The Making of a Rockprodigy

Hey guys,

Haven't posted for a while, yet read this article regarding climbing and specifically training for climbing yesterday and thought it echoed some great sentiments for gymnastic-style training:

http://www.rockclimbing.com/Articles/Training_and_Technique/The_Making_of_a_Rockprodigy__258.html

Some areas of overlap with gymnastic training include developing muscular strength alongside ligament strength:

"Furthermore, the supporting structure of the fingers (tendons and ligaments) take up to six years (not a typo) to respond to additional stress. That means, that if you have been climbing for six years, your ligaments may now just be starting to get stronger, whereas your forearm muscles respond in about two weeks. "

[No source cited for the 6 year figure, however.]

Still, what's incredible to me is a paragraph in the very beginning:

"Currently, climbing as a sport is in its infancy. There is a limited body of knowledge available to climbers, and most of what is available has merely been adapted from other, similar sports. Unfortunately, there isn’t another well-studied sport that is very similar to climbing. Many theories are taken from powerlifting, and some from middle-distance running."

My mind is blown! How can these guys (climbers) not be infesting gymnastics gyms like pests, soaking up as much training and knowledge as possible? The demands of bouldering/climbing seem so strikingly similar to some areas of gymnastics training!

Seems like a shame! (Also, for Coach Sommer, a great opportunity.)

regards,

jason

general consensus among the climbing community is "if you want to be a better climber, climb more"

many climbers i know are afraid of putting on extra useless muscle if they do any training outside of heavily specialised climbing training. Lots of hardcore climbers i know don't even train campusing.

I assume you read that old article from the Rockclimbing.com forums. At least that is where i read it years ago. Do a search for gymnastics on those forums and you will see a whole bunch of different threads on gymnastics as well as varying opinions. Some posts and threads are by John Gill - the guy who invented bouldering and was an ex gymnast.

Gymnastics is great, certainly has carryover to climbing - but will it make you a substantially better climber? not really, at least only in the early stages. Your better of just bouldering in terms of time investments involved. My two mates that i got into climbing were both ex gymnasts. Certainly they were beasts at the beginner level just cause they were so strong but they lacked finger strength and technique and a 50 year old woman at the gym could outclimb both of them very easily even after they had been training for 12 months. Sometimes having too much strength actually retards the speed you develop technique.

When i started climbing I weighed 60kg and could do 10 pull ups with 35kg around my waist. After two years of climbing i weighed 64kgs (the extra 4kg all muscle) and i could barely do 10 bodyweight pull ups. But my climbing ability was very good.

Climbing is just one of those things where you'd be surprised how little other strength training transfers over and how much is related to technique and finger strength or contact strength. You don't really develop that much finger strength as a gymnast from what i can see - at least nowhere near the amounts climbers will develop. As to other strength, well you develop the muscle you need on the rock or the wall. It's very rare to not be able to do a route simply because you lacked enough raw strength at a critical moment. At least not once you have climbed for a couple of years.

It doesn't have to be either / or though, may as well climb and potter along with some SSC static positions as well. But gymnastic type training certainly is in no way neccessary to become an elite climber. It's fun though! and its actually what got me into gymnastics to begin with.

"Newguy" and Tim,

If I read your posts right, one of my big takeaways, at least related to a consuming and passion-inspiring activity like climbing, is that its practitioners are also often subject to typical subculture myopia.

It always seems like there's a structural tunnel vision that arises from an all-consuming lifestyle activity like climbing, and also snowboarding, skateboarding, BMX, surfing, motocross. Part of that focus arises from the powerful drive to perform your chosen sport frequently, for a long time, and to the exclusion of all else.

While it's most definitely true that to be a good climber you have to climb --- not least because your fingers and hands must get stronger --- but the drawback to this myopia is that it blurs out any peripheral activities that could not only prevent or reduce injuries, but could actually increase strength, performance, power in that activity.

My original thought that structured gymnastic training would greatly benefit climbers was not based merely or solely on Coach Sommer's static positions (L-sit, straddle, levers, planche); rather, I envisioned the benefit coming from a systematic method of developing a structured and balanced shoulder girdle, emphasis on joint pre-hab as well as on body awareness and strength through a complete range of arm and shoulder joint angles, and on dynamic and active hip and hamstring flexibility, to name a few.

Of course I expect climbers to demonstrate exceptional weighted pulling abilities as a byproduct of their chosen endeavor.

However, I would be more curious as to number of full-ROM HSPUs as well as planche holds (or reps for push-ups) that climbers can display.

What's important and relevant is that poor overhead pressing strength reciprocally inhibits the strength of your upper body to pull when in a hanging position. Gymnastics seems one of the other sports that's developed training methods for addressing this in a way that would have the strongest carryover to climbing.

I saw a Tweet from Twight at Gym Jones that seemed relevant: "If you're strong enough to play the sport and more strength work won't improve performance call it 'good enough' and focus on the weak links."

I also occasionally look at Shaul's Mountain Athlete site; would be curious if any climber's have followed his methodology and to what success.

best,

jason

Perhaps we are misunderstanding one another. In my opinion all climbers need to do prehab / rehab, mobility ect kind of work off the wall or rock.

If you don't sooner or later you will get injured. I worked in an Indoor climbing gym for 4 years and the list of walking wounded was phenomenal. Fingers, shoulders were most common areas of injury but also areas like hips, biceps, forearm, lower back and sometimes knee injuries. I think you see less injury in people who learn outdoors primarily. People tend to push themselves harder indoors because it feels safer maybe.

I myself did my left rotator cuff when a hold broke off in an indoor gym when i was coming over the lip and all my weight was on it at a compromised position.

You also see the 'climbers hunch' posture pretty often too where the pec minor gets super tight and draws the shoudlers forward and you walk around like an apeman. Boulderers get this a lot.

So no one is disagreeing with you regarding specific training to keep the body a strong functional whole. Outside of prehab / rehab if you look at general crosstraining well that probably won't hurt you either in terms of hiking approaches and such its nice to have some extra cardio.

You will also notice i said these other other activities won't hurt your climbing. They won't and if they are fun and you enjoy doing them then go for it.

my comments earlier are in response to the idea that in order to climb better you need some specific off the wall / rock training in order to succeed. Sure you need prehab and to stretch and those things, but you don't need anything else unless you enjoy them doing them.

Some climbers do a lot of the off the wall training. Some do none. There are many examples of each different approach succeeding. Also you have to realise 'just climb' isn't the same idea as just getting on a rockface and that's it. There are many many sport specific training methods for training for climbing - While Climbing. You can do all your training on the wall or rockface by working moves, positions, statics, negatives, transitions, technique, strength, endurance explosiveness ect. ect. Personally i really like the book 'The Self Coached Climber' for this very reason.

So if you want to do other stuff all power to you. it's fun, and i say always do what's fun. But you don't have to do it unless you want to. Simply climbing and training for climbing systematically on the wall or rock and then doing prehab and strengthening the muscles climbing doesn't work enough is all you really need to do. And you don't need gymnastics for that, just some dumbbells.

You mention being interested in how many HSPU's a climber could do and inhibition of their strength. Aside from injury prevention i don't think its a useful question in my humble opinion. Climbers generally have an excess of pulling power. They have more pulling strength than they will ever need already. Even if that strength is in some way limited because their pressing strength may be weak its not a problem that will ever manifest as an issue in actual climbing (aside from injury prevention). You already have enough pulling strength, the idea is not to be strong for strong's sake, but to be strong enough to do what you want to do - in this case climb or haul yourself up a steep overhang or whatever your type of climbing might be.

But - if you like it do it. There are many paths to excellence, my post is simply responding to your question about why climbers are not flocking to gymnastics. They did, they tried it, they still tool around with it, but for the most part there are more sport specific training methods that tend to give quicker results.