Gimme Kraft 'review'

I'm not a trainer and don't think I'm qualified to provide a real review of Gimme Kraft, but did spend some cash to buy the book and will describe it's contents and offer my opinion for what it's worth.

The book is written by Alex Megos' trainers so they speak with some authority.

It is small. Approximately 6 by 8 inches. Written in German with an English translation side by side or nearby. The English can be idiosyncratic, but I had no trouble understanding what they wanted to say. 224 pages long, although about half the pages are pictures of the exercises or taken up with translated passages. The photos are mostly black and white and illustrate the exercises well.

There is a brief (6 page) intro on how to train. This is supplemented by an online pdf which adds another 9 pages or so of information on muscle and training physiology. Unfortunately, even with the supplement, I think it would require substantially more knowledge to successfully develop a training plan incorporating the exercises in the book.

The main effect of the exercises appears to be developing general strength in the shoulders and core. This seems like a worthwhile goal, but is not necessarily the approach taken by everyone. There is almost nothing on improving specific finger strength.

The bulk of the book is made of of illustrated exercises divided into 7 sections. Each section begins with a very brief description of the apparatus and its uses.

Section 1 (30 pages, about 14 exercises) shows exercises for indoor bouldering. I believe these are mostly technique exercises rather than strength or power exercises, but the text does not make this distinction clear.

Section 2 (20 pages, 11 exercises) is for the pull-up bar. The exercises are a mix, to train shoulder and core.

Section 3 (18 pages, 8 exercises) is for the gymnastics rings. Mostly upper body but some core work.

Section 4 (24 pages, 11 exercises) is for the campus board. It includes one page on hang board training utilizing the campus board. I believe this is the only mention of specific finger training.

Section 5 (10 pages, 5 exercises) is for the pegboard. This will be fairly unfamiliar to many US climbers and looks like a lot of fun. The exercises are pretty self-evident however.

Section 6 (16 pages, 7 exercises) is for the 'sling trainer' which looks a lot like a TRX to me. I'm not familiar with either, so I may be wrong about this. These exercises stress the core and whole body.

Section 7 (20 pages, 11 exercises) is for parallel bars and various floor exercises, again stressing upper body and core. Mostly push-up and dip variations.

Scattered through the book are 'Pro tips' which seem to consist of a picture of a strong climber with a brief "inspiring" quote along the lines of "Motivation is the key!" No doubt someone will find merit in the tips, but they are altogether too condensed.

The included DVD shows demonstrations of all the exercises, which were well done and helpful if you couldn't figure out the written description. It also includes an interview with Wolfgang Gullich's trainer and some footage of Gullich training to perform one finger pull-ups. Both the interview and the training footage are entertaining, but don't expect to get any useful training tips from them. I believe the DVD is PAL format, but it played readily on my Mac.

My primary criticism of the book is the lack of adequate information to enable most people to be able to develop a worthwhile training plan from the many included exercises. Furthermore, inclusion of realistic progressions to work up to various exercises would benefit the book tremendously.

Although few of these exercises are new, if you would like a good collection of upper body and core exercises, then this book will be useful for you. I believe Eric Horst is importing the book and it can be ordered at gimmekraft.us/buy.html
About $57 including shipping.

An alternative to consider is 'Overcoming Gravity' which is quite good at outlining the rationale of training general upper body fitness. eatmoveimprove.com

Thanks for the review Mark! Any interesting tidbits from the campus chapter?

thanks for the great summary of the book.
It seems like my one fear about the book was true, lack of a clear plan or methodology for putting together a plan.

I ordered it as well and it should arrive tomorrow. I'll post here if I have any thoughts to add.

Does the book discuss campus board specifications? IE, rung spacing, rung size, board angle? I've never been able to find any reliable specs on the original campus board.

Mono- I'm working tonight and this weekend- will take a look and answer your campus questions if I get a chance, otherwise Monday.

Here's the url for another Gimme Kraft review, with a response from author Patrick Matros himself. threerockbooks.com/index.ph…

I wonder if he knows the dimensions of the original Campus gym board.

Monomaniac wrote:Does the book discuss campus board specifications? IE, rung spacing, rung size, board angle? I've never been able to find any reliable specs on the original campus board.

It neither includes a manual on how to build a campus board nor does it provide the exact specs of the original board.
It does discuss rung sizes and various grip holds. It also shows many exercises.

I think the book is awesome because it simply shows you great exercises. It doesn´t spoon feed you how to write a training plan. Just do some reading on periodization or search the interwebs for that.

Will Anglin wrote:The rungs and slopers at ET Golden are @8.5in, which is @21.5cm.

Have you measured this since the rungs were installed? I measured the distance between Rung 1 and Rung 5.5 at 105cm. That averages out to 10.5cm spacing per rung, or 21 cm between numbered rungs. There was a fair bit of variation though, so maybe some of the rungs are spaced at 21.5cm. 1cm per numbered rung means Rung #9 is 8cm lower than it "should" be. That's a huge difference, almost a 'half-rung'.

It's really hard to get rungs spaced exactly right. If you install one rung, and then measure off of that rung to locate the next rung and so on, you will introduce tiny errors that get magnified over the course of installation. After installing 19 or 20 rungs this way, an almost imperceptible error of 1 mm becomes 2cm. The way to go is to draw all the lines before installing anything, always measuring off the line for rung one. That way if one rung is misplaced, it doesn't affect any of the other rungs.

If you ever consider making some tweaks in the future, I'd be really stoked to see rungs spaced at exactly 11cm. Probably doesn't matter to most people, but it matters a lot to someone like me. I realize I'm in the very tiny minority though.

OK, I'm looking at GK now.

It does not say anything about rung spacing or board angle. It outlines three rung sizes- small, 2 cm; medium, 3 cm; jug, 5 cm.
It suggests three grip modes- four finger half crimp, 3 finger open hand "drag", and jug hold. I don't have time to review the DVD right now, so can only go by the somewhat confusing written descriptions.
There are appropriate warnings about injuries and overuse.

The same exercises are described with and without feet on.

All the campus exercises are extremely well known except-
Crossovers- basically normal campusing but cross the upper hand over the lower hand with each movement and
Campus bouldering- create your own 'bouldering' route by mixing ladders, crossovers, doubles, down campusing, etc. Supposed to have been Gullich's favorite exercise.

Moritz B. wrote: I think the book is awesome because it simply shows you great exercises. It doesn´t spoon feed you how to write a training plan. Just do some reading on periodization or search the interwebs for that.

I agree it's a good book, although whether at $50 it's good value for most climbers they will need to decide for themselves.

I disagree about the training plans. Matros and Korb have had some great results. I believe it would be extremely useful to understand their training strategy and how best to employ it. This is the missing ingredient.

They gave it. Beginning of the book. Introduction to effective climbing training. Much like Dave MacLeod, they advocate bouldering as the lynch pin.

Mark E Dixon wrote:OK, I'm looking at GK now. It does not say anything about rung spacing or board angle. It outlines three rung sizes- small, 2 cm; medium, 3 cm; jug, 5 cm.

That's interesting. Moffatt says this in Revelations regarding rung depth (note he is referring to the actual Campus Board in Nurnberg):

"I took off some of the two-centimeter holds, as there were too many of them, and put on a series of large, but very sloping holds, running up the left-hand side of the board. Up the right-hand side I put a ladder of small holds, perhaps 15 milimeters deep, but rounded-off."

Based on that I had assumed the original Campus Board had 1.5cm deep rungs (quite a bit shallower than small Metolius rungs, which are ~18-19mm).

Will Anglin wrote: I hadn't measured after the fact. I used a block of wood to space all of the rungs. I just checked out your blog though and realized I hadn't compensated for the variation in the beveled edges on the positive side of the rungs. I got a laser level to align the slopers so hopefully the errors on them are more minute. I'll go back and redo the campus rungs with the laser to get them more exact. When I do I will use 11mm spacing. I might not get to it for a while though. I have a list of other projects I have to finish first. I really appreciate your feedback on then training area. I put up hangers for pulleys on the hang board station. We have a pulley system that people can check out at the front desk, I am working for signage regarding that right now. I also ordered a weight rack, a selection of weights and a weight belt that will go up in the training area as well. That stuff should have shipped this morning and should be here soon.

Right on man! That all sounds really sweet. Make sure you double-check my measurements though. I wasn't able to reach the top of the board because my tape measure was too flimsy, that's why I measured from rung 5.5. I'm super impressed by how repsonsive you guys are. You go way out of your way to listen and respond to your customers, and that is extremely rare.

Will Anglin wrote:The Moon "School Room" used to have that information somewhere. I believe the standard spacing is 22cm for single rungs. Which is only really important if you are trying to achieve benchmarks like 1-5-9, or compare yourself to past and present crushers who are on a standardized board. For training, the more rungs the better, but you have to leave space for your fingers to go and not wreck yourself on double-clutches.

The moon specs are no longer up, however, this article at upskill references and summarizes the mooon specs.
upskillclimbing.com/2008/10…

I have plans to build a board to these specs and place un numbered rungs at the half distances because the board I currently train on lacks the half rungs and I've reached a plateau where reaching 4 is easy but reaching 5 is not even remotely possible.

I just got the Kraft book Saturday and so far I think it looks awesome. I've only skimmed it but I will say that at least the boulder wall exercises seem beneficial for things other than just sheer power. A lot of exercises to help build cross body tension and foot work precision. I'm a fan.

So now that I've had the Kraft book for a bit I thought I'd share my initial thoughts.

The workout descriptions are nice and the photos are really helpful. It's great that they offer a way to make some of the movements more difficult. I haven't had a chance to check out the DVD because I don't have a computer with a disc drive.

The one thing I find lacking is the "Pro tip" things. For the most part there is nothing beneficial in them and they don't add anything of value to the book. In fact, some of them are just obnoxious.

Coming back from a forced 5 month rest last year due to injury, the one part of my climbing that I've felt has been super slow to come back is my core strength and body tension. I feel strong and healthy but there are moves that I can't do right now that I could do this time last year and I can feel that it is 100% due to core weakness.

With that in mind when going throughout the Kraft book, I was really excited to see that the majority of the exercises aren't simple one arm pull-up and campus board routines, which s what I expected from a book all about "power". The majority of the workouts are body tension and trunk strengthening. I think they do the book a disservice by billing it as being all about power.

I've been doing all of the "Sling Trainer" exercises after climbing sessions and can tell you one thing, they are very difficult and I can feel it in my core the next day. I'm confident that if I keep this up my core weakness will be remedied in no time.

It's also really really cheap to build a sling trainer at home. I think mine cost a total of 20 bucks.

I'm going to be installing a set of rings and a set of parallettes next week so I'll be able to further explore the exercises in the book.

All in all, I'm really happy with my purchase. All of these workouts are freely available online if you want to dig around of course. However, having it condensed into one place by people specifically targeting climbing makes this an excellent reference piece. It would be spectacular to see a companion book that discusses things like how to actually construct a training plan using the workouts in the book, but simply using them to finish off a climbing session feels like a great place to start.

I reviewed the book and interviewed the author here:

theboulderingbook.com/2013/…

How much of the book focuses on strength/physical conditioning for climbing and how much is about various skill-oriented drills?

Marek Sapkovski wrote:How much of the book focuses on strength/physical conditioning for climbing and how much is about various skill-oriented drills?

I don't think any of the book would really be described as "skills-oriented". The closest thing to that would be bouldering wall section which is 1/7th of the book. However, event that is more targeted towards body tension, core strength, and full body power rather than skills and technique.

I wanted to post a short follow-up.
I recently picked up a set of wooden gymnastics rings (if you're looking for a set I highly recommend these from Fringe

After installing my rings I've put them to use for three sessions or so. My experience with the rings section of the book has been much like my experience with every other exercise, AWESOME! The ring workouts are surprisingly difficult. The stability requirements to perform most of these simple task is mind blowing. The first exercise has you place your feet on a physic ball and your hands in the rings in a pushup position. They then say to have a partner try to destabilize you by subtly pushing you in different directions. The first session, I didn't even need anyone to try and destabilize me. Simply holding the pushup position was difficult enough.

After a session on the rings, I am sore the next day in very weird places which, to me, is an indicator of it helping build stabilizer muscles.

I'm growing ever more impressed with this book and I have noticed a remarkable difference in my contact strength at the crag. I've only recently been getting back into sport climbing regularly after focusing on bouldering last year so right now I'm mostly doing lots of high mileage days at the crag and not much projecting. Last weekend I did some laps on a route that has always been hard for me with a crux move that I used to have to do dynamically and only hit a low percentage of the time. I was able to stick the crux statically without problem and when I came down my belayer was like "I've never seen you climb that so well, your training is clearly paying off". The only thing that has changed is adding in the Kraft workouts twice a week so I honestly believe I have it to thank.

I'm excited to see these gains translate to harder sends once I get into red-point mode!

just out of curiousity, how would these core exercises improve contact strength?

slim wrote:just out of curiousity, how would these core exercises improve contact strength?

I probably used the wrong word there. What I meant by it is that I have noticed a marked improvement with my ability to maintain contact during moves on rock. For example, one horizontal V7 cave boulder problem nearby I worked a month ago has a very difficult move reaching over the lip where my feet would always blow off because the move is big and the feet are really small and slick. Now I have significantly less to almost no trouble keeping my feet on for that move.

Similarly, the sport climb I mentioned in my post. It's slightly overhanging and the crux involves locking off the right hand on a sloper while reaching for a huge jug with the left that was previously just out of reach. If I went statically before, my hand would blow off of the sloper before I reached the jug. So I would always to a bit of dyno to the jug which was low percentage for me. Just last weekend, I was able to do the route two consecutive times and just fully lock off on the sloper and grab the jug.

Is this scientific evidence that this book is awesome? No. there are, of course, too many other factors that could be at play. However, I am convinced that a lot of what I'm describing is coming from better core tension and stabilizer muscles which I am building via the Kraft book.

cool, that makes more sense. i will have to check the book out.

Adam Leedy wrote: Is this scientific evidence that this book is awesome?

Talking of evidence - how was the delivery, speedy?