Translating Training Strength into Climbing Strength

Obviously, the answer to this question is "climb more." Thank you. However, geographically that isn't an option for me. I can get a gym day during the week and an outdoor day on the weekend. Everything else has to take place on the hang board. I weigh 160lbs right now, and I'm adding 7-85 lbs for my weighted hangs, for 5x18-20 second hangs and my 7-53 splits. If I'm doing repeaters, I'll typically add 15-20 lbs for added challenge. However, when I'm on plastic or rock I found that this power just isn't there for me in the way that it is when I'm board training. So my question: what drills, exercises, or tactics do you use to improve the transfer of your board training. Thanks!

I know you already acknowledged the answer. It's more climbing. Make the most of your time by really focusing on every attempt and what you learn from it. Practice patience to manage your time and energy for having the most useful attempts. Lastly once you get close, imagine the holds and moves on your projects as similar to holds you've used before, especially if they're a staple in your training. This activated cues your body knows how to do and makes you a lot more comfortable with going all in and not holding anything back.

If you can’t climb more, fingerboard campusing, or fingertip pull-ups can help. You can also make a foot board with little jibs that you practice moving your feet around while grabbing different holds on the fingerboard.

I’m also a firm believer that core tension is just as important if not more than finger strength. I’ve found Trx straps are a good way to train this

Dave MacLeod mentioned this issue in one of his books. I don't know if he's discussed it on his blog, but perhaps he would respond to a request to write about the topic. Can't hurt to ask.  And certainly, many people have noticed that it is difficult to see how improved endurance, strength, and so on then improve climbing performance.

I agree that core is probably just as important as finger strength. The issue with core strength is that it is so hard to measure and know what is functional. Before I started climbing I could plank for 6 min, now I’m lucky if I can plank for 2. Yet I am far stronger now at climbing. I think trx is the best proxy but maybe read how to train for climbing and figureout what’s missing.

I have been so infrequent to the gym over the last few years  my friends laugh when I can’t send inside without a kneebar rest!!

Sounds like you're developing a lot of power but are probably lacking in accuracy, not only for grabbing holds but also feet and body position. This is hard to train on a hangboard but maybe consider some cross training sports (basketball, jujitsu, boxing) that can help you develop your body awareness and hand/foot eye coordination. I lived in ND for a few years and found cross training the next best thing to just keep my body awareness and coordination up. Also helps, if feasible, to try and plan as long as you can trips. It will take a little while each time to "remember how to climb" before you can start using all your strength you've been working on.

Bolting Karen wrote:

Sounds like you're developing a lot of power but are probably lacking in accuracy, not only for grabbing holds but also feet and body position. This is hard to train on a hangboard but maybe consider some cross training sports (basketball, jujitsu, boxing) that can help you develop your body awareness and hand/foot eye coordination. I lived in ND for a few years and found cross training the next best thing to just keep my body awareness and coordination up. Also helps, if feasible, to try and plan as long as you can trips. It will take a little while each time to "remember how to climb" before you can start using all your strength you've been working on.

I think Karen is spot-on.   The mental/neuro factors are at least as important as sport specific strength.

I've had several experiences where sport-specific off-rock training has not resulted in better climbing, but cross-training produced surprising results.   In my case the "cross-training" usually involved shovels, saws, heavy objects, hammers... you get the picture.  

Elijah, is it feasible for you to build a woody? I've had very steady progress and transfer since building my first woody in 2020, compared to pretty "meh" transfer from hangboarding in the preceding years. Provided you set it properly in the style of hard rock climbing (bad holds, bad feet, tension, etc.), it smooths the transition back to rock.

I found that strength gains don't immediately translate to climbing gains until you get out there consistently and get your technique/familiarity with movement on rock back up to par (that usually degrades after a long break away from rock).  But once you get that dialed back in, the strength gains usually will start to become noticeable.  My own experience at least.

You might just not be training an actual weakness, relatively speaking.

In many activities, there are go-to things we'd all like to see improve/get stronger, because they obvious contribute a lot to being good at them - finger strength for climbing, cardio for running. However, most activities, especially complex activities like climbing, ultimately come down to a few or many limiting factors. At some point in your quest for fitness, your limiting factor(s) may not be the most obvious things anymore.

Say for running - cardio is great, but increased cardio won't contribute much if your quads, buts, calfs aren't strong enough to take advantage of that cardio. Improve those in turns may be great, but then core is actually important at some point for running as well. Or smaller stabilisation muscles for trail running. And finally, gains in all those areas may not be leveraged without a proper running form. Someone with a great cardio and doing lots of weighted training may still fail to see much improvement in running times, given crappy form.

If you think you're improving your finger strength, but you feel like those gains don't materialize, IMO it's because you're not working on a limiting factor of yours. I'd suggest you take a step back and re-assess - what is really holding back your climbing?

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Finally just a quick remark (pet peeve of mine). You're not training power with what you described. You're training raw strength. Strength is how much force you can maximally apply; power is how fast you can apply that strength. You can easily be much stronger than another climber, but be less powerful. That would translate (given comparable technique) to being better at hard, static moves (like lock-off for instance, or holding on to a bad pinch), but poorer at dynamic stuff like long dynamic reaches and deadpoints, or sequences that requires powering true a quick series of hard moves.

Do yoga. Ya I know it sounds kooky but I personally saw huge strides in my rock climbing when I started doing yoga every day. It doesn't have to be intense. Just fit it into your day even if it's only 5 minutes. Yoga taught me how to breath! It taught me how to breath and move at the same time, and focus! The gain in flexibility and injury reduction was a huge benefit also. My onside grade increased drastically after getting more serious about my breath and flexibility training. 

Anyway, it's worth a shot if you want.

Franck Vee wrote:

Finally just a quick remark (pet peeve of mine). You're not training power with what you described. You're training raw strength. Strength is how much force you can maximally apply; power is how fast you can apply that strength. You can easily be much stronger than another climber, but be less powerful. That would translate (given comparable technique) to being better at hard, static moves (like lock-off for instance, or holding on to a bad pinch), but poorer at dynamic stuff like long dynamic reaches and deadpoints, or sequences that requires powering true a quick series of hard moves.

This is an incredibly useful insight. You've put words to something that I was struggling to articulate—I can pull for days on tiny crimps but if the next one is just beyond reach it feels impossible to grab onto if I can't move to it statically. I've started board training in lieu of an extra hangboard session every week, and in just three weeks I've noticed enormous change in the variety of routes that I feel confident trying.

Sarah-Min Donahue wrote:

Do yoga. Ya I know it sounds kooky but I personally saw huge strides in my rock climbing when I started doing yoga every day. It doesn't have to be intense. Just fit it into your day even if it's only 5 minutes. Yoga taught me how to breath! It taught me how to breath and move at the same time, and focus! The gain in flexibility and injury reduction was a huge benefit also. My onside grade increased drastically after getting more serious about my breath and flexibility training. 

Anyway, it's worth a shot if you want.

Doesn't sound kooky at all! I climb with some insanely flexible women, and they're able to deploy their feet in ways that make my hip flexors feel torn asunder just to watch. I'm starting to employ flexibility training to get my legs working harder for me.

Elijah Benson wrote:

This is an incredibly useful insight. You've put words to something that I was struggling to articulate—I can pull for days on tiny crimps but if the next one is just beyond reach it feels impossible to grab onto if I can't move to it statically. I've started board training in lieu of an extra hangboard session every week, and in just three weeks I've noticed enormous change in the variety of routes that I feel confident trying.

Nice!

I've done sessions for practicing deadpoints & dynamic reaches in the past and found them useful. Having access to something like a system board helps:

Basically I tried various fixed staring position (flagging left/right, facing, higher/lower feet, etc.) from given holds. Then I'd try to do one move to some given holds (perhaps with a 2nd follow up move, like bring the other hand up, but not more than that). Typically those wouldn't be physically super hard, though fairly hard to execute. I'd try to find some start/end position that I could succeed at some of the time, but not all the time, maybe 1/2 or 2/3 success rate. Then I'd repeat it, with short breaks in between. The goal being to do quality effort each and every time. Early on I filmed those as well to try to spot how my execution was on success/failures. Once I'd succeed my exercise pretty much 100% of the time, I'd move onto something harder - worst start/end holds, longer reaches, harder start position, etc. To help round up the training on dynamic moves, you could couple that with campus (with all the caveats that comes with campusing about injuries, not too often not too much, etc.). Campus is physically hard; the system board exercise I described is mostly execution, so I felt they completed well each others.

There is no substitute for actually climbing on actual rock. I know that's not what you're looking for in an answer, but it is truth. You can be strong as hell and still get scared to try hard and fall. Understanding that "climbing more" isn't an option you have, maybe the yoga and mental training is what you need to focus on, so that you can be calm and without expectations when you do go out?

you have to decide if you want to be a strong climber or good at calisthenics first, it'll be impossible to do both with any seriousness. at your level, you'll still be able to improve both.

if you want to get better at climbing, you'll have to do climbing training instead of calisthenics. they're similar, but not similar enough that it'll help. for example, weighted hangs aren't going to help climbing at all. the classic climbing training routines are generally classic for a good reason, they pretty much work for everyone at all levels. 20mm hang is of course the most important. max weight on a 20mm is the most important thing. this is 5..7 seconds at most. if you can do more than 7s you should increase weight. if you can't do 5 s decrease weight. between 70..80% of all climbing is based on finger strength. and when it's not holding on, it's moving, of course. campus board numbers are the next most important, if not just as much. since you haven't done much climbing training, i'd recommend starting off as small as possible, 1-2-3. campus board is exactly what it sounds like, start at the bottom ladder step. put both hands on 1. reach up with right hand to 2. then left hand to 3. repeat but switch hands. ideally, you want bigger movements. if 123 is too hard, try 122. basically, you simply match the 2nd ladder step. if that's too hard, find or build a campus board that has the 0.5 steps, so you can try 1-1.5-2. 

as an example, let's suppose you want to get to v5. the metric for v5 is 50% body weight. so if your hands can hold 60% of your body weight, work on other stuff first. v5 is also 1-3-5 on campus board, so if you can do 1-4-7, work on something else. all the metrics are everywhere on the internet, lattice probably has the comprehensive. the 8a test isn't too far off, but has a lot of useless metrics. 

finally, strength is a long term goal of everyone, rope and boulder alike. boulder training so far seems to serve rope better than rope serves bouldering. many pro boulderers can rope at the top levels fairly easily. the inverse is false, the best lead climbers have no chance at even easy boulders. also, you may want to try another forum other than mp, the more serious athletes rarely frequent this sight and the advice here is generally. . . questionable. not that it's necessary causal, but most of the people giving advice here climb v3, so their advice will be targeted at v3..4. granted climbing level doesn't indicate good advice, necessarily, but you'll find the advice of v12 climbers to be mostly the same compared to v2 climbers that retain a lot of superstition and hearsay.

Aweffwef Fewfae wrote:

you have to decide if you want to be a strong climber or good at calisthenics first, it'll be impossible to do both with any seriousness. at your level, you'll still be able to improve both.

if you want to get better at climbing, you'll have to do climbing training instead of calisthenics. they're similar, but not similar enough that it'll help. for example, weighted hangs aren't going to help climbing at all. the classic climbing training routines are generally classic for a good reason, they pretty much work for everyone at all levels. 20mm hang is of course the most important. max weight on a 20mm is the most important thing. this is 5..7 seconds at most. if you can do more than 7s you should increase weight. if you can't do 5 s decrease weight. between 70..80% of all climbing is based on finger strength. and when it's not holding on, it's moving, of course. campus board numbers are the next most important, if not just as much. since you haven't done much climbing training, i'd recommend starting off as small as possible, 1-2-3. campus board is exactly what it sounds like, start at the bottom ladder step. put both hands on 1. reach up with right hand to 2. then left hand to 3. repeat but switch hands. ideally, you want bigger movements. if 123 is too hard, try 122. basically, you simply match the 2nd ladder step. if that's too hard, find or build a campus board that has the 0.5 steps, so you can try 1-1.5-2. 

as an example, let's suppose you want to get to v5. the metric for v5 is 50% body weight. so if your hands can hold 60% of your body weight, work on other stuff first. v5 is also 1-3-5 on campus board, so if you can do 1-4-7, work on something else. all the metrics are everywhere on the internet, lattice probably has the comprehensive. the 8a test isn't too far off, but has a lot of useless metrics. 

finally, strength is a long term goal of everyone, rope and boulder alike. boulder training so far seems to serve rope better than rope serves bouldering. many pro boulderers can rope at the top levels fairly easily. the inverse is false, the best lead climbers have no chance at even easy boulders. also, you may want to try another forum other than mp, the more serious athletes rarely frequent this sight and the advice here is generally. . . questionable. not that it's necessary causal, but most of the people giving advice here climb v3, so their advice will be targeted at v3..4. granted climbing level doesn't indicate good advice, necessarily, but you'll find the advice of v12 climbers to be mostly the same compared to v2 climbers that retain a lot of superstition and hearsay.

Those metrics sound fine on paper, but at the end of the day are false. I know someone who’s 5’1” who can barely do a pull-up who can climb 5.13. It’s all about technic before strength.

Like others have said, building a home wall and spending more time doing climbing movement will pay off more than any strength training at this point in your climbing 

Aweffwef Fewfae wrote:

the best lead climbers have no chance at even easy boulders

How easy are we talking?

Aweffwef Fewfae wrote:

. .   the advice here is generally. . . questionable. . .

Says the one that almost exclusively posts on training-related threads with long ramblings and tries to preach the importance of campusing.

Also I'd actually argue that a majority of the frequent users of MP are closer to V6.