes by the road or on climbing walls. Their body and mind never gets to relax. If you look at social media climbing sites grade is everything and telling people and registering it is important. Its a disaster. I have friends who are my age and cant climb any more. Their joints are ruined from the stress they have placed on their body. Some have had repeated surgery on finger muscles and tendons.
A. Confirmation bias: You seem to have a predisposed negative image of what people who train are like since you apparently don't do it yourself, and thus you find areas in your life to confirm that belief. B. Training for climbing has HIGHLY evolved in the last 10 years alone. It is highly nuanced, and there are now proven resting and deload strategies involved. I wouldn't be surprised if "every single person" you knew over the years who trained did end up getting injured, but we now have resources and knowledge to mitigate that.
So a quick question, when he says the curve for average finger strength vs body weight is linear, what does he mean by that? Does he mean it's constant as in people who are heavier have equally proportionally stronger fingers? Or does he mean that the change is not equal but still proportional, as in for every kg of bodyweight someone gains they gain an average of 2kg maximum pulling force with their fingers? If it's the second one, what's the coefficient? Put another way and perhaps more practically, do heavier climbers in a group tend to have disproportionately strong fingers, disproportionately weak fingers, or the same ratio of finger strength to their bodyweight as the entire group's average?
Listen again, he mentioned finger strength, body weight and climbing ability (grade) in the question but in the answer Tom is talking about only finger strength and climbing ability, meaning stronger fingers = higher grade climbed. I would expect that at a certain grade, heavier people would have stronger fingers relative to lighter people, but ultimately it's just enough to overcome the handicap of being heavier, and they don't specifically address this.
Climbing is all pull upper body, push lower body, and abs for core. (Not) strangely, there seem to be a lot of hunched, injured climbers, with bad backs. It's always been my view that you should be at the very least offsetting climbing with upper body push, lower body pull, and some lower back exercises just to balance out your frame. This was a great concise explanation of just that.
@@ryenschimerman2127 True, it's more about posterior chain activation. That's the core @dhyanpatel142 is talking about. Get your hams, glutes, external rotators firing because they're the primary movers on overhangs. Abs are fine, but you only need to get your feet back up on the wall after they cut loose - a strong posterior chain is what prevents the feet from cutting unnecessarily in the first place.
I think the idea of "just climb" is to not worry about optimizing their performance or perfect their training as a new climber. Just climbing a lot of variety and different styles will probably already overload your body. You can refine things as you get over the newbie gains in technique and strength
I also often see people that are quite fit from before, but doesn’t really train, try climbing harder than they can, and then they get hurt. I would argue that the training isn’t just to push grades but from keeping yourself from getting injuries. This goes especially out to those of us that started around 30.
Background : climbing for 15 years, training for 8 years, coaching a climbing course in a local club. Yeah, but : define training. In a lot of people minds, training is everything that is not directly climbing. Which is far from the truth. Training is a process in which you design a protocol to adapt your body to better perform for a certain task, or an array of tasks. And this can be done by climbing. The advice "just climb" is very, very, very sound, but it's also oversimplified. If you randomly go to the gym, climb what you feel like climbing for what duration you feel like, of course, your progression will be non efficient. To get better, in an efficient way, you need to design a protocole, a method, so that you make sure you hit the most useful spots. But you definetely can do that by climbing. For example, if you want to build stronger fingers, you might think adding one hanboarding session per week is the best option. From a time consumption point of view, it might be. But that's it. You would be way better bouldering hard boulders that revolves around finger strength for one hour, once per week. It checks all the boxes : -you do get finger strength out of it -it's way more fun than anything else, making it usually easier for people to follow so more durable -you also work connected qualities to finger strength, and they are necessary to use finger strength in the first place (core, contact strength and pain management at a certain level, yeah, you read that right) Those boxes makes it 100% applicable to climbing. Because it's climbing, duh ! There are downside, of course : -it's usually more time consuming, depending on the facilities to which you have access -there is a higher risk of injury to it if you don't think it really through (it's a bit easier to stick to the hanboarding routine exaclty, an it's harder to not try for the 5th time this hard boulder after 1h30 of training, when you're so close !), but there are ways to circumvent that. From my experience, i would say that overall, for all of us amateurs (counting like, 8b routes and under, so probably 99% of climbers !), we are better off just climbing. But climb with a plan, for example cycles of hard bouldering, or cycles of pumpy routes, or weeks with sessions designated to target certain areas (monday : bouldering session, redpoint level for 1h30. Wednesday, redpoint- grade routes, 3 or 4 tries within 2h session. Saturday, all around bouldering session, flash level, 3 tries max. 3h. That's a pretty solid training week !)
Bouldering since 6 months and started Top roping a month ago. So I’m quite new to these specific sports. Yet I can tell that I got most progression out of climbing different styles in different gyms rather then from just climbing/bouldering more.
I stand absolutely by what Tom said. Started climbing less than a year ago at the age of 45, and in just a couple of months have reached the limit of "just climb". All things considered, time I can spent just climbing, my skin regen, my tendons, my muscles. It is a careful balance, almost a dance.
Obviously, it would be dub to neglect your antagonist training but you absolutely have not reached your technical limits in climbing in just a few months. You have people like Dave Graham still seeing technical gains in their 40's let alone someone who has been climbing less than a year.
I've been climbing for six years on and off and it's only this year that I've really gotten into finger training I'm plateauing at v6 right now damn it feels hard to move beyond this grade my fingers are strong but they're never strong enough as we can all agree on that it's very difficult to structure training, work and leisure I just have to remember that persistence and being smart about training is key I'm sorry if this is a little off topic just ranting
Your fingers are probably strong enough for v6. Your fingers are probably strong enough for even harder grades. You should focus more on technique - strength will come, but it builds slowly. Get your technique down and you'll climb harder.
I've just starting climbing and I climb badly. So if I just climb then I'll probably continue to climb badly. I'm looking to improve my climbing so these resources are helpful for sure.
I’ve found the best way(s) to improve my own climbing is to be reflective after every attempt about what went wrong, try moves or problems a bunch of times using different positioning etc., and try to watch or even talk with climbers who climb well about how they approach various moves or problems.
depends on your personality, some people are able to improve optimally by just engaging with the sport out of love for movement. where others have to have a more focused approach if they want to get anywhere. depends on your goals with the sport as well.
I doubt there are many full time professional climbers that 'just engage with the sport' though. Additional training is a must these days if you want to go the distance. Sure you can get very far by just climbing but I wouldn't call it optimal progression. I was one of those 'just climb' types but I hit a ceiling at some point that was hard to break. In hindsight I had good fingers but a weak body and could've progressed further with extra workouts that did not include a climbing wall. If your goal is to just have fun then yes just going climbing is enough but I feel like that's a bit besides the point since we're listening to a training podcast.
I don't think anyone can improve optimally by just engaging with the sport. You'll always be able to address your weaknesses faster with focused training, and thus improve faster than you would have otherwise. Though I do agree that some people won't enjoy that approach and don't need to do it
He's blatantly right, name one thing, not even a spot where doing it alot is better than training specifically for that activity and doing as often as possible....... I expedited my climbing skills by hang boarding and strength training almost immediately after starting climbing indoors. Everyone is amazed I can climb 12s after one year. Now I dooooo climb alot but I train specifically on strength some weeks and endurance other weeks. Just climbing a lot will make you better but not as fast. Just like basket all, soccer, video games, baseball, and basically all of hobbies..... if you train skills they will pay off... a brand new calisthenics bro will immediately climb better than someone who hasn't worked out at all...... because the calisthenics bro trained. Technique can be trained and I would argue it takes longer than strength buuuut training campusing, quiet feet, and dynamic movement will quicken your technique.. obviously...
I wish I could climb more, I can barely maintain climbing once a week because if I go more then once a week, I get tennis elbow or forearm tendinitis. I don't know how people say they climb like 5 days a week, are they just climbing easy climbs for them? I massage, stretch, do supination wrist exercises etc, it's like my forearm muscles are getting too big for the rest of my arms from climbing. Only started climbing 10 months ago.
You are probably overgripping. But yeah I am the same way. I climb about 90 minutes 2 days a week and that’s enough for me. Otherwise, tendonitis. People have different goals and I think it’s funny how we can get blinders to how other people see the world. Not everybody wants to be a “pro climber”. Lots of folks do it because it’s fun. It gives you practical movement skills. It complements a healthy lifestyle. I guess maybe I came to the wrong place, and the intended audience for this video is not me. While I do not care to be the best climber in the gym, I also do like to challenge myself and improve.
@@adamking6957 Yeah i only have a boulder gym, so im always try harding when i climb. Climbs that require a hard pull on my left arm or dyno flare up the worst, if i static climb everything its not too bad.
I had nasty tendonopathy in the elbow for about 4 years, at some points I had to ice it daily to keep the pain manageable. Only thing that got rid of it was doing bench for strength at the same intensity as pull, and I haven't had problems in almost a decade even though I'm doing more volume than ever. Elbow problems can be caused by weaknesses in the shoulders, so you could start with a general strength protocol for upper body push and see if that starts helping it. Stretches and massages usually only help with symptoms and don't address the cause.
@@La0bouchere Thanks for your reply I will look into this. I saw athlene x recommends kettle bells swings as they stretch your forearms on the way up might be similar to why bench helps.
Having come back to climbing after a ten year hiatus (Navy + 3x cancer diagnosis), it’s a bit surprising to me that more, or most really, do not do CrossFit as their supplement. The whole meme of CrossFitters being heathens who only compare macros and CrossFit Total weights aside (f#*k those people anyway.), it really is incredibly beneficial. The methodology at it’s core of constantly varied, functional movements, performed at high intensity aligns with what Tom mentions; especially when it comes to volume. Very few if any other types of exercise match the volume in a daily workout programmed by your local box (gym and yes I hated myself for saying box instead). It’s infinitely scale and interchangeable. Seriously, I have continued to do CrossFit during each subsequent bone then muscle cancer diagnosis. If I can do it safely during that, any climber can get tons and tons of benefit from it. I also want to add in an asterisk of please do not do a movement at high weight or rep count that you are not comfortable with (*cough* Olympic lifting *cough*) and don’t ever be afraid to substitute a movement for one that fits you and your goals.
the main problem of CrossFit done well as supplementary resistance training when compared to climbing is with climbing we already do this high variety and high intensity of whatever necessary to complete the movement, and adding this a supplementary training to build resiliency which mimics many of the worst training wise features of climbing is a poor choice. Having joined in for a few Crossfit and HIIT circuit style sessions... you do an enormous amount of work and seem to never become skilled enough at a few movements to truly progress them. Conditioning wise, especially if climbing is a two a week kind of sport, this is great, but most climbers need to be reducing the haphazard nature of off the wall training. As a schema for resistance training... I think there are better.
Volume and intensity management, tracking progression, being systematic, progressive overload, discipline. You learn all of these things training. Just climbing is too random. Sure, its fun, but you are missing a lot of valuable lessons in addition to strength gains. What if you had one hangboard session a week for 5 years rather than start doing it after 5 years? You would be miles ahead.
I guess it depends on your goals with the sport. Many people take on climbing just to have fun and get in some physical activity in the week. They still want to see progression of course but aren't necessarily interested in maximizing their gains if it means doing something that's less fun with their limited free time.
@@noodlesthe1st Sure, if you like climbing, dont like training and dont want to optimize anything, then you can do anything. But those people aren't asking for better ways to improve. If you are, then at least some percentage of you would like to optimize things. Also, people learn to like things. If you do strength exercises for long enough, you will probably find some enjoyment in them.
Most super strong climbers haven't had training, they get strong naturally, I have asked 8a climbers, what do you do to be strong? nothing just climb, and that's what Ondra and Magnus Mitbo have said in some interviews. Of course if you ask the Founder of Lattice Training this question he will say you need training, but climbing a lot will make you strong too.
Yeah and most of them live somewhere like Spain where you can climb outside 250 days a year. Not in Sheffield where its raining 60% of the time, the sport climbing starts at 7b and the rest of the climbing is runout gritstone trad. Tom randall has had to train crack climbing in a cellar his entire life because its wet outside and crack climbing doesn't exist indoors so his perspective will be different. Magnus also does a metric tonne of training he has hundreds of videos about pull ups
Magnus and Ondra trained extremely hard before hitting their highest grades though. Chris Sharma and Dave Graham are the only ones who've really hit high peaks without training, and they probably would've hit them sooner if they trained. Dave in particular takes a lot longer on problems compared to people who have trained a lot (eg 9 years on hypno compared to a dozen sessions for Woods and 4 sessions for Gelmanov) Training to get through plateaus is also much more necessary for people who start as adults, since if you start young you'll get much more adaptation from just climbing than you would otherwise.
I generally agree with Tom but i do think there is a population of climbers that are attempting to improve their grade on rock and going to great lengths to structure their training to do so when the thing that would most benefit them is to climb more on rock. Obviously for some there are genuine obstacles to get out on rock with real frequency but i have definitely known people that um haopy with their performance in rock but just arent willing to organise their life to get out on rock more often so dont make the technique gains in that mode of climbing
You want to get in shape? Just diet and go to the gym. Just keep going to the gym and keep working out. 🤦🏻♂️ How anyone could think “just climb more” is good advice is ridiculous. If you’re someone who is literally at day 1, sure. Just climbing will take you pretty far, but if you want to significantly reduce the trial and error and master it of course getting a training plan and a coach will give you lightspeed progress. Climbing has always been a very niche sport so it has a lot of old grumpy people who are like “in my day we didn’t have fancy gyms or boards or training walls, we just climbed hard boulders and routes outside blah blah” Yeah no shit, that’s because that’s all you had. We have modern training devices to shorten that learning curve now. It’s like with any sport. It’s the very reason world records are continually being broken, and stronger athletes are made each new generation. The science improves, we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and we improve on what we learned. If you wanted to get shredded would you just try it on your own or would you rather have a prep coach who has worked with hundreds of athletes?
Title is mega clickbait. When people tell beginners to "just climb" they're not saying that all off the wall training is bad. It's more that you get many people who are new to the sport who immediately want to do 5 sessions of max hangs a week.
He wouldnt make much money if it didn't work. Do basketball players "just play basketball?" Do wrestlers "just wrestle?" Do runners "just run?" Even in sports like Golf, where fitness isn't seemingly as critical to performance, many athletes do weight training, mobility work, and drills to focus on specific aspects of the game instead of just smashing out 18 holes every day. To argue that there's no reason for climbers to do the same seems pretty obviously wrong to me.
Nah, there's a reason why every gym has swathes of climbers stuck at v4/v5 plateau. I was stuck there too for about a year, started training, and went from v4 to v7 in four months. The only people that say "just climb" are people that haven't ever tried training and can't know if it isn't worth doing. Everyone that does try it always keeps doing it because it helps so much.
@@HenryFitBR No one is arguing that training is bad but I don't think in wrestling, basketball, or golf, any remotely good coach would have a beginner doing a load of weight training and mobility work before they have even learned the nuances of the sport.
@sirhenrystalwart8303 Training can definitely lead to injury too, but the type of training described in the video is MUCH more likely to prevent injury than cause it.
This is dangerous advice. The idea that these tools make you injury resistant is naive when applied to the broad, new climbing population. Unless you employ a very experience coach new climbers will 100% injure themselves. That's what happened to myself and basically everybody I knew when I started climbing. We all had finger injuries and elbow problem for the first 5 years. The reason for this is two fold: (1) almost nobody actually trains, in the sense of rigidly following a structured plan. They just go campus until something breaks. (2) Even if new climbers do following a structured plan, they have no idea how much to push it without breaking something. It takes time to learn to listen to you body and to learn how much you can take.
I think getting injured is a part of that process of learning to listen to your body and learning how much you can take. Gotta make mistakes and push too hard or under push to know what those feel like and what the consequences are. Rehab works amazingly well when you follow it, so injury (barring the catastrophic) is not a life sentence. Go out, learn what works for you, what doesn't, and if you get injured along the way, you'll have learned a great deal.
I started at 19 and by 27-28 I got up to a high level. 5.13. NIAD. Astroman. All by only climbing. I never trained. But by 29 I fell apart. 2 years of injuries. I wish I had trained to prevent injury. Tom is 100% correct. I'm 52 now and trying to tighten up the body so I can try hard again. Strength training is absolutely essential for me now. Esp shoulder, finger, and hamstring work.
I don't think people usually say "just climb" to people that have already been climbing for 2 years
I always understood "just climb" differently:
- just climb = just climb more: the key factor for beginners is how often they climb at all
- just climb = just do stuff on the wall: this can mean targeted drills
- just climb = just do a climbing session: this does not exclude warm-up or stretching, for example
- just climb = focus on the whole experience: this can mean to let go of researching climbing shoes or finding the best abs training and refocus on climbing as a whole
- just climb = just have fun: be more motivated by doing mainly those things that you actually like to do
I think there is a middle ground that both Tom and the "just climb" preachers actually mean when they think about a balanced training for beginners.
I also think for many climbing is not a sport it's a hobby. It's an excuse to move their body. It's a solution to wanting to exercise, but not wanting to exercise.
For them focusing on what is fun is the best part, and for a beginner that will translate into getting better as well. so Win win.
If someone is seriously trying to become a good climber in a sport sense, then Tom is absolutely correct.
Tom talked about injury prevention, but I agree with you that this can easily be achieved by just climbing too.
I always took the just climb motto for true beginners. You want people just starting out with the sport to have fun and they will see huge gains just by being up on the wall. Some beginners will see what they can achieve and believe that training to climb instead of climbing will show an advance. For example their fingers feel weak and so they train strength in fingers and expect to be able to complete that route they couldn't before. They fail to realize it's not the finger strength holding them back but the lack of climbing ability.
Yes, absolutely! Also to add, simple, repeatable movement patterns are fantastic to build proprioception and granular control of your body. People new to sports as a whole won't be able to follow a cue like retract your shoulder on the wall without first learning the feeling of the muscle involed in a simpler environment.
100% agree on getting climbers interested in progression and longevity in the sport to begin training as early as possible, and not thinking training means never climbing. Some of the best ways to introduce this foundation is for climbers to have a resistance circuit for getting warm before a session and sometimes as a cool down, modulating the session intensity as appropriate. Plus, getting away from the "just" in "just climb". Many of the best almost only climb, but they never "just" because the sessions are focused and progressing. The vast majority of my training a month ago was off the wall, the vast majority of my training for this cycle is on boards and select boulders, and I rarely "just climb" anymore because I can have an intention wandering into a session.
Do you train to climb, or climb to train?
I started climbing a year ago, at age 58.
Climbing is now the main workout in my overall fitness regime, but still just a part of what I do.
If I was younger and had thoughts of competing, advancing to much tougher grades, or to take on El Capitan, I would agree with Tom's perspective. For those who climb as part of a varied fitness regime or just for fun, climbing specific training makes less sense.
For me, climbing is the workout. I spend time in warm up and look for movements that will challenge me and strengthen certain body parts, but that is the workout.
Tom started by saying, "from my perspective..." and that is the point. What are Your goals? What is Your lifestyle? And what makes You happy?
imagine if a boxing coach advised you to just spar for 3 years before you started training! What Tom is saying is spot on here and applies to any other sport IMO
I’d love to hear thoughts about the weekend warrior.
Personally I work full time with a family to take care of so I get to climb one day a week (I try to get a lot of quality in) during the week I work out 2-3 times doing workouts geared to climbing plus cardio 3-5 times a week since I’m a heavier climber 210 pounds at around 13-14% body fat. Am I over doing it? I don’t see progress climbing but I barely feel like I am keeping my climbing fitness
I was in a similar ballpark weight wise to you when I started climbing (I'm 6'1", was 210lb) and I was into weight lifting for about 10 years before getting into climbing so my body type is generally pretty thicc for climbing (especially my legs). I felt like I've progressed in climbing consistently after I got a hangboard for my house and was doing some basic hangboard routines 2-3x per week in addition to 1-2 climbing days. All the weight lifting / other exercise doesn't really help with climbing performance if you're already pretty strong, so I view it more as balance / injury prevention (lots of shoulder bands, knees, stretching, antagonist stuff). Doing a ton of cardio can be a negative for climbing recovery as well, esp if it's intense or super long, like running more than 1-2x/wk, but if you're just walking or doing moderate bike rides (I bike commute everywhere 5-7 days / week) then it shouldn't matter too much. Ultimately though I still was stuck at 5.10 outside until I dropped down to like 180lb... then suddenly I was sending 5.11 outside (both sport and trad) and knocking on the door of 5.12. It's ultimately a strength to weight game, and you certainly can get stronger fingers to offset being heavier but at least for me it was way easier for me to lose weight, even just 10-20lb made an enormous difference.
Im 64 years old. Ive been climbing since I was 10 years old. In the 1980's I was putting up new routes up to French 8a. I climbing professionally in the alps for a time for a guide book company. I still climb almost every day. I had a serious dog attack on my right forearm 4 years ago. Snapped tendon and main nerve and removal of huge amounts of muscle. I can only climb at French 6b now if it requires technique not strength.
I have never trained a day in my life. Every single person I know who trains gets injured either during training or climbing at some point. I put it down to mental attitude. I climb for fun. So some days I climb very easy routes and some days I may push myself. I ride a bicycle to the crag and I always have a hike in. Often Im doing new routes so I physically have to garden the climb. All of this is a balanced work out (training).The guys who train, always train hard and always push the limits. They climb on routes by the road or on climbing walls. Their body and mind never gets to relax. If you look at social media climbing sites grade is everything and telling people and registering it is important. Its a disaster. I have friends who are my age and cant climb any more. Their joints are ruined from the stress they have placed on their body. Some have had repeated surgery on finger muscles and tendons.
A. Confirmation bias: You seem to have a predisposed negative image of what people who train are like since you apparently don't do it yourself, and thus you find areas in your life to confirm that belief. B. Training for climbing has HIGHLY evolved in the last 10 years alone. It is highly nuanced, and there are now proven resting and deload strategies involved. I wouldn't be surprised if "every single person" you knew over the years who trained did end up getting injured, but we now have resources and knowledge to mitigate that.
So a quick question, when he says the curve for average finger strength vs body weight is linear, what does he mean by that? Does he mean it's constant as in people who are heavier have equally proportionally stronger fingers? Or does he mean that the change is not equal but still proportional, as in for every kg of bodyweight someone gains they gain an average of 2kg maximum pulling force with their fingers? If it's the second one, what's the coefficient?
Put another way and perhaps more practically, do heavier climbers in a group tend to have disproportionately strong fingers, disproportionately weak fingers, or the same ratio of finger strength to their bodyweight as the entire group's average?
Listen again, he mentioned finger strength, body weight and climbing ability (grade) in the question but in the answer Tom is talking about only finger strength and climbing ability, meaning stronger fingers = higher grade climbed. I would expect that at a certain grade, heavier people would have stronger fingers relative to lighter people, but ultimately it's just enough to overcome the handicap of being heavier, and they don't specifically address this.
Climbing is all pull upper body, push lower body, and abs for core. (Not) strangely, there seem to be a lot of hunched, injured climbers, with bad backs. It's always been my view that you should be at the very least offsetting climbing with upper body push, lower body pull, and some lower back exercises just to balance out your frame. This was a great concise explanation of just that.
If you want to train for climbing, don't work on your abs, target the rest of your core instead.
@@dhyanpatel142 Yup, abs probably have nothing to do with lifting and placing feet effectively on overhangs.
@@ryenschimerman2127 True, it's more about posterior chain activation. That's the core @dhyanpatel142 is talking about. Get your hams, glutes, external rotators firing because they're the primary movers on overhangs. Abs are fine, but you only need to get your feet back up on the wall after they cut loose - a strong posterior chain is what prevents the feet from cutting unnecessarily in the first place.
I think the idea of "just climb" is to not worry about optimizing their performance or perfect their training as a new climber.
Just climbing a lot of variety and different styles will probably already overload your body. You can refine things as you get over the newbie gains in technique and strength
I also often see people that are quite fit from before, but doesn’t really train, try climbing harder than they can, and then they get hurt. I would argue that the training isn’t just to push grades but from keeping yourself from getting injuries. This goes especially out to those of us that started around 30.
Background : climbing for 15 years, training for 8 years, coaching a climbing course in a local club.
Yeah, but : define training. In a lot of people minds, training is everything that is not directly climbing. Which is far from the truth. Training is a process in which you design a protocol to adapt your body to better perform for a certain task, or an array of tasks. And this can be done by climbing.
The advice "just climb" is very, very, very sound, but it's also oversimplified. If you randomly go to the gym, climb what you feel like climbing for what duration you feel like, of course, your progression will be non efficient. To get better, in an efficient way, you need to design a protocole, a method, so that you make sure you hit the most useful spots. But you definetely can do that by climbing. For example, if you want to build stronger fingers, you might think adding one hanboarding session per week is the best option. From a time consumption point of view, it might be. But that's it. You would be way better bouldering hard boulders that revolves around finger strength for one hour, once per week. It checks all the boxes :
-you do get finger strength out of it
-it's way more fun than anything else, making it usually easier for people to follow so more durable
-you also work connected qualities to finger strength, and they are necessary to use finger strength in the first place (core, contact strength and pain management at a certain level, yeah, you read that right)
Those boxes makes it 100% applicable to climbing. Because it's climbing, duh ! There are downside, of course :
-it's usually more time consuming, depending on the facilities to which you have access
-there is a higher risk of injury to it if you don't think it really through (it's a bit easier to stick to the hanboarding routine exaclty, an it's harder to not try for the 5th time this hard boulder after 1h30 of training, when you're so close !), but there are ways to circumvent that.
From my experience, i would say that overall, for all of us amateurs (counting like, 8b routes and under, so probably 99% of climbers !), we are better off just climbing. But climb with a plan, for example cycles of hard bouldering, or cycles of pumpy routes, or weeks with sessions designated to target certain areas (monday : bouldering session, redpoint level for 1h30. Wednesday, redpoint- grade routes, 3 or 4 tries within 2h session. Saturday, all around bouldering session, flash level, 3 tries max. 3h. That's a pretty solid training week !)
Bouldering since 6 months and started Top roping a month ago. So I’m quite new to these specific sports.
Yet I can tell that I got most progression out of climbing different styles in different gyms rather then from just climbing/bouldering more.
I stand absolutely by what Tom said. Started climbing less than a year ago at the age of 45, and in just a couple of months have reached the limit of "just climb". All things considered, time I can spent just climbing, my skin regen, my tendons, my muscles. It is a careful balance, almost a dance.
Obviously, it would be dub to neglect your antagonist training but you absolutely have not reached your technical limits in climbing in just a few months. You have people like Dave Graham still seeing technical gains in their 40's let alone someone who has been climbing less than a year.
I've been climbing for six years on and off and it's only this year that I've really gotten into finger training I'm plateauing at v6 right now damn it feels hard to move beyond this grade my fingers are strong but they're never strong enough as we can all agree on that it's very difficult to structure training, work and leisure I just have to remember that persistence and being smart about training is key I'm sorry if this is a little off topic just ranting
Your fingers are probably strong enough for v6. Your fingers are probably strong enough for even harder grades. You should focus more on technique - strength will come, but it builds slowly. Get your technique down and you'll climb harder.
I've just starting climbing and I climb badly. So if I just climb then I'll probably continue to climb badly. I'm looking to improve my climbing so these resources are helpful for sure.
Can you explain what dou you mean by “I climb badly”?
The thing is 'just climb' also includes analysing your own performance and then improving technique
I’ve found the best way(s) to improve my own climbing is to be reflective after every attempt about what went wrong, try moves or problems a bunch of times using different positioning etc., and try to watch or even talk with climbers who climb well about how they approach various moves or problems.
depends on your personality, some people are able to improve optimally by just engaging with the sport out of love for movement. where others have to have a more focused approach if they want to get anywhere. depends on your goals with the sport as well.
I doubt there are many full time professional climbers that 'just engage with the sport' though. Additional training is a must these days if you want to go the distance. Sure you can get very far by just climbing but I wouldn't call it optimal progression. I was one of those 'just climb' types but I hit a ceiling at some point that was hard to break. In hindsight I had good fingers but a weak body and could've progressed further with extra workouts that did not include a climbing wall. If your goal is to just have fun then yes just going climbing is enough but I feel like that's a bit besides the point since we're listening to a training podcast.
I don't think anyone can improve optimally by just engaging with the sport. You'll always be able to address your weaknesses faster with focused training, and thus improve faster than you would have otherwise.
Though I do agree that some people won't enjoy that approach and don't need to do it
Tom is ace 😃💪
He's blatantly right, name one thing, not even a spot where doing it alot is better than training specifically for that activity and doing as often as possible....... I expedited my climbing skills by hang boarding and strength training almost immediately after starting climbing indoors. Everyone is amazed I can climb 12s after one year. Now I dooooo climb alot but I train specifically on strength some weeks and endurance other weeks. Just climbing a lot will make you better but not as fast. Just like basket all, soccer, video games, baseball, and basically all of hobbies..... if you train skills they will pay off... a brand new calisthenics bro will immediately climb better than someone who hasn't worked out at all...... because the calisthenics bro trained. Technique can be trained and I would argue it takes longer than strength buuuut training campusing, quiet feet, and dynamic movement will quicken your technique.. obviously...
I think the question was framed in a way that invites a non-nuanced answer for a very nuanced topic.
Is Lattice Training providing training to beginner Climbers with long term goals ?
I wish I could climb more, I can barely maintain climbing once a week because if I go more then once a week, I get tennis elbow or forearm tendinitis. I don't know how people say they climb like 5 days a week, are they just climbing easy climbs for them? I massage, stretch, do supination wrist exercises etc, it's like my forearm muscles are getting too big for the rest of my arms from climbing. Only started climbing 10 months ago.
I just ignore the elbow pain
You are probably overgripping. But yeah I am the same way. I climb about 90 minutes 2 days a week and that’s enough for me. Otherwise, tendonitis.
People have different goals and I think it’s funny how we can get blinders to how other people see the world. Not everybody wants to be a “pro climber”. Lots of folks do it because it’s fun. It gives you practical movement skills. It complements a healthy lifestyle.
I guess maybe I came to the wrong place, and the intended audience for this video is not me. While I do not care to be the best climber in the gym, I also do like to challenge myself and improve.
@@adamking6957 Yeah i only have a boulder gym, so im always try harding when i climb. Climbs that require a hard pull on my left arm or dyno flare up the worst, if i static climb everything its not too bad.
I had nasty tendonopathy in the elbow for about 4 years, at some points I had to ice it daily to keep the pain manageable. Only thing that got rid of it was doing bench for strength at the same intensity as pull, and I haven't had problems in almost a decade even though I'm doing more volume than ever.
Elbow problems can be caused by weaknesses in the shoulders, so you could start with a general strength protocol for upper body push and see if that starts helping it. Stretches and massages usually only help with symptoms and don't address the cause.
@@La0bouchere Thanks for your reply I will look into this. I saw athlene x recommends kettle bells swings as they stretch your forearms on the way up might be similar to why bench helps.
Having come back to climbing after a ten year hiatus (Navy + 3x cancer diagnosis), it’s a bit surprising to me that more, or most really, do not do CrossFit as their supplement. The whole meme of CrossFitters being heathens who only compare macros and CrossFit Total weights aside (f#*k those people anyway.), it really is incredibly beneficial. The methodology at it’s core of constantly varied, functional movements, performed at high intensity aligns with what Tom mentions; especially when it comes to volume. Very few if any other types of exercise match the volume in a daily workout programmed by your local box (gym and yes I hated myself for saying box instead). It’s infinitely scale and interchangeable. Seriously, I have continued to do CrossFit during each subsequent bone then muscle cancer diagnosis. If I can do it safely during that, any climber can get tons and tons of benefit from it.
I also want to add in an asterisk of please do not do a movement at high weight or rep count that you are not comfortable with (*cough* Olympic lifting *cough*) and don’t ever be afraid to substitute a movement for one that fits you and your goals.
the main problem of CrossFit done well as supplementary resistance training when compared to climbing is with climbing we already do this high variety and high intensity of whatever necessary to complete the movement, and adding this a supplementary training to build resiliency which mimics many of the worst training wise features of climbing is a poor choice. Having joined in for a few Crossfit and HIIT circuit style sessions... you do an enormous amount of work and seem to never become skilled enough at a few movements to truly progress them. Conditioning wise, especially if climbing is a two a week kind of sport, this is great, but most climbers need to be reducing the haphazard nature of off the wall training. As a schema for resistance training... I think there are better.
Volume and intensity management, tracking progression, being systematic, progressive overload, discipline.
You learn all of these things training. Just climbing is too random. Sure, its fun, but you are missing a lot of valuable lessons in addition to strength gains.
What if you had one hangboard session a week for 5 years rather than start doing it after 5 years? You would be miles ahead.
I guess it depends on your goals with the sport. Many people take on climbing just to have fun and get in some physical activity in the week. They still want to see progression of course but aren't necessarily interested in maximizing their gains if it means doing something that's less fun with their limited free time.
@@noodlesthe1st Sure, if you like climbing, dont like training and dont want to optimize anything, then you can do anything. But those people aren't asking for better ways to improve. If you are, then at least some percentage of you would like to optimize things. Also, people learn to like things. If you do strength exercises for long enough, you will probably find some enjoyment in them.
@@jiggyb2640 Sure. If you do not find enjoyment in training and pushing your limits, then don't do it.
Most super strong climbers haven't had training, they get strong naturally, I have asked 8a climbers, what do you do to be strong? nothing just climb, and that's what Ondra and Magnus Mitbo have said in some interviews. Of course if you ask the Founder of Lattice Training this question he will say you need training, but climbing a lot will make you strong too.
true but training can be understand as structure, what you choose can be climbing or something else
Yeah and most of them live somewhere like Spain where you can climb outside 250 days a year. Not in Sheffield where its raining 60% of the time, the sport climbing starts at 7b and the rest of the climbing is runout gritstone trad. Tom randall has had to train crack climbing in a cellar his entire life because its wet outside and crack climbing doesn't exist indoors so his perspective will be different. Magnus also does a metric tonne of training he has hundreds of videos about pull ups
@@Dom-fk3te you can climb a lot in the gym too, training can be useful but not always necessary for beginners
@@robertobreve8623 If you are the kind of person who naturally pushes yourself and works on your weaknessess then for sure do your thing
Magnus and Ondra trained extremely hard before hitting their highest grades though.
Chris Sharma and Dave Graham are the only ones who've really hit high peaks without training, and they probably would've hit them sooner if they trained. Dave in particular takes a lot longer on problems compared to people who have trained a lot (eg 9 years on hypno compared to a dozen sessions for Woods and 4 sessions for Gelmanov)
Training to get through plateaus is also much more necessary for people who start as adults, since if you start young you'll get much more adaptation from just climbing than you would otherwise.
I generally agree with Tom but i do think there is a population of climbers that are attempting to improve their grade on rock and going to great lengths to structure their training to do so when the thing that would most benefit them is to climb more on rock. Obviously for some there are genuine obstacles to get out on rock with real frequency but i have definitely known people that um haopy with their performance in rock but just arent willing to organise their life to get out on rock more often so dont make the technique gains in that mode of climbing
You are extreme right if you get stromger. 😂😅
I love sport not training only. 👍
i feel climbers should train once they hit V4-V5
You want to get in shape? Just diet and go to the gym. Just keep going to the gym and keep working out. 🤦🏻♂️
How anyone could think “just climb more” is good advice is ridiculous.
If you’re someone who is literally at day 1, sure. Just climbing will take you pretty far, but if you want to significantly reduce the trial and error and master it of course getting a training plan and a coach will give you lightspeed progress.
Climbing has always been a very niche sport so it has a lot of old grumpy people who are like “in my day we didn’t have fancy gyms or boards or training walls, we just climbed hard boulders and routes outside blah blah”
Yeah no shit, that’s because that’s all you had. We have modern training devices to shorten that learning curve now.
It’s like with any sport. It’s the very reason world records are continually being broken, and stronger athletes are made each new generation. The science improves, we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and we improve on what we learned.
If you wanted to get shredded would you just try it on your own or would you rather have a prep coach who has worked with hundreds of athletes?
Title is mega clickbait. When people tell beginners to "just climb" they're not saying that all off the wall training is bad. It's more that you get many people who are new to the sport who immediately want to do 5 sessions of max hangs a week.
the AI face tuning on the thumbnail is unsettling, not to mention unnecessary on Tom's beautiful face 🥺
Sounds about right coming from someone whose entire platform is built on over-coaching climbers.
Overcharging is right. Just jump on the wall people like Tom are just stuck in some sort of complex.
He wouldnt make much money if it didn't work.
Do basketball players "just play basketball?" Do wrestlers "just wrestle?" Do runners "just run?" Even in sports like Golf, where fitness isn't seemingly as critical to performance, many athletes do weight training, mobility work, and drills to focus on specific aspects of the game instead of just smashing out 18 holes every day. To argue that there's no reason for climbers to do the same seems pretty obviously wrong to me.
Nah, there's a reason why every gym has swathes of climbers stuck at v4/v5 plateau. I was stuck there too for about a year, started training, and went from v4 to v7 in four months.
The only people that say "just climb" are people that haven't ever tried training and can't know if it isn't worth doing. Everyone that does try it always keeps doing it because it helps so much.
Some people climb for fun not for grades, if grades come with it thats extra benefit.
@@HenryFitBR No one is arguing that training is bad but I don't think in wrestling, basketball, or golf, any remotely good coach would have a beginner doing a load of weight training and mobility work before they have even learned the nuances of the sport.
"Just climbing" is a really good way to injure yourself
So is training.
@sirhenrystalwart8303 Training can definitely lead to injury too, but the type of training described in the video is MUCH more likely to prevent injury than cause it.
This is dangerous advice. The idea that these tools make you injury resistant is naive when applied to the broad, new climbing population. Unless you employ a very experience coach new climbers will 100% injure themselves. That's what happened to myself and basically everybody I knew when I started climbing. We all had finger injuries and elbow problem for the first 5 years. The reason for this is two fold: (1) almost nobody actually trains, in the sense of rigidly following a structured plan. They just go campus until something breaks. (2) Even if new climbers do following a structured plan, they have no idea how much to push it without breaking something. It takes time to learn to listen to you body and to learn how much you can take.
I think getting injured is a part of that process of learning to listen to your body and learning how much you can take. Gotta make mistakes and push too hard or under push to know what those feel like and what the consequences are. Rehab works amazingly well when you follow it, so injury (barring the catastrophic) is not a life sentence. Go out, learn what works for you, what doesn't, and if you get injured along the way, you'll have learned a great deal.