So do you want to get better at climbing? Whether you’re a recent convert or a seasoned veteran, welcome to the club.
Climbing, always a marginal sport compared to, say, running, cycling or swimming, has historically had no scientific backing for even the most basic training protocols. Hangboard routines? Laps of resistance? These exercises make intuitive sense, but have long lacked nuance based on research. Fortunately, whether due to the growing indoor industry, the Olympic inclusion of climbing, or the collective prayers of our worship community, this is rapidly changing. Over the past decade, the pace of publication of climbing-related research has accelerated from a trickle to a torrent, and it’s about time we all tuned in.
This series of articles aims to review current knowledge and current training protocols with the goal of helping youngsters and veterans get the most out of their climbing. Excited? We also!
Read Part I, Part IIY Part III here.
Step Four: Maximum Strength Training
If you’ve been following this series, you know that strength is one of the most important predictors of climbing performance and that we still have a lot to learn about how best to develop it.
We have talked about how power and even stamina are (largely) determined by strength and we have dispelled the myth that hypertrophy (ie getting bloated) is bad for climbing. we dive deep advanced Hypertrophy, revealing the importance of employing a diversity of training methods and we have framed all of this within the broader need for a cyclical program that includes different protocols.
Hypertrophy training increases strength by increasing the potential force output of muscles; maximal strength training does this by triggering neuromuscular adaptations. Fully developed strength demands both. After a cycle of hypertrophy training, a cycle of maximal strength training rewires your system to make the best use of the new potential means of force production you’ve gained.
max. Strength means becoming neurotic
Your muscles are made up of motor units made up of motor neurons and innervated muscle fibers. The amount of force your muscles can generate depends on your distribution of type I and type II muscle fibers and your ability to contract your muscles.
Muscle fiber type distribution it is determined half by genetics and half by training. max. strength training can promote changes in fiber type, Sciences It’s not clear yet, and even if it isn’t, it certainly increases the cross-sectional area of the muscle fiber. This is part of strength development, sure, but the real benefit of training comes from the neural adaptations that increase contractile capacity.
When you train, you teach your body to do more with what it already has.
Training-induced neuromuscular adaptations
max. Strength training asks your system to improve on three things.
Recruitment of motor units
As you train, the threshold at which you are able to recruit large alpha motor neurons falls. In effect, it overrides an evolutionary adaptation that seeks to conserve strength by first recruiting less powerful motor units before incorporating their older siblings.
Motor drive activation frequency
Training also increases the rate at which motor units fire. Faster firing motor units mean an improved ability to quickly generate force. This is why power, which is simply strength over time, increases with max. strength training.
Synchronization of motor units
Finally, training prepares your motor units to fire in sync. While science has yet to prove that this adaptation increases strength, it makes sense that it does.
cycling max. Strength training in your program means calibrating your six basic training variables (load, set endpoint, volume, frequency, rest, and exercise selection) to favor these neural adaptations.
Maximizing Max. strength training
The best training program takes the best of current knowledge and applies it to achieve well-designed goals. This requires a part of reflective self-analysis and a part of dedicated study (yes, that it is what we now call bingeing on the Internet’s endless raft of information).
Don’t you feel like studying? Here is the cheat sheet of everything you need to know to effectively train max. strength. Note: A cheat sheet for this cheat sheet appears at the end.
Burden
Load refers to the magnitude of resistance used during training. It can be expressed as a percentage of your maximum strength or as a specific repetition goal.
Higher loads produce greater strength gains. Studies show than exercises performed at more than 60% of the maximum load you can withstand in a single repetition (your one repetition maximum or 1RM) or performed with fewer than 15 repetitions. per set are better at building strength than those that employ lower loads.
As you gain experience, you will need more charge to progress. Well-trained climbers need to train at 80% or more of their 1RM to see continuous neural adaptations.
Also, the biggest gains come from varying the training load. when we look hypertrophy training, we present drop sets, supersets, group sets, and accentuated eccentric loads as methods that increase training variety and efficiency. These methods can be used for the same in max. strength training.
Lastly, you need to periodically increase your training load. Every time you complete two consecutive workouts at a specific intensity, research recommends that you apply a 2-10% load increase.
set end point
When to finish a set is really a matter of how close you are to failure. Training to failure (TF), or to the point where muscles momentarily stop working, is all the rage despite conflicting scientific evidence. That, or the algorithm is convinced that we are obsessed with TF and is giving us loads of material on the subject; it’s hard to tell. Either way, TF is a no.
Yes, we said that TF was an important tool for experienced athletes to use sparingly in hypertrophy training, but the same is not true here.
Muscular strength gains depend on repeatedly exerting high mechanical tension. When you take a set to failure, the number of reps you’re able to do on subsequent sets decreases. The consequent decrease in training volume implies a decrease in the time that your muscles spend under tension and this is counterproductive.
TF also doesn’t help with neural adaptations. Research shows that no-fail protocols provide the same motor unit recruitment, firing frequency, and timing benefits.
Volume
Volume is the amount of exercise you do in one exercise.
Low volumes and high loads are the hallmarks of max. strength training and science (mostly) back this up.
All researchers agree, yes, quite rarely, that doing multiple sets is better than doing just one. This applies no matter your training level, and yet newcomers to training don’t need to perform as many sets as seasoned gym rats. The former will benefit from doing 2-3 sets per exercise, while the latter may require 4-6 sets to see continued gains.
Frequency
Training frequency describes the number of sessions you do in a week. Best practice is a moving target that depends on training volume, intensity, exercise selection, personal fitness, and recovery ability. Time and resources are also involved.
When writing about hypertrophy, we quote a 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis who found that weekly training frequency did not matter as long as volume goals were achieved. Here we quote a different systematic reviews and meta-analyses (this of 2018) which concludes that the opposite is true for max. strength training.
Training frequency does matter. The sweet spot, according to research, is 3-5 sessions a week. Mainly, this has to do with achieving a higher training volume. However, higher frequency also allows for greater exercise selection and volume per muscle group, which, in turn, means greater specialization. This matters a lot in a sport with fine margins like climbing.
Short, frequent sessions followed by food, rest, and recovery are key to maximizing your maximum. strength training because they support high-intensity training and reduce fatigue during exercise.
One of many studies he even found that splitting training volume between two daily sessions instead of one increased strength gains. Complicated if you work full time, sure, but maybe one more reason to finally quit and move into that truck by the river.
Rest
A day off? Two? It’s hard to tell without looking at the details of his training plan. However, a couple of things are generally true of max. strength training and rest.
First, you get the most profit when you use all your effort. This means rest enough to go a death in each session.
Second, more is more when it comes to rest between sets. Studies indicate that 3 to 5 minutes is the ideal rest interval to take between max. strength sets. Bring a book.
Exercise selection
Of course, the exercises you do and the order in which you do them are also important.
The rule of thumb here is multi-joint exercises before single-joint exercises, higher intensity exercises before lower intensity exercises. Adhering to this maximizes the total resistance of each session which, in turn, maximizes your body’s metabolic response.
TLDR: Max. Conclusions of strength training
max. Strength training is a method designed to increase strength by enhancing the neural components of force and power production.
According to current science, this looks like this:
- Train with a variety of loads beyond 60% of your 1RM (80% to 100% for experienced athletes).
- Increase your load by 2-10% every time you successfully complete two workouts at a given intensity.
- Prioritize high loads, low reps, and multiple sets. Beginners can start with 2-3 sets per session; highly trained climbers should run 4 to 6.
- Perform 2-3 weekly sessions for the specific muscle groups and 1-2 sessions for the muscle groups you are looking to maintain.
- Resting completely between workouts and 3-5 minutes between sets.
- Perform multi-joint exercises before single-joint exercises and higher intensity exercises before lower intensity exercises.
