Your technique might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about endurance, and there’s a good reason why we will address technique first. If you’re able to climb efficiently and rely less on brute strength to get you up the wall, you’re going to be able to last longer and repeat more routes.
Plain and simple.
Cast your mind back to the first time you ever went climbing. Did you just try and haul yourself up the wall using your arms? Yep. Did you last about 30 minutes? Uh-huh. Once you learnt some fundamental climbing techniques such as using your legs, footwork, body positioning etc., the improvements were massive, and you could last a lot longer, right?
Keep working on your technique and try climbing some more accessible routes to climb with good form and the obvious takeaway here is that repeating bad habits will never work out well. In any scenario. Once you have conditioned a terrible habit, undoing the old habit whilst trying to re-learn a new habit is effectively doing double the work, with half the results.
Hang boards are precisely what they sound like - it’s a board, and you hang. They’re designed to specifically train finger strength in a very similar fashion to the equipment in the gym that trains specific body parts.
Hangboards exist to train everything finger related - from endurance (raw strength), and they optimise your grip within a multitude of orientations. Hangboard workouts are vast and riddled with increasing complexity alongside some scientific basis; however, the most accessible place to start is the classic 7:3 Repeater exercise.
TRY this : The 7:3 Repeater Exercise
After a good warm-up, hang for 7 seconds, then off for 3 seconds (one repetition)
perform 6x reps, then rest for 3 minutes.
Rinse and repeat 3 to 6 times
Utilising bodyweight only and focusing more on the endurance side of hangboarding!
One essential aspect of hangboarding is to try hard! If you fail to complete a set, drop the intensity by moving onto a larger hold. If you’d like to find out more about hangboarding, check out our Beginner guide to hangboarding here
Becoming stronger will help with the ability to bust out multiple moves over and over again. Some areas to get started on are your shoulders, back and core. Even a sneaky Yoga session once a week would lead to some noticeable improvements.
Yogis often have to hold some pretty strong positions for long periods so don’t pull a face when you hear yoga...
Fundamental exercises - aim for up to 12 repetitions per set.
Pull-ups - regular, or assisted using a resistance band or machine
Single-arm lat pull down - this one is a great way to work on your imbalances
Push-ups - a great core and shoulder exercise with lots of variations.
Single-arm dumbbell bench press - another one to target both left and right sides
Overhead barbell shoulder press
Handstands - check out this video if you’re keen to give it a go.
Seated row - you can even use your body weight and some gymnastics rings
Reverse Dumbbell fly