I’ll start by reminding readers that climbing is no different than any other sport. I know we all love the semi-arrogant suggestion that climbing is a “skill sport,” but if you’ve ever tried to hit a baseball or dodge a kick to the face or drop into a half-pipe, you can appreciate just how skill-based those other sports are too. One of the problems with the “skill sport” suggestion is that it paradoxically complicates the way that climbers think about training, driving a lot of climbers to do random skill-based strength exercises with their training time rather than simply practicing the skill (i.e. climbing). The goal of this article series is to convince the reader that doing random exercises will produce random results, and to demonstrate that supplemental strength training is a way of improving our ability to generate and recruit strength while climbing.

Athletes from all sports can benefit from strength training

All sports involve multi-joint, multi-directional tasks that require a number of muscles working in synch to produce a powerful yet smooth and efficient movement. Because multi-joint tasks coordinate many muscles and tendons, we never use only one muscle group, which means that no muscle group gets overloaded to its maximum intensity. That last statement is the primary justification for supplemental strength training: It allows us to expose the tissues we rely on for our sport to a stress greater than the sport itself.

Strength training must involve progressive overload to be effective

If you stop and ask yourself why you’re strength training in the first place, you’ll probably say one of the following things: (1) to climb harder; (2) to reduce injury risk. The good news is that strength training can achieve both if done correctly. That’s because these two outcomes result from the same thing: progressive overload. Both the concept and the application of progressive overload are simple. Over some time, usually months to years, you expose the tissues to a progressively more intense load. As a result, the tissues have a greater “envelope of function.”

I like to use the gas tank analogy: the more gas you have in the tank (i.e. the stronger you are) the greater distance you can travel (i.e. the more climbing moves you can do) and the more roads you can travel on (i.e. the harder the moves can be). But in order for the strength to translate to climbing, you also need to practice your skills on a climbing wall. Remember the following few lines if you need to remember only one thing from this article: Refrain from approaching strength training with the mindset that increasing strength will automatically increase your climbing grade, because it won’t. Instead, approach strength training with the mindset that strength training improves both the quality and quantity of climbing practice. It allows you to practice harder movements with more control and consistency.

Strength training exercises are NOT SPECIFIC—their adaptations are

There are five main adaptations to training. As we run through each adaptation, I challenge you to think about it in the context of the movements you’ve done or seen climbers do.

Coordination. The initial adaptation to exercise is coordination. You must become coordinated with an exercise before gaining anything else from it. This is especially true for less stable exercises such as rings, TRX, balls, etc. If there’s too much coordination demand, almost all the adaptation you’re gaining is getting good at the skill. But don’t be confused by that last sentence: The coordination adaptation is so specific to the skill that we shouldn’t expect it to transfer to climbing, even if the “movement pattern” seems to match what we do on the wall. It is simply different.

Recruitment. After the coordination adaptation comes increased muscular recruitment, specifically of high-threshold motor units, which is what will actually help improve our climbing. To train recruitment properly, we must increase the intensity of the exercise to recruit the largest and fastest fibers in a muscle group. The science is clear that recruitment increases best with stable exercise (bench press), not unstable exercise (rings or TRX), because even though unstable exercises feel intense, that perception of intensity does not directly reflect muscle recruitment. The important thing to note here is that recruitment gains will transfer directly to rock climbing even if the exercise doesn’t resemble climbing. If we teach our brains to communicate with more fibers in a muscle group, we will have access to those fibers when we climb. That works great so long as we are maximizing recruitment levels and not simply changing our perception of effort by doing less stable exercises that take our bodies a long time to coordinate to.

Hypertrophy. Another adaptation with long-term strength training is hypertrophy changes—i.e.changes in muscle size. These increased size changes come with the additional benefit of increased energy storage for climbing practice. This change in muscle size is real-time capacity building. I would even go so far to say that building muscle size is way more productive long-term than doing year-round capacity training on the wall. Too much on-the-wall capacity training can be a real power suck for climbing athletes. A very sneaky fact about low-intensity, high-volume exercise is that they are quite fatiguing for the system and run many climbers into a cycle of overuse injuries which can be avoided with better strength training.

Tissue stiffness. One of the most important adaptations to proper strength training is changes in connective tissue stiffness. There is a limited amount of science on connective tissue responses to loading; however, we know these stiffness changes happen due to qualitative (material) changes to the tissue, not quantitative (size-based) changes. The science currently suggests that slow, heavy loading over long periods improves the quality of tendons and ligaments. From the tendon’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter how it gets the load, which means you can choose the exercise of your preference; it only matters that it gets the load regularly. If we contrast heavy and slow strength training with light and fast training (i.e. light weight, fast movements, high reps), the latter does not load the tendon adequately to create an adaptive response. Tendons respond best to properly dosed (progressive) heavy loads.

Power. The final adaptation I want to cover is how strength training makes you more powerful. You may have heard the old adage that you should “train strength before speed,” and that’s still best practice today. That statement concerns multiple adaptations we’ve already covered, but it is important to tie them together here. By activating the fast twitch fibers with strength training, we can access more fibers that naturally contract fast (power). First, however, we’d need to coordinate them at the speed of our sport (this is the subject of the third article in this series, which will be released next month). Then, by making the tendons stiffer, we can shorten the joint at the rate of the muscle. Finally, all we need to do to gain a power increase is do more powerful movements (mostly climbing) on and off the wall. So the final specific adaptation to strength training is that it gives us the ability to increase our power output.

In Part II I’ll discuss how to implement a simple strength training regimen and provide an easy-to-follow 13-week sample plan. Read it here.

• Related: Are Most Climbers Getting Fingerboard Training Wrong?

Dr. Tyler Nelson is the owner and content creator for Camp4 Human Performance (@c4hp). For the last seven years, he’s been exclusively writing about and managing climbing injuries for athletes around the globe. His home base is in Salt Lake City, UT (USA climbing headquarters), where he does a lot of diagnostic ultrasounds, consulting and programming, performance testing, and writing for the climbing community.

While in chiropractic school, he completed a dual master’s degree in exercise science, emphasizing tendon loading and rehabilitation. This interest has led him to challenge the status quo with climbing training. He wants to better educate climbers and coaches about the rationale behind training interventions. He firmly believes that our sport moving forwards requires this nuanced approach.

In addition to his work as a physician and coach, Tyler enjoys playing the guitar, skateboarding with his boys, bouldering, and trad climbing with his daughter.