Opposing Muscle Strength

Opposing muscles are the muscles that you do not use while climbing but are used to stabilize joints and move them in the opposite direction. Training your opposing muscles is very important when training strength to prevent injuries and to improve the strength of you climbing muscles. When strengthening your opposing muscles you are stretching the muscle fibers of your climbing muscles and that will allow them to be able to contract more, thus giving them more strength. These muscles can be strengthened at the end of a workout and will not affect your workout.

Some of the opposing muscles and strength training drills are:

Back of Your Forearms

The muscles on the back of your forearm are generally very weak compared to your muscles on the front of your forearms. This can lead to wrist problems because the wrist joint is not stabilized properly.

To strengthen the muscles on the back of your forearm there are several good drills.

Reverse wrist curls where you keep your palms facing the floor and curl your hand back towards your elbow. This can be done with or without weight, or by rolling a weight up with a broom handle or something similar.

Pushing and opening your hands in sand. This is great for constant resistance throughout a range of motion. Place a closed hand in a pile of sand and push down and out with your fingers as you open your hand.

Just opening your hand and extending your fingers as far as possible. Try to keep the back of your hand in line with your forearm as you do this. This one is good because it can be done anywhere; at school, in a car, or even at the dinner table.

Triceps

While triceps are used alot when climbing they are not as used as often as your biceps and this can lead to elbow problems. Triceps are easy to strengthen. Chair dips, pushups, and tricep presses are all ways of strengthening these muscles. Not only that but stronger triceps will increase the range of motion in your lockoffs.

Lower Back

Look at the core strength section for some drills to strengthen your lower back.

Hand Strength

Hand Strength

Hand strength is the ability to clamp down on holds. It can be defined as contact
strength (slopers), crimp strength, pocket strength, or pinch strength. Each type of grip requires different recruitment of the muscles in your forearms, and this requires practice.

Holding a sloper requires a different amount of contraction than holding a pocket. Training on just slopers will improve your contract strength but may not help you on a steep wall with small crimpers. The trick is to train on many different hold types and to understand what your limits are. You don't want to climb slopers all evening and then try and crimp near the end. Injuries occur most often when you are tired and you try to push yourself on small holds.

You will probably want to start a general training session (after warming up) by climbing less steep, crimpier routes then moving towards larger holds (slopers and incut, open handed holds).

If you are a very strong crimper but cannot hold slopers then you may want to focus on just slopers for a period of time, thus sacrificing some of your crimp strength to become a better all around climber. The same applies for the other type of grips as well.

In addition to just climbing on different hold types there are also lots of drills that you can do to improve your hand strength:

Weighted hangs

Weighted hangs is an incredibly effective drill for increasing hand strength, when done correctly. If done incorrectly you can easily harm yourself so it is best to start out slow and progress as you feel comfortable. In order to do weighted hangs you will need various different grip types and some way of adding weight to your body (attaching a diving belt, weight vests, backpack of rocks...). Start with little or no weight and try and dead hang some of the different grips, you can switch between one or two handed dead hangs if you want more difficulty. Determine which grips are your weakest and which are your strongest. You should be able to hang from the grips for at least 10 seconds before adding any weight. On the grips that you can hold for more than 10 seconds you can start to add weight, increasing the amount until you can only dead hang the holds for 8-12 seconds.

Select three different grip types and do three sets of 8-12 second hangs on each grip
type. Rest one minute between sets and three to five minutes between grips. You can do other exercises between the sets to decrease the amount of time required to complete the drills (perhaps some core strength drills).

Hit Strips

Hit strips are a drill designed by Eric Horst and described in his book "How to climb
5.12" and more information can be found here... http://www.nicros.com/training/articles/h-i-t-workout-details/

System Board

A system board is a "woody" covered with different grips strategically placed at varying angles and difficulty. The nice thing about a system board is that you move your feet as you adjust your hand grips so you are actually climbing and practicing climbing movements. To train hand strength focus more on smaller holds than big moves and moving slowly between the holds.