How to Train Strength and Power For Rock Climbing

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Training power with weights at Confluence Climbing Gym in Golden, BC. Photo: Anthony Walsh

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For too long now, climbers have assumed that certain exercises—as opposed to the manner with which they complete those exercises—inherently increase power output. Unfortunately, this mistake often means that many climbers are completely wasting their time when they think they’re training power. The most obvious tool to pick on here is the campus board, but since this article is about off-the-wall power training, I’ll hold my tongue for now.

But why train power off-the-wall?

Simply put, off-the-wall power training is more objective and reproducible than on-the-wall power training, which is just climbing at a particular (in this case, high) power output. While on-the-wall training is a great way of practicing your sport, it’s different from training your physiology to better perform in your sport. Because every climbing movement is unique—every move requiring a slightly different combination of body position, power output, range of motion, and so on—non-climbing power training movements are useful to us because they are simpler to reproduce and help us train more general movement patterns that apply to a wide array of climbing movements. They are also more stable, easier to modify, and far more measurable .

The simplest definition of power is moving quickly.

Non-climbing training movements should be as fast as possible, even heavy ones. When I say as fast as possible, however, I’m not referring to the exercise’s tempo, i.e. how long it takes to get all the reps done; instead I’m referring to the concentric (muscle-shortening) portion of the exercise. In the bench press, this is pushing the bar away from the body. With a squat, it’s standing up. With a pull-up, it’s going from a straight arm to pulling your chin over the bar. Each of these movement directions represents the concentric portion of the exercise, and when training power that’s the portion where your intention should be to move fast. By slowing down the non-concentric portions of the exercise, you’re then able to keep good form and bring the most intention to the powerful concentric portion of the movement.

Every movement, even slower ones, has a power output. Heavy loads (85+% intensity) have a power output in the .17-.35 meters/second range; lighter loads (40-60% intensity) are typically in the .65-1.0 meters/second range. But if an athlete spends all of their training time at a power output that is slower than their actual power use in their sport, their adaptations are not likely to transfer neatly to their in-sport movements.

First of all, to properly understand the adaptations generated by strength training, read my previous article titled How Strength Training is Misunderstood by Climbers, which will (a) help you understand how the strength adaptations we get from exercises are specific even if the exercises themselves don’t feel particularly specific to our sport, and (b) serve as a good primer on how to train with weights. The article discussed various adaptations to strength training programs, including: coordination with the exercise; voluntary activation (muscular recruitment); antagonist coactivation; developing hypertrophy (muscle size); lateral force (dispersing load to adjacent fibers); and tendon stiffness (increasing capacity). In this article I’ll be covering the same adaptations as they pertain to power training. The good news is that we need to highlight only a few significant differences, mainly that training power is all about dropping intensity and increasing movement velocity. We must get in that 40-60% intensity range for the adaptations to be optimal for climbing.

Movement coordination is the biggest reason changing the exercise in your power phase is a mistake. My strength article discusses how you must become coordinated in the exercise before you can actually gain strength from it. The same principle applies to increasing power output. Too many climbers change the coordination requirements when switching from strength training to power training. They might, for example, go from doing weighted pull-ups in a strength training phase to bodyweight muscle-ups in their power training. But even though the movements look the same, they aren’t. Even though the intensity might be appropriate for power training during the pulling portion of the muscle-up (for most climbers, body weight is roughly 60% of their max), the muscle-up has no deceleration at the bar and uses momentum generated by the legs to “kip” the climber’s body into position, thereby circumventing the power requirements of the arms and back. A better way to transition from strength training to power training would be to do bodyweight pull-ups with high concentric velocity. All we have to do is move our chin over the bar as rapidly and intentionally as possible. By changing the coordination demand of the exercise, we lose the adaptation that we’re trying to gain: coordination at speed. The good news for recruitment, however, is that large fibers are naturally fast.

The strongest climbers are rarely the best climbers. The athletes who apply force quickly, slow down quickly, and move through space efficiently are far more successful at applying the strength they do have, which translates into success on the rock. Part of the challenge for many climbers is that proper high-intensity strength training methods are naturally slow, i.e. the exercises we use to get strong involve low velocity movements. That means that if we spend too much time strength training, we aren’t coordinating the large motor units at their natural climbing speed, which is fast. In the long run, this overemphasis on strength essentially slows you down, which makes little sense for performance.

Similarly, if I change exercises between my strength and power phase, I’m not necessarily coordinating the large motor units at that speed. During my strength phase, I’ll work to gain coordination and voluntary activation (recruitment) of the pull-up exercise using progressive overload, i.e. by adding weight. Once I’ve gained that adaptation and plateaued, instead of switching exercises I want to train the same movement at a lower intensity and focus on doing the concentric repetitions as quickly as possible. Switching to a new exercise—like, say, switching from weighted pull-ups to muscle ups—means learning a new skill, which misses the point since it means you have to start the coordination process all over again. Recruitment is the most transferable adaptation between a training exercise and a sport.

Antagonist coactivation—the thing happening on the opposite side of a given joint when it’s working—is best trained at sporting speeds. This means that to optimize power output I need to train the muscles on the opposite side to relax at the same speed at which the agonists contract. If I hammer away at antagonist strength training, however, I’m likely reducing movement efficiency and, consequently, my power output. Modifying your exercise method to emphasize lighter weights and faster movements will account for what’s happening on the opposite side of the joint. Don’t try and make them even.

If you gained a little muscle size in your strength training routine, don’t fret; your muscle size will reduce slightly once you move to a power training phase. This is because there will be less total time under tension for the exercises in this phase. The same goes for lateral force transmission. Because there will be less need for synergy between fibers, which is required when lifting heavy loads, you won’t get as much force dispersing to the side before going down the muscle. That’s why power training methodologies are not typically used for muscle hypertrophy adaptations, and why you don’t need to worry about putting on too much muscle weight.

It’s long been thought (indeed, I used to espouse the idea myself) that increasing movement speed naturally increases connective tissue stiffness. We know now that this is not the case. Moving heavy loads intentionally will increase connective tissue stiffness, which is one of the most important reasons for strength training in the first place: Building stiffness to the connective tissues of the upper and lower extremities is protective for athletes.

So what are we doing when we train power if power training doesn’t increase connective tissue stiffness?

Well—and this is likely the most critical paragraph of this article—if we properly use strength training for the required timeframe, our connective tissues will gain a stiffness adaptation, and our high-threshold motor units will be coordinated; after that, however, we need to increase the movement coordination at speed, which will automatically increase power to the working muscles and movements, which in turn allows us to apply our strength to our sport. It is that simple.

A simple analogy works well here. Imagine pulling a rock that weighs roughly 30% of your body weight with a 10-foot dynamic climbing rope: The rock will move at the speed of your muscles only after the rope has stretched to its maximum length. Now imagine you’re moving the same rock with a 10-foot static rope: The rock will move at basically the same speed as the muscles you’re using to pull it, including at the beginning of the movement. The static rope is faster because no energy is lost in the elongation of the rope—i.e. because the rope is stiffer. The same thing holds true for muscles. A muscle’s rate of force development defines its power output/movement velocity.

In Part II of this article we talk about what to focus on when shifting from strength to power training, and walk you through a four week rep progression. Find it HERE.

For more information on Dr. Tyler, follow him on Instagram @c4hp or check out his website for online or in-person courses (link). In addition to the certification course listed above, he works remotely, diagnosing and prescribing rehabilitation (link) for injured climbers.