If there is one thing that all climbers should be consistently training it’s finger strength. Like it or not, having strong fingers is important for all hard climbing and the single best way to train finger strength for climbing is on a hangboard.
Unfortunately, while we all agree on the direct correlation between hangboarding and climbing performance, this is about where our agreement on finger strength training methods stop. If you look back through the TrainingBeta Blog, you’ll see that we’ve posted numerous articles about hangboarding. Many of them suggest completely different protocols. Luckily, while there are many different ways to hangboard, if you follow some basic guidelines and are consistent with your training it’s hard to go wrong. Ultimately, the “best” fingerboard program is the one that you are actually going to stick to.
With this in mind, we thought we would share the top 5 hangboarding articles from the TrainingBeta Blog. This way, if you are new to hangboarding or are looking to reevaluate your training all the information that people found most helpful is together in one place.
Top 5 Hangboarding Articles:
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Mark and Mike Anderson’s Guide to Hangboard Training
- “Everyone could use greater finger strength – it can overcome many other weaknesses. While technical skill is incredibly important in climbing, as you improve, you will inevitably be limited by finger strength. While some routes can be finessed, there are many that simply cannot be climbed without a decent serving of brute force.”“Besides the ability to pull on small holds, increased strength improves endurance as well. By raising one’s strength ceiling, a move that previously may have required 80 percent effort might only require 70 percent effort in the future, resulting in less fatigue over a sequence of moves.” – Mike and Mark Anderson
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Jonathan Siegrist: Review of 3 Hangboards
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“What I look for in a hangboard is pretty simple.”
- “I want a board that has bad holds – the point is that these holds are hard to hold onto.”
- “I want a board that has a wide variety of grips to train – not just jugs and and a novelty sloper.”
- “Lastly I want a board with good texture that I can both imagine spending hours hanging on and not ruin my skin.” – Jonathan Siegrist
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6 Tips to Make A Hangboard Session More Tolerable
- “How do we make fingerboarding less like waterboarding and more like fun? After all, even though we know we need to do it to get stronger, if it’s laborious and time-consuming, we’re going to make up any excuse to not do it. So…”“Here are 6 tips to make a hangboard session more awesome.”“Well, at least less awful.” – Neely Quinn
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Tom Lindner’s Climbing Training Tripod Beta
- “If you’ve spent time living on the road, you know sometimes it feels hard to keep progressing in climbing while you’re traveling. Or maybe motivating to hangboard is hard for you because your hangboard is in your garage or basement and it’s gloomy?”“Ready for this? A solution. A way to hangboard outside and while you’re on the road. A way to transport your hangboard and/or pull-up bar and set it up wherever you have the space.” – Katy Dannenberg
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Fingerboard and Campus Board for Beginners
- “Recently we received a question from a beginner climber who was interested in using our bouldering program. However, he was concerned that the program’s fingerboard and campus board workouts would put him at risk of injury since he is newer to climbing.”“Here at Training Beta we are obviously all about training and training hard. However, we are also really concerned with doing so safely and preventing injury. So to help any novice climbers out there who are looking for advice on how to begin training we decided to post Seth’s response to this question.” – Matt Pincus
More Finger Strength Training:
Well, there you have it. Above are the top 5 articles on the TrainingBeta Blog that relate to finger strength. However, if you are looking to take all the guess work out of your hangboarding, then be sure to check out our Finger Strength Training Programs.
There’s a beginner, intermediate, and advanced program. So, no matter what your climbing level or training experience looks like, there’s a program that will help you systematically increase your finger strength over a 5-week period. Check them out!
(cover photo courtesy of Matt Pincus | @mpincus87)
