Everybody wants to last longer, right? Your endurance is a major part of your climbing experience! While strength is a key factor to pull on holds, endurance is the way you stay on them and keep climbing.
Endurance doesn’t care whether you’ve warmed up properly, stretched your fingers and forearms, or if you’ve taken the last two days off from climbing—Your body will tell you just how much endurance you have once you start climbing.
Endurance doesn’t care whether you’ve warmed up properly, stretched your fingers and forearms, or if you’ve taken the last two days off from climbing—Your body will tell you just how much endurance you have once you start climbing.
Discover what climbing endurance is, the muscle groups used, techniques and training for lasting longer, and how to keep track of your progress and stay motivated with the information below!
Understanding Climbing Endurance: What It Really Means
Climbing endurance and general fitness are two different things and shouldn’t be lumped together. A V10 boulderer could have incredible fitness and power yet atrocious endurance. Many boulderers discover this, and, therefore, try to climb fast enough to “not let the pump catch up.” However, if you want to tackle longer routes or even sustain performance, you need to incorporate some endurance training. You may crush your hard boulder project, but can you even pull onto the wall after to climb something that should be well within your wheelhouse?
What exactly is “pump?” Pumped, or “wrecked”, “thrashed”, “done for”, are all ways to describe your level of endurance at the moment. A pumped climber is one with stiff forearms from gripping (contracting their muscles). These contractions squeeze the small arteries and veins running through the muscles, limiting the amount of fresh oxygen-rich blood entering and the waste-filled blood leaving.
Before proceeding, we also must acknowledge common misconceptions about endurance training in climbing. Many people think endurance training just means climbing longer routes. Instead, endurance training involves structured exercises that target specific energy systems, like the pump you get in your forearms. Strength is also incredibly important for good endurance. While you may equate endurance to not pumping out, as you should, you should also recognize that having a stronger foundation will reduce the relative load during each move you make.
On-the-Wall Training Techniques for Lasting Power
Have you heard of ARC training? You may have seen climbers in the gym doing it, even if you don’t know the science behind it. ARC training is commonly done on an autobelay, where the climber will climb up and down a route for a predetermined amount of time, but it can be done in a number of different ways. ARC training stands for aerobic restoration & capillarity training. The idea is to stimulate capillary growth (tiny blood vessels in your muscles), which improves oxygen delivery and waste removal. Neat, right?
A few endurance exercises you can perform are:
- Pyramids: Climbing a route or set of moves in increasing and then decreasing repetitions. For example, do 2 moves, rest, 4 moves, rest, then back down 4, then 2. Try to do this exercise with moves just below your onsight limit.
- Laps: Climbing a route at 50-60% of your limit for 15-30 mins at a time. Try to perform 3 sets of this exercise.
- Linked bouldering problems: These can be 4x4s, traversing, or just up and down boulder problems similar to laps on a route.
Remember that if you’re taking up space at the climbing gym for your workout, try to think of others. (Don’t traverse the entire bouldering area during peak climb times if there are many others trying to hop on the wall. Essentially, just be respectful!)
Try to focus on your breathing when performing these exercises. If you’re doing laps, establish a consistent pattern of inhales and exhales. When doing the quicker and punchier exercises, focus on breathing through the effort of each move.
Off-the-Wall Conditioning for Total Endurance
Consider working to improve your total endurance to help complement your climbing. While not all of these are climbing-specific exercises, the following will help you stay on the wall longer and improve your strength.
- Grip and forearm strength: Fingerboarding, pinch training, and wrist curls are all ways to increase your grip strength.
- Leg and push strength: Squats, lunges, and step-ups allow you to rely more on your legs when you’re climbing instead of holding on so tightly with your forearms, saving you some energy.
- Cardiovascular training: Running, rowing, cycling, or swimming are all great ways to increase your aerobic base, which improves oxygen delivery to your muscles.
While these exercises are great for complementing your climbing, consider adding in even more to help improve your overall endurance and fitness.
- Core exercises: Planks, hollow holds, hanging leg raises, and Russian twists are all ways to develop your core.
- Climbing-specific pulls: Pull-ups, weighted pull-ups, slow negatives, and lock-offs are all great ways to increase your pulling strength for climbing.
- Antagonist muscle training: Often overlooked, the antagonistic muscles are just as important as the most used muscles in climbing. Antagonist muscles include the chest, triceps, rear delts, rotator cuffs, and core opposites. Strengthening these is important because climbing mainly requires pulling, which can lead to muscle imbalances, causing joint pain and other injuries.
Exercises to improve your antagonistic muscle include: push-ups, dips, face pulls, reverse flys, rotator cuff external rotation, and back extensions.
Come Climb With Us!
Understanding climbing endurance is only half the battle. Once you understand why you get pumped, you can begin to work to improve your endurance through targeted exercises like ARC training. If those laps don’t sound too appealing, consider working on 4x4s on the boulder wall!
Remember, off-the-wall training can also drastically improve your climbing endurance and should be done just as religiously as wall training!
At the Rock Spot, we have everything you need for your endurance training adventure. Whether you’re looking to improve your grip strength, your antagonistic muscles, or your squat PR, we have what you need. Come check out our auto belays, massive bouldering area, full fitness area, hangboards, and more! Fill out a waiver online to speed up your check-in process—let’s get you training!
