Quote:
Originally Posted by cottonseed1
I think you are on the right track in terms of knowing what to work on. You just keep focusing on where your hips are and if they could be in a better position. Typically, this will involve better positioning prior to the next hand move and having more aggression through the feet.
What is the rock type and style of climbing that you will be mostly be climbing on? Body tension goes up on the list of importance outside relative to inside, IMO. Your fingers are certainly strong enough for V5-V6 and 5.12 outside.
I did read that article on TB. I tend to be skeptical of new and better training methods. The base rate any new training method being a substantial improvement over what people are currently doing is terribly low. I did like that he went into first principals, though.
With that said, the longer duration hangs are interesting. Will Anglin has an article that I think is going to be reposted Monday on Tension Climbing where he mentions having decent results using them. As a counterpoint, Lattice dropped the long duration hangs from their assessment due to having very low correlations to the grades people were climbing.
Generally speaking, I think hangboarding (and most off the wall training) is overemphasized relative to designing high quality climbing sessions. Let's say a climber climbs 4x a week and hangs 2x a week. The total TUT on a hangboard might be 10% of the workload on someone's finger flexors that week. To use a lifting analogy, the hangboard is basically an accessory exercise yet it gets treated like a main lift.
If someone is thoughtful in how they structure their sessions I think all the adaptations written in that article can be accomplished on the wall. Muscular recruitment and size can easily be done with hard limit boulders and ancap work, blood flow is done with aerocap work, rate of force development can be done by choosing problems that have big powerful moves.
A lot to unpack here. I’m also generally skeptical of something that appears to be well outside the norm of what the most advanced/elite athletes have done over decades to produce great results.
I do think the one arm hangs on bars he does could be useful in my programming.
I think what hangboarding has allowed me to do is work harder problems which in turns creates a better training effect. Whether I could have gotten there merely climbing is certainly up for debate, but I do feel as if I needed to “learn” how to half-crimp and the 20mm hangs have provided a safe way to do so.
Moving forward I’ll be upping my on the wall volume and will be video’ing much more to catch bad habits and opportunities for improvement.
As far as rock goes, I have nothing planned outside the fact I know I want to get outdoors a good deal from October through March. Would love to come hang out with you and TC in Chattanooga, I’m in Denver multiple times a month, and once things cool down in Texas I’m about 2.5 hours from Rogers Park. Been watching a ton of V3-V4 outdoor videos and stoked to see if I can climb that grade.
