The Brand New Climber’s Training Primer

or “How to Climb Like CRAP”

-by straightCrimpin

So you’ve started climbing and it’s awesome, it makes you feel awesome, it makes your friends look
awesome, the staff was awesome, and the squishy floor was awesome. Climbing is awesome! You’ve
seen those awesome looking guys in the cave, with their chiseled backs, bulging biceps, and forearms
bigger than your thigh. Or maybe you’ve seen the girls with their lean frames, flat stomachs, powerful
backs, and strong arms, and you’ve thought to yourself “I want to be like that!”
Maybe instead you spent the day on a problem that was hard, and you couldn’t get to the top, but you
kept at it, you figured out a new way to twist your body and it worked, and suddenly you were at the
top and you wanted nothing more than to find the next challenge, something harder, but you realized
you were totally exhausted and wished you weren’t. You see the regulars and you want to know how
they got so good, but you have no idea where to begin. Have no fear, we’ll hold your hand through the
beginning and show you how you can go from Brand New Climber (BNC) to Crusher of Rock And Plastic
(CRAP).

The Terminology

The first step on the path from BNC to CRAP is to learn your terminology. Just what the hell is a “drop-
knee”, or a “back-flag”? What’s the deal with all these French words like “mono”, or “Gaston”, or
Spanish words like “Hueco”, and “Venga” (seriously, that dude has been yelling “Venga” at us for over
an hour and we have no idea who he is)? What does it mean to “heel-hook”, and what on earth is a
“climbing shoe” (wait, you might actually know that last one)? Don’t worry BNC, the CRAP climbers are
here to help!

This first link isn’t the most comprehensive, but it is short enough, and it has cute little MS-Paint
drawings of people climbing, so we had to include it, for a real Glossary of climbing terms, check out this
link instead. You’ll probably be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of words we’ve co-opted and
bastardized…or impressed, hopefully impressed. Maybe bookmark this one and save it for later.

Technique

Okay, now that you know how to speak like CRAP we need to teach you to move like CRAP. In our
opinion, the ultimate guide to moving like CRAP is Neil Gresham’s Masterclass DVD. If you really are in
this for the long haul, and enjoy fun ‘90s British climbing movies, we highly suggest picking up this DVD.

In the interest of getting you started quickly though (shipping from the UK isn’t quite the lengthy
process it was when the Mayflower sailed, but it’ll still take at least a few days), we’ll include a few
articles that will get you moving like CRAP in no time! This cool website has some great videos to show
you basic moves, and intermediate moves you should know. Here are some more advanced techniques
for when you’ve mastered the basics.

Getting Started with Training

Now that we’ve learned how to talk CRAP, and how to climb like CRAP, we need to learn how to train
like CRAP. As you may have seen by now, this article isn’t so much of an excuse for us to talk at you so
much as it is an excuse for us to say “crap” as much as we can while providing you with a bunch of links
to great articles and videos that have been written by other CRAP climbers. Having said that, the best
definition we can find of climbing training is buried inside one of the greatest climbing training articles
ever written, and it’s quite long, so we won’t link it here (don’t worry, we’ll link to it later). Instead we’ll
use the copy and paste function to just dump out this paragraph from Mike Anderson’s 2006
article/essay “The Making of a Rockprodigy”.

“So what is training anyway? I don’t care what the dictionary says, to me, climbing training is “a
systematic, disciplined approach to improve climbing performance.” I hear a lot of climbers say they are
“training”, but if I probe them about the specifics, there aren’t any. They just “climb” or “boulder” every
other day, or when they have time. That is not training. Training is a pre-meditated routine that is planned
intelligently with the hope of attaining some tangible goal. It should be designed deliberately to transform
your body towards what ever end you have in mind, then it should draw from the body of knowledge
available by using specific exercises to create the gains that are desired.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves (and we had no intention to, so you’re really quite lucky that
paragraph existed)! In case there’s any confusion about what training is we’ll let Kris Hampton, CRAP
climber out at the Red River Gorge, tell you what training is not.

Why Should You Train?

Now, we’re sure this won’t apply to you, you’re here to get stronger and better after all, but just in case
you’re not sure if training is right for you or now, we’ll let one of the Anderson Brothers (we can’t
actually tell which one in this case because they’re twins and nobody can tell twins apart, I mean they’re
basically just the same person right?…Oh and there’s no signature on the post) tell you why you should
be training. Bear in mind that, while the Anderson brothers seem to be advocates for training from the
beginning of your climbing career, not all climbing trainers are. Some, like Kris Hampton, say you should
be focusing on climbing outside and building up experience for a while. Both arguments have merit, and
they’re not entirely contradictory either. Decide for yourself whether or not training for climbing is for
you (of course it is, that’s why you’re here right?)

Mental Training

Alright we’ve gotta put the brakes on for a second, we’ve been spending all this time talking about
training and when the right time to start is without pointing out that we’re talking about physical
training. We’ve talked about improving technique, but we haven’t talked about mental training yet. The
three pillars of climbing are technique, physical capability, and mental fortitude. If you’re not strong in
all three then you are not reaching your full potential and you have room to improve. Mental fortitude is
a huge topic and includes everything from fear of falling, to the ability to get in ‘the zone’ on command.
To improve your mental game I would highly recommend two books, the first is “Vertical Mind”, by Don
McGrath, Ph.D. and Jeff Ellison Ph.D. and the second is “The Rock Warriors Way”, by Arno Ilgner. There
is also a multitude of articles to dive into at the knowledge base over on Eric Horst’s website
www.trainingforclimbing.com.

Physical Training

Okay, on to physical capability training. At its core, climbing is a fight with gravity. Gravity tries to pull us
down, and we try to use our muscles, our skills, our wits, and other crap to move up anyway. And since
we deal with gravity, our strength-to-weight ratio is of supreme importance. Climbers want to maximize
lean muscle in certain key muscle groups, limit muscle in less essential muscle groups, and minimize
body-fat all over (the CRAPpiest climbers usually look like Greek gods and goddesses). We also want
tendons of steel but we’ll have to wait for science to catch up on that one. The best way to minimize
body fat is to diet, and the best way to build strength is to lift weights and do climbing specific exercises.
You can check out Aicacia Young’s website www.climbhealthy.com for some climbing specific nutrition
advice, as well as this two part article on strength training for climbing by Steve Bechtel of
www.climbstrong.com.

The most important part about strength training for climbing is knowing which exercises are useful, and
which are not, as well as knowing what rep and set protocols we should be using and why. These are far
more in depth topics, many books have been written about them, and we’re not going to delve into that
here. If you want more information look through the rest of the free articles one climbstrong.com as
well as this post by Mark Anderson (the other half of the Anderson brother duo) with a great list of
strength exercises you can be doing to aid your rock climbing. There are plenty more resources out
there, so look for them.

Next up is periodization. You’ll see this term a lot when people are discussing climbing training and if
you want to be the next, great, piece of CRAP, it would benefit you to know what they mean.
Periodization is simply a way of breaking your climbing training into a few basic categories, and cycling
through them in one way or another. The basic categories are:
 Base Fitness, or Endurance
 Strength
 Power, sometimes combined with Strength
 Strength-Endurance, often called Power-Endurance
 Stamina, or all-day-endurance
If you want to learn all about linear periodization and how to apply it to climbing training, I would highly
recommend you check out “The Rock Climbers Training Manual” by Mark and Mike Anderson, as well as
the original “The Making of a Rockprodigy” essay.

Note that linear periodization is not the only way of periodizing your climbing training, many coaches
recommend non-linear periodization where everything is trained continuously, with emphasis on
different elements on different days, while some other trainers recommend block periodization. They all
work, and people use different ones for a variety of reasons I won’t get into here. It’s important to learn
about all of them and decide for yourself which you like best.

Now that you have an idea of what periodization is we’ll visit the different physical training categories
and give you information on each of them.

Base Fitness-

When most people talk about base fitness, they’re talking about ARCing. However base fitness can
refer to general non-climbing fitness as well, programs like “Insanity” or “P90X” can help build your
base-fitness, although you’ll note that most CRAP climbers don’t do either of those. Those types of
programs may be beneficial if you’re in very bad shape, but for most climbers ARCing will be
enough. ARCing is not for everybody, as Kris Hampton explains here, and you should know WHY
you’re ARCing before just doing it.
Strength-

Strength training is the phase where we build our muscles up, without necessarily conditioning them
for climbing, and is the phase where most people do their hangboard training, as hangboarding is
essentially just strength training for our fingers. Apart from hangboarding this is the phase where we
do all the strength exercises we talked about earlier to build up our back, biceps, lats, shoulders,
core, etc. Since we already discussed that kind of training earlier though, we’re mostly going to talk
about hangboarding here. So what the CRAP (see what I did there?) is a hangboard? It’s exactly what
it sounds like, a board (generally a piece of plastic or wood) that you hang off of to build up your
finger strength. Hangboard workouts generally break down into two categories, repeaters, and max-
hangs (example videos). Most max hang workouts are based on a research paper published by Eva
Lopez, showing that her method was more effective than others. So far this is the only study of its
kind, so while her results are interesting the jury is still out as to whether or not it’s the best method
for increasing finger strength. Here’s a review of her paper if you don’t want to read the whole
thing.
Repeater workouts have been around for a long time and there are plenty of advocates including
the Anderson brothers, Dan Mirsky, Ryan Palo, and Eric Horst. Some trainers think the best thing to
do is switch between the two types of hangboard workouts periodically, while some advocate
instead for one-arm-hangs (these are damn hard, you’re a beginner, you shouldn’t bother, just be
aware that they exist).
One last thing needs to be said here about hangboards. These are generally not tools for beginners.
It’s very easy to injure yourself, so if you choose to use one, make sure you know exactly what
you’re doing, make sure you’re resting properly, and for God’s sake use a pulley system.

Power -

When it comes to power bouldering is king. The short, intense, nature of bouldering often requires
powerful moves at the limit of your capabilities and can help you improve your power drastically.
Mark Anderson discusses how to use bouldering as power training here. Apart from bouldering, the
ultimate tool is the campus board. Campus boards, however, can be quite dangerous and are not
recommended for beginners. They’re just too injurious and not very sport specific. The material
provided here and here and here is for reference to help you learn about them so that one day you
can utilize them safely. There are no shortcuts to becoming a CRAP climber.

Strength-Endurance-

Strength endurance, often incorrectly called power endurance in the climbing world, is essentially
the ability to perform difficult moves, close to your limit, for a fairly long time (10-20 moves). For
most climbers strength endurance means 4x4’s or circuits. Strength endurance is essential for sport
climbing and useful on longer boulder problems if you find yourself pumping out towards the end.
Unlike strength or power, strength endurance is not a persistent quality. You’ll improve by training
it, but you will quickly lose it afterwards. Fortunately strength endurance is easy to build back up
and a well-trained CRAPper can build to peak strength endurance in as little as three weeks.

Stamina –
 Stamina is your work capacity, or the ability to continue climbing all day at a high level. This is useful
for crag days, as well as climbing trips, or climbing competitions, all of which tend to require a
moderate to high level of climbing for long periods of time with light rest in between climbing bouts.
Stamina is often trained using pyramids, or volume bouldering, where a high number of sub-
maximal boulder problems are climbed in a day, sometimes called “climbing for points”.

Injury Prevention

Injury Prevention should be of supreme importance when one considers climbing training. Elbow
injuries, shoulder injuries, wrist injuries, and finger injuries are all common amongst climbers, and any
aspiring CRAPper should educate themselves on how these injuries develop, and how to prevent them.
Two of the best resources out there are “Make or Break” by Dave MacLeod, and “Climbing Injuries
Solved” by Dr. Lisa Erikson. Learn how to treat your body right or watch it go to crap!

Sample Schedules

One thing we haven’t included so far is sample schedules. We saved this for last purposely because if
we’d just given them to you in the beginning of the article you may have been tempted to blindly follow
them and end up as a bad climber instead of a CRAP climber, or worse, an injured climber. Hopefully
now that you have some context you’ll have a better idea of what you’re up against if you go with
something similar to Steve Maisch’s workout structure, or the basic Rockprodigy plan, or something
similar.

Epilogue

I bet you thought only books had epilogues huh? Well, this is the age of the internet, where anyone can
write whatever they want and no one can say anything about it! So this article has an epilogue. While
we’re on the topic of crap people put on the internet, we really should point out that there is a lot of
crap about climbing on the internet, when what we’re concerned with is articles about climbing, on the
internet, written by CRAP (I think that’s right). It can be hard to know which crap is written by CRAP, and
which crap is just crap. We’ve covered the basics here, but if you’re going to continue your education
you’ll need to know who to trust, and where to get your resources. For that reason we’ve included a list
of some of the CRAPpiest climbing trainers and resources out there (good thing this is the end of the
article, this CRAP joke is getting old). Enjoy!

 “9 out of 10 Climbers Make the Same Mistakes” – Book by Dave MacLeod

 Online Climbing Coach – Dave MacLeod’s coaching website
 “Training Manual for Competition Climbers” – Document by Mike Doyle
 Climbing & Training – Will Anglin’s training blog
 Power Company Climbing – Kris Hampton’s training website
 Eva Lopez – Spanish Climbing Coach and Trainer
 Habit Climbing Training Center - Articles on Climbing Training
 Rock Climbers Training Manual book and website – by Mike and Mark Anderson
 r/climbharder – Reddit climbing training community
 Alli Rainey – Climbing coach
 Steve Maisch Training – Steve Maisch’s training website
 Climb Strong – Steve Bechtel training site
 Nicros Training Center – Eric Horst training articles
 Training For Climbing – Eric Horst training website
 Self-Coached Climber – Climbing training book by Dan Hague
 Training Beta – Training Articles from around the web, and athlete/trainer podcasts in one place