I'm not convinced repeaters work

So here's the background. I'm 37, been climbing almost 20 years (f*ck I'm old), and have been hang boarding for probably the last 5 or 6 years. Bigger dude (by climber standards) at roughly 6'2, 185 but in good shape. Don't think I'm carrying a bunch of excess weight around. For the last 5 or 6 years I've incorporated hang boarding into my winter training regimen. I cycle between the Anderson brothers repeater protocol and the Eva Lopez max hang protocol. With the Eva Lopez protocol, I see gains pretty quickly and quantifiably. I typically do 8-10 "sessions" and by the end of a cycle of the Eva Lopez protocol, I can hang on smaller holds or with more weight. These gains transfer to outdoor sport climbing and bouldering (my main areas of focus) because for lack of a better way to say it, smaller holds just feel better. I don't have to try as hard to get the same purchase. So this begs the obvious question, why not just do the Eva Lopez protocol? If ain't broke, don't fix it. 

Well, as a bigger dude, my main deficiency is endurance. Eva Lopez's workout couldn't be any less effective for endurance with the cumulative hang time in a given session lasting around 30 seconds over 10 or so minutes. So I figured the Anderson Brothers repeater protocol would be a good hybrid between strength and endurance. Unfortunately, my results after 6 or 7 cycles show absolutely no improvement and in theory, I could make the argument it's been actually detrimental because the use of pockets has resulted in tweaks and strains (nothing major) and the repetitive nature of the workout (no pun intended) destroys my skin and limits my ability to actually climb much more than the Eva Lopez routine. So here is my question; what the hell am I doing wrong. I speak with people at the crag who do a cycle or two of repeaters and they go from 5.10 to 5.12, 5.12 to 5.13, V4 to V8. I mean, the improvement people claim from these repeater workouts is insane and I am getting none of it despite a higher than average level of commitment to it. 

So , question 1 is just generally, what am I doing wrong? Has anyone had a similar experience where these repeater workouts feel useless, frustrating, and completely unproductive? Was there some hack or tweak that I need to make to recognize some of these gains I hear stories about? My second question is more practical. Typically, within a cycle of the repeaters, I will see some gains but they are minimal. Things like, adding 5 additional pounds when using a certain hold. Or maybe in my first workout, I failed on the 5th rep and by my final workout, I can hang on through the 7th rep. So some improvement, but nothing particularly meaningful. I've always heard the mantra, you want to add or subtract just enough weight that you are failing on the last rep of the last set. However, I find this confusing. My failure typically occurs in the back half of the workout, when I'm using the smaller holds, pockets, or bad slopers and taking a bit of weight off. I often wonder though if the weight I am adding to the earlier sets is hurting me later on. So the practical question is when doing repeaters, are you looking for failure at the end of each set of hangs? Or at the end of the entire workout? Depending on the answer, I may want to reduce the amount of weight I am adding to my first few grip types which are typically larger and easier for so I get a bit of a warm up in. Is it better to complete all the hangs without adding any weight first even if some of the grip types feel easy? I have wondered if I'm just calibrating the workout all wrong and that is the reason for my lack of progress. 

Max hangs are for power. Repeaters are for power endurance. I am fifteen years older than you, and when the pandemic hit, I got out of the gym and spent two years on the hangboard, doing nothing but max hangs, repeaters, max pull ups and climbing outside. I did not do cycles, but did try for gradual progression, adding weight, and used nothing but 20 mm and 15 mm edges. During those two years I actually broke a two-decade plateau. 

So you didn’t use any other holds while doing repeaters besides the 15 and 20 mm edges? That’s another thing I’ve wondered about. I use a beastmaker 2000 and the beastmaker app. Most of the holds are not edges but instead are pockets and slopers. Part of me (maybe optimistic?) thinks that you should train on different holds like you’d encounter outside. Part of me thinks that training slopers and pockets is a waste of time and your approach just using the edges would be much more productive because it’s more focused on just pure finger and tendon strength. 

Dave Macleod spoke about this in one of his great youtube videos. He suggests that if you climb a lot then you are already getting plenty of repeater-like stimulus in your fingers, so using the hangboard to supplement your climbing with strength-focused protocols (i.e. max hangs) makes more sense. Sounds like you climb a lot, and have been for a long time, so you're already well adapted to repeaters but still have some relatively easy gains to squeeze out of the max hangs.

I've also read many sources that suggest just sticking with medium-small edges, 2-3 grip positions, and not training on other holds unless you have a specific reason to be doing so. KISS

What kind of endurance do you think you are you lacking? Failing after 6 moves on a boulder? After 15 moves on a sport route? After 40 moves on a sport route? In the number of good tries you can have on a boulder or route in a day? Also, is your perceived lack of endurance purely a physiological problem? Some climbers, boulderers especially, sometimes over-grip or get tense about falling. The kind of training that is likely to help you will in part depend on the answers. 

Many find repeaters effective but I also found them tweaky and not that helpful. Other climbers I know highly rate 45-60 seconds of foot-on campusing for short duration ('power'-)endurance. I found this to be a very short cut to elbow pain!

I had a really good (for me) spring of sport climbing after a winter of a little bouldering and lots of aerobic capacity type exercise, 8-10 minutes on a circuit board or up and down on an auto-belay, a total of 40-60 minutes climbing time in a session. I was training for El Cap. but all those metres getting only slightly pumped accidentally had a really positive impact on endurance for 20-30m vertical sport routes. I already had strong enough fingers for the cruxes (of sustained, not bouldery, sport routes) and kept that topped-up with the bouldering. Other climbers I know don't like this kind of training at all, they find it trashes their skin and reaps little benefit. 

Different people respond to the same exercise in different ways. One of the joys of coaching yourself is to work out what works for you. If you have given something a good go and it doesn't work, whatever the books or gurus say, try something else. If you find this process frustrating or unproductive then pay for a coaching assessment and training advice.

TheBirdman Friedman wrote:

So you didn’t use any other holds while doing repeaters besides the 15 and 20 mm edges? That’s another thing I’ve wondered about. I use a beastmaker 2000 and the beastmaker app. Most of the holds are not edges but instead are pockets and slopers. Part of me (maybe optimistic?) thinks that you should train on different holds like you’d encounter outside. Part of me thinks that training slopers and pockets is a waste of time and your approach just using the edges would be much more productive because it’s more focused on just pure finger and tendon strength. 

Yes, 20 and 15 mm edges on a wooden Tension hangboard. I would warm up on 25 mm, and on occasion I’d go down to 10 mm.  Remember, you can grab a flat edge like a pocket, which removes the lateral supports that an actual pocket has, so it is more effective.
For full disclosure, prior to this, I did pay for an assessment as suggested above, and surprise, my finger strength was lacking while my endurance was already off the charts (for goal grade).

Frank Stein wrote:

Yes, 20 and 15 mm edges on a wooden Tension hangboard. I would warm up on 25 mm, and on occasion I’d go down to 10 mm.  Remember, you can grab a flat edge like a pocket, which removes the lateral supports that an actual pocket has, so it is more effective.
For full disclosure, prior to this, I did pay for an assessment as suggested above, and surprise, my finger strength was lacking while my endurance was already off the charts (for goal grade).

The assessment process could be flawed. 

WF WF51 wrote:

The assessment process could be flawed. 

Except in my case it was spot on. 

I have had success with repeater protocol. I found that if I was following the Anderson style ‘2 sets of 5 grips’ I needed 72 hours of rest before I could train effectively again. So all I did for about a month was warmup, do the finger workout and then rest for 2 days. Doing this I was able to add about 2.5 lbs per workout.

repeater time under tension is way higher than any max hang protocol. Maybe you haven’t been getting enough rest?

Lately I have dropped to 2 sets of 2-3 grips and I find I can recover in 48 hours while still making similar progress. This also leaves a lot more time to climb’

Honestly, I don't think that repeaters help with endurance that much. I think they are more efficient than max hangs at getting your fingers strong due to the time under tension hanging from the board. I think judging repeaters based on how pumped you feel sport climbing is not a good indicator. A good indicator for success would be increasing weight on your grips (which you've been doing?) It seems like the people that jump from 5.10 to 5.12 or whatever had the necessary endurance/efficiency and just needed a bump in finger strength to get there (see schmuck's reply). 

Do repeaters feel useless and frustrating? Yes, when I'm doing them: they dig me into such a recovery hole that climbing basically feels like shit. The gains come after the cycle when I'm recovered. (as opposed to max hangs, which feels like I'm "topping off" my finger strength which has always been there, and make me fingers feel healthier and stronger).

What are you doing wrong? I know the anderson bros have these monster workouts with like 8 grip types, but it's too much for me. I found more success pretty much just doing half crimp and a bit of 3 finger drag (I definitely agree with Jack on this one). Repeaters are way harder on your forearms than max hangs: you could simply be doing too much. As for failing sets/reps: I'd rather have my first 4 workouts be "easy", and by the end of the cycle just starting to fail my last reps of my last sets. If I failed a rep on my first workout of the cycle, I'd drop 10 pounds for the next one. If you are constantly failing then not only are you doing less hangs due to skipping the last few reps, it's harder to try hard after you've completely melted off the board, and you go in slightly fresher to the next workout. This is just my opinion, btw, and maybe I'm too conservative, but maxing every workout to failure just doesn't seem like the way to go. I don't get frustrated from failing every single workout, and I can avoid injury way easier (my fingers still get tweaky with repeaters, and it always seems to be a minor twinge that I get on the wall towards the end of a cycle). 

Either way, ending a cycle with 5 or 10 pounds over your max seems like a win to me, especially with 5 years of hangboarding under your belt. I think you might be right, that the way you're calibrating your workouts could be leading to the feeling of repeaters being useless and frustrating. 

And as an aside, from one boulder bro to another, no amount of hangboarding will get me in shape for pumpy climbing. And I've ran into the same problems you have with repeaters. TBH, I barely do them anymore, they prevent me from climbing as much as I want to. Just a lot of bouldering and some max hangs. 

A lot of things could be done wrong, and it’s hard to tell based on the details provided. As recently suggested, 48-72 hours between sessions is required (this means no junk mileage, no additional climbing between, and sleep!)

If I understand you correctly, your hard grips are too far at the end of your workout. Move the most important grips to the beginning of your workout.

And as others have recently suggested, 3 grips is likely sufficient. For me, I do a 1 pad 4-finger edge, a 2 finger pocket, and a 3 finger pocket (in that order).

And 5 pounds improvement per season? Standard. Compound that by 3 seasons a year over years and the gains build up.

Some finger pull protocols have been recently suggested by Tyler Nelson (@c4hp on Insta) that you may find interesting.

FWIW, IMO if you want to break plateaus and do harder routes with actual harder moves, your fingers need to be stronger. Full stop. I find I get plenty of endurance and power endurance doing routes in the gym but the moves are generally easy-ish. To get past real cruxes or to tame a series of semi-hard moves, improving max strength is key. Once you're hanging (or doing sets of one or two pullups) with two hands with a bunch of weight say +60 percent of BW, then pivot to one-arm hangs and eventually pullups, at first with weight off, then full BW, then with added weight.

The same is basically true of actually productive repeaters. You need to add a fairly substantial amount of weight to actually get any benefit. I see climbers do them in a surprisingly low-key way and completing their sets with little or no visible strain or effort. In a typical 5 sets of 7/3x6 (1 minute) sort of workout, you should be feeling it for real on set 3 and barely getting through the last 2. If you're not digging really deep on repeaters, you might as well just go climbing.

Thanks for the responses. To answer some of the questions:

1. When I say endurance is my issue, resistance routes give me a lot of trouble. If you put the crux at the second bolt, I can usually pull the move even if it's at my limit. But stack a bunch of moderately challenging moves in a row, especially on smaller/less positive holds and I think the combination of my size, pump, and overgripping/tunnel vision take over. 

2. In terms of rest, I'm likely overdoing it. I usually do my repeater workout (I also add a 3rd set of repeaters on a large pinch block since my home crag involves a lot of pinches). I then will boulder for an hour, nothing too difficult. I don't like the idea of not climbing altogether since I think the movement training is arguably the most important part. But if I boulder V7/V8 at my max, I'm usually only doing V3/V4 and just trying to focus on technique and efficient movement, not pulling super hard. The following day I'll usually lift. Third day is a rest day. Then I start the cycle over. So I'm probably overdoing it somewhat, but not sure it's totally egregious. 

TheBirdman Friedman wrote:

2. In terms of rest, I'm likely overdoing it. I usually do my repeater workout (I also add a 3rd set of repeaters on a large pinch block since my home crag involves a lot of pinches). I then will boulder for an hour, nothing too difficult. I don't like the idea of not climbing altogether since I think the movement training is arguably the most important part. But if I boulder V7/V8 at my max, I'm usually only doing V3/V4 and just trying to focus on technique and efficient movement, not pulling super hard. The following day I'll usually lift. Third day is a rest day. Then I start the cycle over. So I'm probably overdoing it somewhat, but not sure it's totally egregious. 

This is a classic definition of overtraining and a common mistake nearly all climbers make at some point (apparently, being obsessive runs in the type).

  I’m also a large guy, ~185 pounds and I know the pumped-stupid feeling you’re describing. My silver bullet for that has been linked boulder circuits. The Anderson bros book does a really good job explaining them, I’m not even going to try.

 All 3 of my best sport climbing performances have been preceded by 4-5 of those lbc workouts. The only bummer is that those adaptations fade pretty quickly when you stop performing the workout. 

Jack Lange wrote:

  I’m also a large guy, ~185 pounds and I know the pumped-stupid feeling you’re describing. My silver bullet for that has been linked boulder circuits. The Anderson bros book does a really good job explaining them, I’m not even going to try.

 All 3 of my best sport climbing performances have been preceded by 4-5 of those lbc workouts. The only bummer is that those adaptations fade pretty quickly when you stop performing the workout. 

Thanks Jack, I think this makes sense. Some quick googling basically says these linked boulder circuits are just replicating the difficulty and length of your target route. Whether it's roped climbing in the gym or linking boulder problems together, try to have the aggregate amount of moves and difficult be similar to the actual route you're trying to send. This makes sense from the perspective of "I am trying to send X route." It doesn't really do anything for finger strength. That's another question though, in my mind repeaters were sort of a supplement for power endurance. There is true power endurance which I think is the ability to pull hard (though not max difficulty) moves for longer periods of time. I always thought of this as less about pure finger strength and more about maintaining pulling power, core tension, and climbing efficiently with a pump. Since repeaters are longer duration hangs at less than maximum effort, my thinking was that they would be a good supplement but I'm starting to thing I was wrong. 

I'm leaning toward your suggestions Jack. Some combination of linked boulder problems and max hangs sounds like the ticket. Perhaps some sort of hybrid repeater/max hang work out where instead of the traditional protocol, you reduce the amount of grips (and thereby the overall amount of sets) but increase the training intensity.