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Tension board workout structure

j mo · · n az · Joined Jan 2009 · Points: 1,200

Glad you asked.

https://www.climbing.com/skills/get-the-most-out-of-your-board-session/

Quote from above article:

“But there’s another element of board climbing that we often ignore: The number-one side effect of starting training on a spray wall or app-driven wall is injury.”


one last point Kirsten K is that if you are as old as you say you are, training board work is impressive

Dan Schmidt · · Eugene, OR · Joined Feb 2016 · Points: 349
Joyful Jane wrote:

I have experienced this - I of all things got an extensor injury on my tension board - probably too much too fast.  Is there any training plans out there specifically for tension boards, or even just system boards?  does anyone find some of the tension board holds "tweaky" (honestly I was probably just holding the holds in a tweaky manner, more to do with my utilization of the holds rather than the holds themselves being tweaky)

also where does Bechtel say this?  I'd like to learn more about what Bechtel has to say about system boards. 

I found all of the buckets and incuts tweaky until I started actively gripping the living hell out of them. If you get the fingers up and engaged on them they’re decently comfy, but drag them and I insta-split. The small crimps are utterly horrendous at most angles and I honestly don’t use them.

RE: Training — I think you just have to really ease into it, and in particular to limit your exposure to high velocity snatchy moves. That can be really hard if you’re not used to boards, as any non-trivial moves will initially feel thrutchy. If you can spare a few months of climbing pretty statically on “bad” (relatively speaking) holds, not necessarily on set problems, I think that really helps acclimate. And obviously, you just have to climb a lot less. I almost exclusively board climb, but my sessions are like 30-45m compared to the marathon 2-3h gym sessions I used to do (pre-kid/family/age).

Joyful Jane · · Unknown Hometown · Joined Apr 2017 · Points: 0
Dan Schmidt wrote:

I found all of the buckets and incuts tweaky until I started actively gripping the living hell out of them. If you get the fingers up and engaged on them they’re decently comfy, but drag them and I insta-split. The small crimps are utterly horrendous at most angles and I honestly don’t use them.

RE: Training — I think you just have to really ease into it, and in particular to limit your exposure to high velocity snatchy moves. That can be really hard if you’re not used to boards, as any non-trivial moves will initially feel thrutchy. If you can spare a few months of climbing pretty statically on “bad” (relatively speaking) holds, not necessarily on set problems, I think that really helps acclimate. And obviously, you just have to climb a lot less. I almost exclusively board climb, but my sessions are like 30-45m compared to the marathon 2-3h gym sessions I used to do (pre-kid/family/age).

Yeah, i was doing too long of sessions following a canned training plan most likely meant for gym climbers.
how many days a week are you doing 30-45 min sess? And this is after warming up? How long is warm up taking? Ive set a timer now and wont go for longer than 1 hour but wondering if i should cut back even more.
agree about the “snatchy” moves. Especially anything that you loose tension right at the end just because its hard. I noticed i cant climb as hard of problems when i focus on that but the movement is way better when i maintain tension after grabbing the hold instead of looking like a wet noodle for the finish.
i was also wrapping my thumb on top of the angled holds and i think that was putting my hand in a weird position. Now i focus on pulling perpendicular to the hold and putting my thumb on the backside if the crimp to add some pinching action. (Cause i love using my thumbs!) 

thanks for the insight!

Dan Schmidt · · Eugene, OR · Joined Feb 2016 · Points: 349
Joyful Jane wrote:

Yeah, i was doing too long of sessions following a canned training plan most likely meant for gym climbers.
how many days a week are you doing 30-45 min sess? And this is after warming up? How long is warm up taking? Ive set a timer now and wont go for longer than 1 hour but wondering if i should cut back even more.
agree about the “snatchy” moves. Especially anything that you loose tension right at the end just because its hard. I noticed i cant climb as hard of problems when i focus on that but the movement is way better when i maintain tension after grabbing the hold instead of looking like a wet noodle for the finish.
i was also wrapping my thumb on top of the angled holds and i think that was putting my hand in a weird position. Now i focus on pulling perpendicular to the hold and putting my thumb on the backside if the crimp to add some pinching action. (Cause i love using my thumbs!) 

thanks for the insight!

it sounds wild to me as someone who used to train 6x/week with a few double days, but I'm really only doing hard bouldering twice per week. On top of that I'm also doing four other ~30m-ish workouts, of which two involve the fingers, and I'll pull onto my board statically to try positions a few times almost every day, but there are only two actual bouldering sessions. At that cadence I've been able to make steady progress week-to-week without feeling tweaky, at least until the end of the phase. I've tried climbing "hard" three sessions per week, and while it initially seems to work I plateau pretty quickly and end up with erratic progress. That third session just takes a lot out of my top end.

Length-wise, strength-oriented (slow, controlled) sessions have been pretty short. Looking at my logs, while I usually warm-up for ~15m, I did have one great 10-set session that was only 33m total. Since I know those problems very well and the climbing style is intentionally slow, I find I don't need the warmup quite as much. Power sessions are definitely longer, and I feel that I actually need the warmup for those. My limit bouldering session yesterday consisted of a 15m warmup followed by 1h30m of setting and bouldering. But a lot of that stems from having to set the boulders. Now that they're set, my work rate will increase and the session length will creep down.

If I had the time, I'd use it to extend the sessions slightly and improve quality / rest more.

Especially anything that you loose tension right at the end just because its hard. I noticed i cant climb as hard of problems when i focus on that but the movement is way better when i maintain tension after grabbing the hold instead of looking like a wet noodle for the finish.

Honestly, I think that's the way to train. Hard rock climbs often don't afford you the kind of margins to cut feet, lose tension, etc.

Edit: If you're not already a Wedge Climbing fan, definitely check them out. I have learned a lot about what good board climbing looks like from watching Aidan, especially. A lot of board climbing you see on Instagram is terrible even at pretty high grades.

Bolting Karen · · La Sal, UT · Joined Oct 2011 · Points: 56

I don't find the Tension Board holds to be tweaky at all. I'm at a fixed 40 angle and it took a long time (like 4 months) to be able to use the "c" set of crimps and pinches. I picked the tension board specifically because I really like the "vacuum" style of climbing and this board is perfect for that. It's really hard to climb well on this board with garbage footwork. I feel like a lot of the problems that have little dynos are kind of missing the point but maybe that's just me. As an added bonus, I have found that I wrap my thumb onto the holds instead of onto my fingers, decreasing the acute angle in crimp position and giving me more control when moving laterally. Not just on the board but on rock as well. It's really improved my thumb dexterity and improved my climbing.

Because I'm fixed at 40 degrees, I find it pretty hard to train anything but pure power on the board. As such, limiting myself to one or two sessions per week. If I could move it back to 30 degrees, I think training power endurance would be a lot easier. I do find it pretty nice for training endurance by leaving my feet on the floor and doing very long (60+) move chains with breaks in between. 

One thing I do that I haven't seen mentioned on any training board forum is a kind of half campus/lockoff routine. Feet on the floor with one hand on a good, above head hold (I use the large 30 degree in the center). Hop up to a bad edge or pinch and pull into a high lockoff position. I do three sets of 3-5 lockoffs on each side. Obviously the smaller the hold the harder it is, but also extending the width or height of the hold you need to go to increases the difficulty as well. I don't have a ton of time to train, so I like things like this where I can combine coordination drills with contact strength, muscle explosiveness in the offhand, etc. These can be done off a foothold as well, but I feel like this is injury territory because you're trying to hold an awkward swing on small holds.

Guideline #1: Don't be a jerk.

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