Bodybuilding and climbing?

Anyone out there do both? I injured a few fingers and can’t climb all that much currently. In my boredom starting lifting, found it to be sort of fun. It’s similar in terms of consistency brings improvement, so I figured this could be a fun thing to do to keep the strength up while I rest the fingers. 

Bodybuilding generally adds big "dumb" muscles, the opposite of what you want for climbing. 

You could do pullups, ab work, stretching, all of which can help your climbing.  Maybe some oppositional work like pushups, overhead presses, etc.  But trying to max out your bench press or squats will do Jack Shit for your climbing ability, and if you gain lots of heavy useless (for climbing) muscle it will make you worse.

Will it? I mean this is the typical response I expected. If we as climbers are often maxing out our pulling muscles, wouldn’t it make more sense to balance things out? I dunno, just a thought.

My general physique is on the larger side of things anyway, so why not run with it. If I make it back to NH this year the goal is to send some of your hardest routes at Rumney, so I’ll report back to ya and let you know if it worked or not! Haha

Check out Natasha Barnes on Instagram, who is a climber and powerlifter. 

https://www.instagram.com/natashabarnes/

 

I think a lot of the really huge guys, and especially those who make those gains in short amounts of time, are having a bit of fun with the locker room pharmacist.

Even if it takes 6 months for your fingers to get better (probably 6-10 weeks), how much can you realistically gain in muscle without a pharma assist in that time? 10 lbs? How much fat can you gain in the same amount of time if you just sit around eating? Probably 20 lbs. 

Pick your poison.

If I sat around and only ate(no exercise) I could gain way more than 20lbs! I gained about that climbing in the RRG all year haha. I love food too much to be a twiggy sport climber 

jessie briggs wrote:

If we as climbers are often maxing out our pulling muscles, wouldn’t it make more sense to balance things out? I dunno, just a thought.

Every training protocol I’ve read encourages working on antagonist muscles for “balance”. Eric Horst has promoted deadlifts for strengthening the posterior chain. But at the end of the day climbing has a hard law of strength to weight ratio. I think that’s what everyone is getting at. But yeah carrying an extra ten pounds of muscle is probably(?) better than equal pounds of fat?

jessie briggs wrote:

Will it? I mean this is the typical response I expected. If we as climbers are often maxing out our pulling muscles, wouldn’t it make more sense to balance things out? I dunno, just a thought.

My general physique is on the larger side of things anyway, so why not run with it. If I make it back to NH this year the goal is to send some of your hardest routes at Rumney, so I’ll report back to ya and let you know if it worked or not! Haha

Absolutely balancing your muscles is a good idea.  But you specifically said "body building," as Steve Bechtel says in Logical Progression, "If weight training makes you a better climber you suck at climbing."

jessie briggs wrote:

Will it? I mean this is the typical response I expected. If we as climbers are often maxing out our pulling muscles, wouldn’t it make more sense to balance things out? I dunno, just a thought.

My general physique is on the larger side of things anyway, so why not run with it. If I make it back to NH this year the goal is to send some of your hardest routes at Rumney, so I’ll report back to ya and let you know if it worked or not! Haha

As I get older, injury prevention is high on my priorities.  Agree with you on balancing and building core and other muscles.  Rather than build mass, I’m more focused on high reps at low weights and cardio for muscle endurance… Have you tried bike trainers or swimming?  Allot of cross benefits! 

OP seems to not be differentiating sufficiently between bodybuilding and strength training. Both involve moving heavy pieces of iron around, but the details and goals are quite different. Do you want to get big, or to get strong? Those are trained quite differently. You can add a lot of strength without adding much mass.

That is just the generalized stereotype that all bodybuilders want to be massive. Bodybuilding is about physique and strength. You do not have to be massive to be a bodybuilder. The typical climber build leads to poor posture, a lack of chest muscles and twiggy legs. So I’d like to have better posture, a more developed chest, and less twiggy legs. There ya go. I’d also like to climb 5.14/v10, I’m pretty certain I can do both, just wanted to see if anyone else out there is doing similar things.

Also, Ward, on the flip side of your Steve Bechtel comment, couldn’t you say the same for someone who loses weight to climb higher grades?

I say go for it. Focus on the main, compound lifts and have fun with it. I would make the goal general fitness as your fingers heal. Throw in some cardio if you want to experiment with that and stretching if you wanna get real crazy. My guess is that bouncing back to your previous climbing level is going to be a lot faster than if you did nothing.

In my experience the benefit of weight lifting depends on the type of climbing you want to pursue. Single pitch sport and bouldering close to the road? Including a routine of lifts as part of your program is maybe beneficial but only as far as maintenance rather than bulking up or increasing your one-rep max. 

But for alpine climbing, regardless of difficulty, having a solid chassis is critical. The specific progression of lifts will depend on training plan, physiological adaptation, previous history of lifting etc, but at the end of the day, if your goals involve mountain routes, your training plan had better include some variations of squats and deadlifts. 

The next step of course is to take those standard Olympic lifts and adapt them to the athletic demands of mountain movement. I dunno about anyone else but I’ve never had to do a pure squat while in the mountains. But I have had to balance my way through boulder fields and break trail through thigh deep snow. So while I keep up with normal lifts, I make sure to mix in a lot of single leg work, balance work, and weight transfer work. 

As an example, I’ll do sets of standard deadlifts, but then do sets of single leg deadlifts with a kettlebell while standing on a balance disc, or squats while standing on an Indo board.

I'm doing a pretty good mix of lifting and climbing - following a protocol from tactical barbell - the goal isn't to gain weight or mass, but strength without the mass. I’ve gained a lot of strength and lost some weight while following it. It's been a lot of fun and I've set the goal to climb 5.13 and lift over 1000lbs in the same week by July 2023 (when I take the bar exam). We’ll see. I wouldn't call myself a power lifter or a climber, but I'm definitely doing powerlifting type workouts and climb a lot. Check out tactical barbells stuff - it's awesome.

Matt Z wrote:

As an example, I’ll do sets of standard deadlifts, but then do sets of single leg deadlifts with a kettlebell while standing on a balance disc, or squats while standing on an Indo board.

I think that's fine advice. But I also think that for the first few months, it would be worth considering keeping things simple and just doing the plain compound exercises without getting into more difficult variations. The squat (for example) is a deviously difficult exercise to do with absolute correct form, and getting that form would benefit the person doing the squats before they decide to then work on balance, proprioception, singe leg stability, etc, etc, etc. Just work on doing the exercises perfectly (and no ego lifting). 

I learned some gymnastics in the 1950s, so bodyweight exercises rather than body building was a natural progression. Although I stopped climbing well over a decade ago, I'm going on 85 and still enjoy modest bodyweight workouts every few days. For an hour or so I feel youthful (well, middle aged).  

I’ve heard people say before I don’t want to train with weights I’m afraid I’d get too muscular. LOL like it doesn’t take months of hard work and dedication to put on even a small amount of size. Like someone is going to work out a few times, look in the mirror and all of a sudden see they’re huge.

Ondra has said putting on some muscle helped his climbing.

Glowering wrote:

Ondra has said putting on some muscle helped his climbing.

Does Ondra train with weights?

Brendan N wrote:

Does Ondra train with weights?

I mean, technically, 

https://youtu.be/8-5yuVuDFzU?t=2934

I think those are like, old beanie babies salvaged from the trash.

Bodybuilding & strength training are two different things! 

So to summarize: 

Any weight, including muscle, makes you a bad climber.

If the thought even occurs in your brain your getting stronger, you’re no longer bodybuilding, but strength training.

Rock climbers don’t lift weights.

Lifting weights makes you huge, instantaneously.

We can fix muscle imbalance by doing body weight push-ups, to counteract doing pull-ups with as much added weight as possible.

Muscle imbalance doesn’t lead to injuries.

I suck at rock climbing if I improved from strength training.

Ok got it. 

Thanks for answering my question y’all.

I totally needed your unsolicited advice on how to train.