8b - 8c+ How?

Over on my personal blog the other day I was talking in passing about a period in my life about 9 years ago when I took my best sport climbing grade from around 8b to 8c+ in about a year and a half. On Twitter, Sean picked up on this and thought that would be a good subject for a blog post. Here is the short answer:

I started fingerboarding.

But it’s not as simple as that. So here is the long answer. I was replying to Sean in 140 character stylee that I would explain but there are no secrets and the explanation would be nothing that isn’t in my book 9 out of 10. However, personal stories are always helpful if you highlight how the results link back to the underlying principles.

You might be tempted to take my short answer above and think if you just fingerboard, you too will climb 8c+. It’s unlikely to say the least. That’s because basic strength may well not be your weakness. I think it’s fair to say that most climbers would say they feel their strength level is a performance weakness relative to technique. I’ve spent much of my climbing coaching career repeatedly trying to convince climbers otherwise. In fact, in almost every climbing wall on a busy evening you’ll see climbers with enough strength to climb 8c+, but will never even get close to this grade.

What was slightly unusual about my background in climbing was how little I time I spent in climbing walls during that period. I climbed outdoors, year round. My staple diet of climbing was trying super technical projects at Dumbarton Rock. I really valued the fact that they could be cracked by exploring every subtle detail of the technique used to climb them in place of brute strength. When conditions allowed, I’d be teetering about on hard mixed routes, mountain trad, sport climbing, sea cliffs, etc, etc. I had built up a huge depth of experience as a tactician. In other words, if a project was 100% of my strength limit, I’d still have a 100% chance of succeeding on it. Fear of falling, redpoint nerves, mistakes on the lead, finding the best sequence were all things I’d put huge volumes of hours into developing. One thing I hadn’t really done was trained strength properly.

Training was only half on my radar really. I was just a climber having a whale of a time going outside and having adventures trying new routes in places I loved to be. But when I decided to sacrifice some of that to up my level a bit, my strength level was so poor that I had rapid results.

I decided to start in June 2005. The inspiration to start was realising I could climb the Requiem headwall if I really wanted it badly enough. Six days a week, I started the day with around 40 minutes of fingerboard (the same routine I published in 9 out of 10). Then I went round to the Dumbarton boulders and did endurance circuits for another couple of hours, followed by a ten mile run. Sometimes I’d go for a second run late at night, at a relaxed pace, just to wind down. At the weekend I went climbing in the mountains if the weather was good. I worked before and after my training, at home of course - a working from home job with flexible hours is a good catalyst for climbing performance.

I didn’t vary the training all that much for many weeks at a time, although the ‘real’ climbing days were as varied as ever. But I did start gently with the fingerboarding, building up very steadily for the first 6 weeks. And that was against a background of already doing a large volume of bouldering for a decade beforehand. Without these factors, I’d likely have got injured, not stronger.

After three months I went back to an 8c project I’d previously failed on and was completely shocked when I linked it first try from the second move to the top on my shunt in freezing conditions. Later in the winter I completed Font 8b projects at Dumbarton, Rhapsody the following spring, and my first 8c+ sport route shortly afterwards.

I can’t overemphasise the importance of the previous decade of building up those skills in being a solid all-round climber. The pure finger strength was just the final piece of the puzzle. The fashion in the popular climbing culture is very much revolving around physical strength right now. The underlying message is ‘let’s train like proper athletes’ and that means this kind of stuff. That’s great, but it is nothing if you miss the crucial toe-hook that knocks a grade off the problem, or you are so scared you crush the rock as soon as you are 20 feet above a bolt. The strength level generally among climbers these days is mind blowing. Training like proper athletes means being able to use every ounce of strength in your muscles at the right moment. While you might be able to one-arm a crimp in 6 months with nothing but a piece of wood above your doorframe, you can’t shortcut learning to be able to do something good with all that strength.

Any excuses?

Can’t climb for a while? Injured? No climbing wall nearby, no crags? Sure it’s rough not to be able to do the real thing for a while. However, it happens to almost all of us every so often. You can moan about that, but one thing you cannot moan about is getting weak. Have a look at this video. Do you really have any excuse? Thanks to Beastmakers for pointing at this.

Understanding how muscles adapt

Whenever I post on this blog about the nitty gritty of strength or endurance training regimens, many comments come back looking for a more detailed explanation. From my last post, in the comments we got into talking about training anaerobic endurance and effects of training generally on different muscle fibres.

This is where things get tricky because muscles and complex structures, and the adaptations they make to training are also fairly complex. Picking over the surface of some details and using this to make inferences about how to train is shaky ground. My general advice or those who want to understand training at a muscle physiology level rather than the simple prescriptive or principle based level that you’ll get from coaches and coaching books, is to read thoroughly through the anatomy and physiology of muscle. I’m not trying to be difficult here, but understanding training will always seem confusing with only partial knowledge of the physiological picture. Perhaps adding a good exercise physiology text to your pile of training books would be a good help and reference. Any of Ron Maughan’s books are excellent resources. His book Basic and applied sciences for sports medicine has a superbly clear chapter on muscle and it’s adaptations which by an old lecturer of mine Neil Spurway. Spurway’s writing on muscle, like his lectures, are a great pleasure to read!

But back to the nitty gritty. Reeve was commenting just then about anaerobic training, asking:

“What is the certain type of force which a muscle must be exposed to over months and years to develop (presumably) fast twitch fibres? And if I do anaerobic work, thus growing my intermediate fibres, what effect will I notice in my climbing? Will I feel stronger? Increase my muscle's capacity to handle lactic acid? Or just have bigger heavier guns?

Secondly, you state that recruitment will get poorer with endurance training. Is is possible to maintain it whilst endurance training (maybe by a few deadhangs at the start of each session, say)? I imagine (although this is purely specultation) that the body is capable of maintaining high levels of potential recruitment without having to use them all the time (I can deadhang then go to the fridge and hold an egg). Is there any truth to my speculation?”

High (near maximum) forces are needed to develop fast fibres. By high forces I mean hard boulder problems or hanging on a fingerboard with as much weight as you can hang on for less than 10 seconds or so. If you do anaerobic work, you’ll get better at that anaerobic work, and not much else. We come back to the specificity principle! Anaerobic work won’t make you stronger - the forces are too low. In fact recruitment is lowered to make the muscle more efficient at sustaining work over the length of sustained sport routes. Yes this work creates better tolerance of the chemical imbalances of hard anaerobic work in the muscle. Muscles won’t get dramatically larger.

As for maintenance of recruitment during anaerobic training - yes, some high force work mixed in is the thing to do to maintain it. One session a week bouldering while you are training a lot of endurance for a sport climbing trip would be a good example. A little fingerboard before your endurance sessions would have the same effect, but not as good.

Why not? Because ‘recruitment’ is not a simple attribute of a muscle that rises and falls. Lots of people think of it this way - simply the number of fibres the muscle can recruit for contraction. The reality is much more complicated. Recruitment composes of the number of fibres recruited, the frequency and firing pattern and timing of the firing, and the ability of the central nervous system to supply a strong enough stimulus. But we can understand it much more simply as the body ‘learning and remembering’ how to pull hard on holds. 

Endurance training in climbing is a constant reminder for the body teaching it to use the minimum of force. Hard bouldering is the exact opposite on the hardest moves. Using a fingerboard is great to stimulate the forearm muscles and remind the fast fibres to grow and be responsive. But it’s important to show the system some hard bouldering on a real climbing wall in order that the whole nervous system remembers how to pull hard.

Fingerboarding -timings

Several climbers have picked up on routines floating about the web advocating very short rest periods between sets on the fingerboard - like 6-10 seconds hanging with 3 seconds rest. They have compared it to notes in my book talking about 5-8 second hangs with more like a minute’s rest. Confused?

The regimens are very different because they are training completely different things. The former is an anaerobic endurance protocol. It replicates roughly what happens when climbing a route - hanging for some seconds on each move with only a few seconds rest as the hand reaches for the next hold. The rationale for using a fingerboard to do this type of endurance training is two-fold:

Because you can’t get to a real route or bouldering circuit to do this training more effectively. Or…

You already train a ton and need something that bit more intense to keep the body responsive.

Clearly both are a very specific and fairly rare set of circumstances. Most people can get to some real climbing, and they should do that instead because they need the technique element of the training every bit as much as the fitness. And very few are doing enough training to have squeezed everything out of the technique element and need a really intense stimulus to keep the body responding. If you do fit those above special cases, using the fingerboard in this way could be useful as a very intense way to build anaerobic endurance.

The majority of fingerboarders are doing it to gain strength. Gaining strength needs a high force stimulus - pulling at your maximum. If the rests are short, it’s not possible to sustain this - you get pumped and can’t pull your hardest. So that’s why you rest fully between sets and the sets are 90% plus of your maximum force.

What ‘body tension’ means

Since the explosion of bouldering, especially indoors, many climbers ask these days about how they should improve their body tension. However, the discussion is often limited because of a basic problem in actually defining what this performance quality is, and this leads climbers on the wrong path for training it.

Climbers frequently refer to body tension as a strength component. Most would agree on the objective - to be able to keep the feet on the holds more and to apply more force through the feet. The problem comes when you see this purely as down to body strength, which it’s not.

Body tension is the product largely of technique, but also of strength through the body. Some important (and trainable) parts of it are:

Climbing rhythm. That is not getting too extended with both arms high before moving the feet.

Aggression in the lower body. Many climbers are far too passive with the lower body, and aren’t using the strength they already have.

Placement of the foot - The big toe must be in a position to apply the strength, and it’s often not possible because the toes are not engaged and the heel is dropped low.

Turning of the trunk - Helps bring the tensioned hip close to the wall during a stretch and be more ‘over’ the foothold.

Momentum use. Momentum is essential to apply body tension from awkward positions where it’s hard to apply foot force. For example throwing the hips into a plane in which the foot can apply force during execution of a move.

You could go to a gym and train body strength for a decade and it would make little difference to your body tension in climbing if the above factors are not working for you already. The flip side is that many climbers have enough strength already to get a lot more body tension just by working on the technical elements.

How to go about this? Boulder voraciously on steep ground with limited footholds, in the presence of climbers who can show you the techniques involved in applying body tension. You’ll know you are making progress with the technique when you feel calves, hamstrings and core stabilisers in your trunk complaining from effort from single moves in steep bouldering. And if you’ve got this far, you’ll be training strength in these areas in a far more efficient way than you would achieve in a gym or elsewhere.

All that said, those who do some other whole body work such as Yoga or other activities that break up the imbalances that climbing demands on the body will be protective from injury by maintaining posture and strength across joints.

Potential problems with blobby climbing

Recent days coaching in big bouldering walls reminded me of a potential specificity problem of using these for training for outdoor hard problems and routes. I think a good proportion of those training indoors with a view to climbing harder outdoors get that grabbing big rounded sloper blobs the whole time creates a problem with missing out on gains on the fingery holds you find outdoors. But I’m finding that even the small holds that are about right now, tend to be quite big! I don’t mean big in the sense that they are easy to hold onto. I mean that even the really poor holds have quite a pronounced profile and are fairly pinchable. 

There are even more effects at play when it comes to the feet. Indoor holds are often very rounded and sloping on top. Using them develops a good skill for maintaining contact with the feet, using continuous and carefully directed force application to the foothold. But the technique required to use tiny but positive footholds (like you commonly find outdoors) is subtly different in the way strength is applied using the lower body, foot and toes. The pattern of foot movements outdoors is different too, and habitual indoor climbers often lack ability in foot swaps, matches etc..

All of this means that if you are using big modern climbing centres to train for outdoor climbing, make sure you get enough diet of positive but really quite small fingery holds by seeking them out diligently at the wall.