Strength training

[juliet]

I'm increasingly aware when climbing that one of the things causing me difficulty is that I don't have much upper body strength.

This was particularly brought home today, at the Arch, when I read the instructions about how to use their thing-above-a-doorframe-you-hang-on. "Hang with your arms slightly bent for 5 seconds", it said. I couldn't pull myself up sufficiently to do this. (I don't do quite as badly as this when actually climbing; but I've never been able to, say, do a pull-up.)

Will this just improve as I carry on climbing (she asks hopefully; to be fair, it has improved already), or should I be doing something more specific? Any suggestions? Things I can do at home would be good (if I pull myself up on the doorframe, will I hurt the doorframe?) as currently it is just too hideously embarrassing to try anything like that in public.

At least my legs are OK (lots of cycling!).

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Belated thought -- if you fancy doing a bit of strength work at home:

As well as the pull-ups, one thing that's often recommended is to do a bit of work on the muscles that are antagonists to the ones you use in climbing; this balances things out and reduces the risk of overuse injuries.

The basic principle is to do stuff that works the "push" muscles of the arms and shoulders, e.g. push-ups and shoulder presses.

(Then there's more specific antagonist stuff to fix elbow tendonitis, but it's better to skip this by not getting the tendonitis in the first place.)