max hangs (puntery) question

Doing at least 2 max hang sessions per week at the moment in the hope of maintaining or maybe even gaining a bit of grip streng. Can't remember exactly why but I'm doing 5 or 6 sets of 10 sec hangs with 3 mins between sets (well 2min50secs actually). First set feels relatively steady but typically failing around the 6/7sec mark on later sets. Feels like if I rested longer between sets I could probably knock out the full 5 or 6 x 10 secs... So, to maximise benefit, what would general wisdom be?
a) don't change anything, near enough
b) stick to 3 mins between sets but reduce weight a bit so completing more/all sets to full 10s
c) stick with current added weight but increase rest time between sets to help complete more/all sets to full 10s

My suggestion and it's a suggestion that I make because many coach types have made it to me is that for max hangs you want max effort per hang so you can cause maximum overload and therefore you should rest for as long as you need to ensure every hang is of maximum quality.

Personally I don't have a set rest time but like, I probably rest for at least 5 mins per set. And that's true of all the strength training I do, just rest as long as I need.

Wellsy said:

My suggestion and it's a suggestion that I make because many coach types have made it to me is that for max hangs you want max effort per hang so you can cause maximum overload and therefore you should rest for as long as you need to ensure every hang is of maximum quality.

Personally I don't have a set rest time but like, I probably rest for at least 5 mins per set. And that's true of all the strength training I do, just rest as long as I need.

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Agreed. Extend your rests to 4-5 mins and you’ll see a huge difference in quality on your later sets

Classic sign of going too close to failure early on.

The strength adaptation from stopping 2-3 reps (or seconds in the case of hangs) short of failure is about the same as going all the way to failure. The benefits of working at a lower intensity are: (a) reducing injury risk, (b) reducing fatigue and the impact on your climbing, or (c) allowing for a higher volume of training and potentially more gains.

In weightlifting/powerlifting they rarely go to failure.

So out of your options I'd go with (b). You should be able to increase the load over time (I.e. get stronger) whilst stopping short of failure.

Without knowing anything about this really, from chatting with the person who did my little training plan you don’t need to go to failure for strength gains.

So I did my max hang test but then did 2-3 sessions a week between 80% and 90% of the “total weight” - I.e. added weights + body weight at the time.

It allowed me to keep good form for all six 10s hangs, but still had to try hard and got notable strength gains from it over an 8 week period. I really liked this as it didn’t feel like I was pushing close to injury at all.

James Malloch said:

Without knowing anything about this really, from chatting with the person who did my little training plan you don’t need to go to failure for strength gains.

So I did my max hang test but then did 2-3 sessions a week between 80% and 90% of the “total weight” - I.e. added weights + body weight at the time.

It allowed me to keep good form for all six 10s hangs, but still had to try hard and got notable strength gains from it over an 8 week period. I really liked this as it didn’t feel like I was pushing close to injury at all.

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Dave Mac shared a study about this on his Insta. You can get significant strength gains from doing hangs at 80% effort, but you get even more significant gains at 100% effort. The 100% effort hang did not improve endurance but the 60% and 80% did so there is a trade off. It is also good to note that with good form doing a 100% load max hang is very safe.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CcSWLPFqYuc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I'd say the key phrase there is 'Good Form'. Yeah you can get better results from that but most people probably won't have good form when they're getting towards the end of their sets and are opening themselves up to injury.

In my opinion it's better to train safer, more regularly than risk injury especially when you're just starting out. As you get more experience and awareness with how you react to the exercises you can push closer to the max effort.

Hey Steve, is this 2 armed? I'm usually on 1 arm and use a 2 minute clock (so 1.50 rest) for max hangs, but am alternating arms so it's a 4 min clock for the same arm (ignoring the 10s in the middle where it's holding the assistance on a pulley). That's just based on the balance between recovery and boredom, but you could try going up to 4 min anyway.

As ever, if you're doing something and making gains then I wouldn't worry too much, and when the gains stop you can mix it up and try something different for a few months. If you did want to change something, I think going to a 4 min rest and possibly dropping the weight slightly would be worth trying, then if you complete all sets you could always start to ramp the weight back up. Incidentally, my best gains on a fingerboard seem to have come when I've given myself a bit of a "run up" to my max i.e. deliberately started back at a protocol at a slightly cautious weight and then been able to steadily ramp up each week - for me this seems to work better than jumping straight in at my max for that protocol.

CapitalistPunter said:

Dave Mac shared a study about this on his Insta[...]

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I wouldn't read much into the study. When you boil it down it's entirely unsurprising that doing 6s max hangs (and for many this appears to be in the form of an overcoming isometric) for four weeks makes you feel good on a short overcoming isometric. The trouble with this type of study is that it answers a questions that no-one really asks and that you can guess a bunch of the answers to fairly easily. The real question is what works well in the long run, e.g. if you did 16 weeks of that vs 12 weeks of the 80% protocol followed by 4 weeks of the 100% protocol which would work better on that MVC test. (Also I don't like their 80% protocol, I would be much more interested if they split the repeaters up more like an an cap or Andersons session).

CapitalistPunter said:

It is also good to note that with good form doing a 100% load max hang is very safe.

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I assume you mean doing your X second max load for, say X-3 or X-5 seconds (e.g. your 10s max load for 7s)? I can't comprehend how anyone can try at truly 100% without losing "form" in some way. I also suspect that most people doing, say, a 10s hang will think of their "max" as their 10s max in that context, not their 5s max. Obviously what is "very safe" depends hugely on who you are, what grip type you're using, your history of - and propensity to - injury, your recent training history etc. I don't think blanket statements like that are useful or stand up to any scrutiny. Sub-max hangs at say 80-90% of max (for that given hang time) and staying away from failure seem significantly less tweaky to me than going to true max (or going to 100% effort at 80% of max as per Anderson sessions).

With 100% effort I mean tye max amount of can possibably hang for 5-7 seconds before your hand uncurls and loses form. Also you need to make sure you you pull slowly into the the hang, rather than jump and shock. Do those things and it should be hard to get injured unless you are doing some weird shit with your shoulders.

Like I said, I can't really conceive of trying at my 100% for a hang without losing form. The two are inherently incompatible for me, perhaps I'm the outlier here but it doesn't make sense to me, almost by definition. 95% yes, 100% no.

From the rest of your comment I can only assume that either you're young and not injury prone or you don't like to train a wide variety of grip types. Show me someone who doesn't find a difference in tweakyness between a 10s hang at 80-90% vs at 100% and my bet is it's someone with limited history of injury... Show me someone who finds that true on a mono and my bet is they're lying.

I can assure you that
"Do those things and it should be hard to get injured" is a very stupid thing to say without all the qualifiers and caveats I mentioned about injury propensity, training history etc.

abarro81 said:

Hey Steve, is this 2 armed?

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Yeah 2 armed. Previously I've always done max hang stuff 1 armed and typically to failure CWP style (probably unwise for me) but thought I'd try something different since I've got the weights and set up to do it at the moment. Thanks a lot for the replies. I'll back off a good bit by reducing weight, extending rests between sets and focussing on form. Like the idea of having a good run up.

Good posts Barrows. It should go without saying that max effort will come with some loss of form. There is absolutely no way that people have the same shoulder position doing a warm up hang with no weight as they do with 30kg hanging off them if 30kg is their absolute maximum. If 95%ax maybe they'd stand a chance.

If anything, identifying at what point I start to lose form is a reasonable indicator of where my max is.

Regarding the study Dave Mac shared I'm not surprised 100% did a bit better than 80%. The strength training literature I've seen suggests 85-90% is optimal. I'd bet if they repeated at those intensities the results would be close to the failure group.

Loads at somewhere between 80% and 90% are required to recruit all available motor units depending on subject, if I remember correctly. The cut-off is often set at 85% in vulgarisations of the scientific literature. (I have very slow internet today, so no googling...). We can also recruit all available muscle units by going to failure; towards the end of the set all units will be briefly loaded.

Training for larger muscle cells can off course be done at much lower loads as size increases are triggered by mechanical loading rather than recruitment, but a short-term training program to increase max strength should somehow be constructed to make sure that all units are loaded. This is usually done by using high load (≈85% of max) and not going to failure. Using 100% is tweaky and not guaranteed any better results than the normal 85-90% for max strength.

Excuse the daft question. When people talk about X% effort, are you all referring to the same thing? Do you mean a perceived percentage of the effort applied in a hang to failure(qualitative)? Or are you measuring 100%, i.e. time at which you fail for a given load, and then hanging for X% of that time (quantitative)?

Bonjoy said:

Excuse the daft question. When people talk about X% effort, are you all referring to the same thing? Do you mean a perceived percentage of the effort applied in a hang to failure(qualitative)? Or are you measuring 100%, i.e. time at which you fail for a given load, and then hanging for X% of that time (quantitative)?

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I think it’s more a percentage of how much you can hang. So say you’re max hang (100%) is +40kg - if you’re hanging 90% you would hang 36kg instead. That’s usually what I’m told to do when doing 90% effort.

Can't speak for others, but I would mean quantarive, but weight varied not time. If I was talking about perceived effort I would always say RPE

Carliios said:

Bonjoy said:

Excuse the daft question. When people talk about X% effort, are you all referring to the same thing? Do you mean a perceived percentage of the effort applied in a hang to failure(qualitative)? Or are you measuring 100%, i.e. time at which you fail for a given load, and then hanging for X% of that time (quantitative)?

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I think it’s more a percentage of how much you can hang. So say you’re max hang (100%) is +40kg - if you’re hanging 90% you would hang 36kg instead. That’s usually what I’m told to do when doing 90% effort.

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Disagree with this though, the percentage should be of the total weight, so in your example if you weighed 70kg the total is 110kg, and 90% is 99kg, or +29kg

Duma said:

Carliios said:

Bonjoy said:

Excuse the daft question. When people talk about X% effort, are you all referring to the same thing? Do you mean a perceived percentage of the effort applied in a hang to failure(qualitative)? Or are you measuring 100%, i.e. time at which you fail for a given load, and then hanging for X% of that time (quantitative)?

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I think it’s more a percentage of how much you can hang. So say you’re max hang (100%) is +40kg - if you’re hanging 90% you would hang 36kg instead. That’s usually what I’m told to do when doing 90% effort.

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Disagree with this though, the percentage should be of the total weight, so in your example if you weighed 70kg the total is 110kg, and 90% is 99kg, or +29kg

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Not sure what other coaches do but this is how we prescribe load at lattice.

I mean % of the maximum weight you can hang for a specified time (e.g. my 5s max might be bodyweight on 1 arm on the Lattice edge, or 10s max might be BW minus a few kgs).

Duma is obviously right on his maths too