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Gymless Training

• May 2011
• Hi Steph Simple Living Climb Training

Hi Steph,
I want to pick your brain about training techniques, if I may. I started climbing about 6 months ago in Minnesota and recently moved to Turkey, so while most of my climbing experience has been indoors due to snow overload, it won’t be for long. I’m so new at climbing but I really enjoy it, and I am finally starting to connect with the climbing crowd here in the city. Not only do I want to be in the best shape I can be when I finally can get out and climb, but I will be joining a climbing club and I don’t want to look like a complete weakling when the time comes.

As per usual, one of the first physical affects I noticed about climbing was how fast my upper body, forearms, and fingers fatigued. I haven’t climbed for over a month now and I know the little climbing-specific endurance I had built up will now be gone. I run a lot and do yoga every day, but I don’t have access to a weights or a gym, so I have been trying to keep up my strength with basic body-weight exercises at home (I even found a set of monkeybars where I do pullups, embarrassing but totally worth it). So I wanted to ask, are there any more at-home exercises that you would recommend for prepping to climb, regarding upper body and finger strength in particular? If you have any advice about gym-free endurance training I would love to hear it, if you’ve got the time. Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
-Marta

Hi Steph,
You’re a great inspiration for in many ways, specially because you live your life doing what you love the most and not everybody dares to do that. Also I like to thank you for a previous post about eating wheat. I discovered I was allergic to it! stopped it for 5 days and lost 2 kilos..

I started (sport)climbing only 1 year ago and I live in Paris so I’ve been going a lot to Fontainebleau and now I’m pretty psyche about bouldering. I noticed that Font can be very technical and there are some 6a I can send but others seem impossible for me =( I feel my arms are not strong enough(I’m 1.69 m height and my weight is 53 kilos) I only have time to go to the climbing gym once per week, but I’m thinking on working out at home. I just got a small pull up bar with different holds, I’m not so sure how to use it. Could give me some tips?

Thank you in advance,
Keep it up!
Aurora

Dear Aurora and Marta,
I think you’re on the right track with wanting to increase your upper body strength for climbing. As a woman, I notice that if I improve my upper body strength at all, I instantly see dramatic results in my climbing. Since women do not naturally build upper body muscle like men do, I think we are forced to climb with more technique in general. If we give any attention to strength building, it allows us to make use of that technique to an extremely gratifying degree.

I’ve also seen many posts written for climbers that play down the benefits of pullups and pullup workouts. I couldn’t disagree more, especially for women. If you start to do pullup workouts, and possibly fingerboard workouts, you will see a dramatic improvement in your climbing very quickly.

Here’s a post I wrote about what I do with my fingerboard, and a guest post from Eric Horst with more fingerboard information.

If you do find yourself with access to a weight room (sometimes easier to find than a climbing gym), here are some more ideas about where to start with weight lifting.

If you want to do your workouts purely at home, the best thing you can do is start doing the pullup and/or fingerboard workouts, and start to focus on core strength. You can do crunches and plank crunches on the floor, and that will also give you a big advantage with climbing, since it allows you to have more body tension and use your feet more precisely.

I hope that helps!
Steph