[petejh]

   Isn't it just the case that lots of stuff has been posted in reponse to a vague initial post that doesn't even specify what goal is being trained for, other than 'hypotrophy'. The principles of training are everything you need: specifity, overload, reversability, recovery, adaptation. Interpret the principles in whatever language you prefer and if someone else's terms don't resonate ignore them.
When broken down into its constituent parts, what are the most easily-identifiable elements in the desired climbing goal, and which are you worst at? How are you going to train them - it won't be nice, because you're not good at it.
And not the theoretically most efficient way either, but the way you can sustain, for whichever reasons make sense to your circumstances.
If the goal is just to get bigger forearms - which I doubt, than freeweights would obv be more effective than climbing training.

[Robsons]

Hi Shark - I guess he didn't directly, he was agreeing with what Alex said "a good system of aerobic capacity work will go some way towards helping with this".
I know he didn't mention cardio, I was adding this myself - so that he actually gets use out of his big, heavy arms.

But, it depends on what his actual goal is...like Petejh just said.

[Gulmark]

wow, really hit a hot topic there.. and yes it was a bit of a weak post and i have forgotten to specify my goals..

I actually thought that "classic" periodization of first a hypertrophy phase followed by max recruit phase was more accepted in the climbing community :D .

This fall i have been doing a lot of high intensity bouldering/campussing  and general strength strength training and have seen quite a bit of result, but have also felt that the gains have been diminishing for some time.

I mainly boulder on plastic as i live in denmark, but when i go on rock it is rope climbing. im going to el chorro in the end of january and  have therefore started a PE phase.

After this trip i want to start a new periodization cycle and is therefore planning how i could get some hypertrophy done i a fun way.

Im quite a weak boulder lacking brute strength and power. I  mostly want to develop my bouldering strength and power because that is what i do most + I feel that the strength gains are quite easily transfered to the rope climbing.

 If hypertrophy + max recrut is not the way what is then ?  Im open to ideas?

[Stubbs]

I know he didn't mention cardio, I was adding this myself - so that he actually gets use out of his big, heavy arms.

Are you talking about cardio as in running, cycling, or are you referring to some climbing training?

[Sasquatch]

I actually thought that "classic" periodization of first a hypertrophy phase followed by max recruit phase was more accepted in the climbing community :D .

The idea is widely talked about as being used, but I think most people are actually benefiting from the strength endurance aspect rather than the muscle building.  They're preparing their body for the Max recruitment cycle so they get more out of that cycle.  I've never heard of any study, or individual measuring their muscle mass/size before and after to see if the hypertrophy worked....  The only reason I care about this is if I am trying to translate findings from other studies/fields into climbing related activities. 

Im quite a weak boulder lacking brute strength and power. I  mostly want to develop my bouldering strength and power because that is what i do most + I feel that the strength gains are quite easily transfered to the rope climbing.

 If hypertrophy + max recrut is not the way what is then ?  Im open to ideas?

That's a good question.  I think the training concepts work in general, the word "hypertrophy" is just wrong.

You say you are a "weak" boulderer, but in what way?  fingers, arm, core, etc.  These all play a role in dynamic movement and power.  I have relatively weak arms, but my explosive strength is very good as long as I have some type of foot.  Where and why do you fail?  Most people have distinct weaknesses and have a hard time recognizing them.  We become very used to the local styles and often get shutdown when we find something different exposing a big glaring weakness

[mark s]

wow, really hit a hot topic there.. and yes it was a bit of a weak post and i have forgotten to specify my goals..

I actually thought that "classic" periodization of first a hypertrophy phase followed by max recruit phase was more accepted in the climbing community :D .

This fall i have been doing a lot of high intensity bouldering/campussing  and general strength strength training and have seen quite a bit of result, but have also felt that the gains have been diminishing for some time.

I mainly boulder on plastic as i live in denmark, but when i go on rock it is rope climbing. im going to el chorro in the end of january and  have therefore started a PE phase.

After this trip i want to start a new periodization cycle and is therefore planning how i could get some hypertrophy done i a fun way.

Im quite a weak boulder lacking brute strength and power. I  mostly want to develop my bouldering strength and power because that is what i do most + I feel that the strength gains are quite easily transfered to the rope climbing.

 If hypertrophy + max recrut is not the way what is then ?  Im open to ideas?

you need to build strength NOT muscle
building muscle will fuck your climbing,i put on a bit of weight from doing weights and im wank on the rock now (never was that good before some ass picks me up on it)

[abarro81]

I'll be surprised if anyone manages to gain large amounts of weight through repeaters, long duration hangs or ancap workouts. We aint talking weights here.

There seem to be a few questions, which are basically all subquestions on 'what's the best way to get strong, and ideally strong in a way highly useful for routes'.

1) Do we want to do hypertrophy followed by recruitment (climbing specific muscles here, especially flexors)
2) If so, how best to do it - do strength gains from ancap relate to this? Long duration hangs? Repeaters?
3) If not, why not, and what are we going to do to get strong instead.

I don't have the answers to the above, I don't know enough about the physiology of getting strong, but suffice to say if you want sensible answers you can ignore anything Dense says.

I think that any time spent training for forearms hypertrophy would be better spent training finger strength over different prehensions.

I don't see why they would necessarily be mutually exclusive, as far as I can tell doing 25-30s hangs on different grips is aimed at achieving the later by doing the former.

It does, however, remind me of something Dave Mac wrote when asked about repeaters and hypertrophy: http://onlineclimbingcoach.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/fingerboarding-timings.html - see the comments. Unfortunately he doesn't answer all the questions, but he seems to think that hard hangs will work to hypertrophy the relevant muscles when used over a long time.

He also had this to say on ukc:
Me > But surey you can't endlessly recruit? At some point you've surely got to get some big, bad forearms so you've got some more muscle there to then work on recruiting (or have surgery to modify your fingers to be like however the hell Ondra's are put together).....

DM: > Muscular recruitment is more complicated than just firing more fibres. The term includes the ability of the muscle to better synchronise and time the firing as well as activate the most reluctant fibres. So there is a lot of scope to improve it over time. And hypertrophy doesn't work quite like you suggest either (in an intensity band). It's rate is influenced by intensity, but it occurs when the muscle is stimulated with high force contractions over a LONG time, like years of steady work.



An extra thought: the thing with recruitment is that presumably it's not the type of strength that will make you get less pumped by submaximal moves? E.g. If I can recruit 80% of my fibres, and I up that to 90% by training it (let's assume no other adaptations take place for the sake of argument), I don't see how that makes a difference to how hard I find 10 moves at 70%, or how fucked I get by 15 moves at 65% or whatever. So, as a route climber, what I really want the most is presumably more fibres, or better ability to do work with my fibres thus requiring fewer for the same force output, or simply stronger connective tissue? And how are these aspects best trained? Or is there so much crossover between 5s or 10s or 30s work that we don't need to worry?

Any thoughts Tom? Or Serpico? Or Stu? Or Carlisle?

[a dense loner]

Absolute fantastic, gulmark wanted to get bigger forearms by training repeaters or campussing. I said this couldn't be done. Obviously it can be done most things can but it can't be done in a realistic way. So the guy wants bigger forearms and now you've gone and brought Dave Mac into it, a man so tiny that I nearly stood on him at the wall. Stu, a man so tiny that I nearly stand on him every time I see him. Don't know serpico. Dan, a man so thin now they've started calling Bowie the fat white duke! Toms by far the biggest of this bunch, and he just looks like a normal guy, who I'll let off cos he's gotta drag a bit of muscle up with him.
So what I'm gonna do next is start a thread about how I slim down and get stamina and give people insights into this by quoting kook, who's huge. German heiko, who makes kook look tiny. Fuck it may as well get polish Dave in on it as well since he's a secret big bastard. What you've effectively done abarro is make your own question up and answered it yourself. We'll done, you've passed.
Oh and for the record Magnus is tiny as well, he just packs on muscle.

[abarro81]

Like I said, ignore anything Dense says 

[slackline]

Why not search all the sports science literature for scientific evidence? 

[shark]

Why not search all the sports science literature for scientific evidence? 

I think there are a couple of things that need disentangling. The first thing is that the finger strength we are are interested in is isometric finger strength and as this is irrelevant for all other sports the studies are limited. Then you have to distinguish between isometric max strength and intermittent isometric finger strength endurance which are both hugely important to climbing performance. This is further complicated by inequalities in performance on different grip types ie crimps, slopers, pinches.

Observably there are many climbers who have relatively skinny forearms but mutant max finger bouldering strength even factoring in their body mass. This leads me to believe that hypertrophy isnt that important for this type of strength so when Stu says you need to do a period of hypertrophy to provide a base to get stronger (ie make these bigger muscles recruit better) it doesn't ring true with me notwithstanding that repeaters as Dense says seems an unlikely way to stimulate hypertrophy in the first place. I suspect forearm size is more important for finger endurance and recovery.

It would be good to have a study that compared forearm size (circumference at the widest point) relative to body mass and compared standardised performance on max hangs and intermittent endurance to look for correlations but as we know our personal performance varies on all these things throughout the year.

[Johnny Brown]

Or you could just look around you and check if you're being burned off by folk with big forearms. No, me neither.

[Nibile]

We aint talking weights here.

I think that any time spent training for forearms hypertrophy would be better spent training finger strength over different prehensions.

achieving the later by doing the former

That's exactly what I meant. I agree with Alex here.

[shark]

Or you could just look around you and check if you're being burned off by folk with big forearms. No, me neither.

<cough> Body Machine <cough> 

[slackline]

A more specific search of Google Scholar....

Anthropometric and strength characteristics of world-class boulderers
ML Michailov, LV Mladenov, VR Schöffl - Medicina Sportiva, 2009 - Versita

Dynamic eccentric-concentric strength training of the finger flexors to improve rock climbing performance
A Schweizer, A Schneider, K Goehner - Isokinetics and exercise science, 2007 - IOS Press

Electrical and mechanical response of finger flexor muscles during voluntary isometric contractions in elite rock-climbers
F Esposito, E Limonta, E Cè, M Gobbo… - European journal of …, 2009 - Springer

Physiological determinants of climbing-specific finger endurance and sport rock climbing performance
D MacLeod, DL Sutherland, L Buntin… - Journal of sports …, 2007 - Taylor & Francis

...and so on.

I'm sure there are perfectly valid critiques (most will be small sample sizes in specific sub-groups) and aspects that these don't cover (but then science is a gradual process), but there appears to be at least some scientific work and literature out there.  Someone with the time and inclination could perhaps digest it all and write a review article for UKB on the wiki (it would at the very least serve as a good reference to point people to when these threads recur).

[shark]

I'm sure there are perfectly valid critiques (most will be small sample sizes in specific sub-groups) and aspects that these don't cover (but then science is a gradual process), but there appears to be at least some scientific work and literature out there.  Someone with the time and inclination could perhaps digest it all and write a review article for UKB on the wiki (it would at the very least serve as a good reference to point people to when these threads recur).

I volunteer Alex

[Johnny Brown]

Or you could just look around you and check if you're being burned off by folk with big forearms. No, me neither.

<cough> Body Machine <cough> 

And who's the massive forearmed bastard who burnt me off on that? I just saw skinny guys, mostly tall.

[shark]

Or you could just look around you and check if you're being burned off by folk with big forearms. No, me neither.

<cough> Body Machine <cough> 

And who's the massive forearmed bastard who burnt me off on that? I just saw skinny guys, mostly tall.

Maybe big forearms aren't even that useful for endurance then

[lagerstarfish]

I've obviously got the answer cos my forearms are massive.....

so are Alan Titchmarsh's

is this because you both like handling other people's plumbs?

[douglas]

Experimented with some barbell finger rolls after my deadlifting tonight. Definitely worthwhile. Has anyone got opinions on whether a pronate or supinate grip is best (palms in or out)?

[abarro81]

I volunteer Alex

Looked at a few papers on google but Shef Uni don't have access to most of them - you need someone at a uni that does sports science, and is used to looking through papers.

[spam]

To reply to the original question:

This ~8-10 rep up/down campus doubles workout seems like it could be adjusted to be in the ball park for the right duration to be a HYP workout for the forearms, while being fast-twitch/bouldering specific.  It also has the advantage of being straightfoward to track improvement.  Not a beginner routine though.

http://mountainproject.com/v/campus-video-power-training-that-doesnt-hurtcause-injury-/107251235#a_107254141

player.vimeo.com/video/27422533?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

[Jim]

looks like a good training routine to permanently fuck your elbows