Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Warm Up Exercises and Stretches For Rock Climbing


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As with any form of sport or exercise it is incredibly important to warm up and stretch appropriately before rock climbing. Too many rock climbers make the amateur mistake of not warming up or stretching properly before climbing and this can potentially be very dangerous and extremely limiting on their ability to climb with their full potential.

Doing the appropriate stretches before, during and after climbing will help you to climb better, climb longer, reduce the risk of injury and enhance the recovery time for your muscles following a climbing session.

Below we have listed a number of warm up exercises and stretches for the different areas of the body to help you improve your climbing sessions and also to decrease the risk of damage:

Before Climbing

Before you do any stretching you must warm up your body. The obvious way to do this is to find a straightforward bouldering route on a wall and climb this for about 5 minutes. You shouldn’t feel tired and you also shouldn’t really be breaking a sweat because all you really need to do is increase your heartrate and get the blood pumping around the body. You definitely don’t want to feel pumped in your arms and you ought to come off the wall should your arms start to feel tight and try one of the other up exercises below.

This is a small sample of a full article, click here to see the full post

http://climbingthings.com/warm-up-exercises-and-stretches-for-rock-climbing

Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Leg Strength Training For Rock Climbing


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Footwork is easily the main aspect of improving a climbers strategy and having strong legs is totally crucial to converting this technique to power the upper body.

It is beneficial to focus on single leg strength to allow each leg to produce individually to replicate real ascending situations this will also allow you to develop any imbalances between your legs and may prevent one leg relying for the other.

Here we will list some exercises to assist you to build the strength in your own legs. Most of these can be carried out either at home or inside gym.

This is only a sample! Click here to see the full article on our main website!

Improving core strength for climbing


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Building core strength is important to guarantee the communication between the upper and also lower body. This is important for climbing as footwork is essential to good technique as is transferring this technique to the upper body.

This only ever becomes more noticeable as climbers advance into steeper routes and overhangs.

Keeping your body near to the wall is crucial to success on steep routes and many climbers fail. This is caused by a blend of bad technique and also poor core strength.

Other more advanced routes will need put even more focus on advanced footwork techniques. This can easily usually mean heel hooks and also toe hooks. For the most part, core strength will enable you to maximize the strength from the lower body.

We are going to show you some core strength exercises you can do either at home or inside climbing gym to help increase your core strength:

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http://climbingthings.com/improving-core-strength-for-climbing/

Building Arm Strength for Climbing


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Creating a well balanced overall strength is vital for climbing. Having strong biceps and triceps is favorable for good climbing method. You don’t want to be stuck because you can’t perform your next move because you don’t contain the arm strength to push or pull your body.

However, arm strength is generally considered to be less important than improving areas of the climbers body for instance finger strength or improving method. This is especially true for novices or relative newcomers to the experience who are looking to enhance their climbing ability.

Once you learn to move onto the more challenging, inverted climbs, then this is where you will need to improve on your body in addition to arm strength as gripping the actual holds becomes secondary to a chance to pull on them.

Building arm strength for climbing is mainly based around two specific regions:

- Forearm or Lower Equip Strength

- Bicep, Triceps or Upper Arm Strength

We are going to check out exercises to strengthen these a couple areas of the arm absolutely help improve your climbing ability.

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http://climbingthings.com/building-arm-strength-for-climbing/

How to construct Upper Body Strength For Rising


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Upper body strength is a vital element of rock climbing. Building body strength will enhance the endurance, precision and technique with the climber which all combine to build the overall climbing package.

Improving upper body strength

Obviously, as any experienced climber will tell you, the best way for beginners to improve strength for climbing is to climb regularly and to constantly challenge yourself and build in your ability. There are also techniques as well as exercises that advanced climbers incorporate the use of to improve the effectiveness and intensity with their climbing gym workouts.

If you can’t regularly get to the climbing gym, then we are going to show you how you is able to do exercises at home to improve your upper body strength.

Upper body strength may be grouped into two main physical exercise groups.

- Pulling exercises

-- Pushing exercises

Pulling exercises

Pulling exercises engage the muscles mainly in your back and you'll be able to imagine why it is important to build strength in this region of the body. Pulling exercises are such things as rows and pull ups. There is some discussion regarding the effectiveness of standard pull ups and many people believe that pull ups are certainly not effective for climbers or as realistic for an actual climbing situation as horizontal rows (or inverted rows).

This makes sense if you feel about it, try and imagine a time period whilst climbing that you realistically needed to train on a vertical pull up motion.

Usually the only times you'll want to engage your upper body on its own without the help of your lower body is with overhanging rock or surfaces. Using proper technique means that you simply generally don’t have to pull the body directly vertical as with an ordinary pull up but more horizontally like this of the inverted row (see online video below).

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http://climbingthings.com/upper-body-strength-for-climbing/

Increase Your Climbing Finger Strength


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It’s obvious to anyone that will building strength in the fingers is just about the most important (if not by far the most important) areas to build strength on the body of a climber.

Regardless how strong your back, chest, arms along with your core is, if you can’t hold onto the wall, then none of those other things mean anything since you can’t climb the route!

An absence of finger strength usually becomes a lot more prominent as climbers advance throughout skill and general overall power, their route grade increases and thus the hand holds become typically smaller. It is then when climbers have a tendency to start to train finger power using isolated exercises.

In fact, the best time to start off training your finger strength is as soon as possible!

Even beginner climbers should start off doing some basic exercises to boost finger strength in preparation for if they start to reach the larger grades.

So where do I commence with improving my finger strength?



We’ve all seen those videos of the people doing one-finger pull-ups. Naturally that isn’t the place for you to start…

The key to building ascending strength in any particular perhaps the body is to choose a place that is lacking and stay with that one body part. If you're trying to improve a large amount of different areas, then you aren’t likely to excel in any one particular area at any time.

As with most power building for climbing, the best starting point training finger strength is on the wall.

Follow these tips for an easy way to start building strength in your fingers:

1. Make sure to stretch and heat up properly as you would commonly before climbing

2. Find a route your local gym or wall you find fairly challenging to ascend.

3. Make sure that a superb majority of the holds are challenging on your own fingers and are not huge, easy hand holds.

Make sure that you aren’t experiencing any pain if you grip onto them since you can very easily damage the tendons in your fingers which could put you out of action for months.

4. Continue doing this until you can’t physically hold onto the wall any longer.

5. Repeat 2-3 times every week

The idea behind finding the low-stress repeatable exercise is that you'll slowly build up enough strength in your fingers to move onto the more state-of-the-art techniques.

If you do this exercise had to have 4-6 weeks you should go to the noticeable increase in strength.

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http://climbingthings.com/improve-your-climbing-finger-strength/

How to improve your rock climbing technique in 5 easy steps


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For climbers, technique is the most important aspect to spotlight. Regardless of strength, body fat and gear, a climber’s technique will make all the difference when on the rock or in the gymnasium.

Obviously those other things still element in, but not as much as technique. We all see those individuals at the gym who appear to climb routes with absolutely zero effort. They make it look easy, then when you give it a go yourself, you can’t understand the reason it’s so incredibly hard!

The reason being that other climber has their particular technique perfected. Sure, they often have more body strength than you and they also may have better gear, they rely on their technique to utilize those other things to their full potential also to bring them together into 1 neat package. And you can do the same!

We are going to list a number of the core techniques below, try them out and see should they don’t improve your climbing even just a little!

Now obviously, there are main features for traditional climbing techniques, sport climbing techniques, bouldering techniques, static ascending techniques, dynamic climbing techniques and alpine climbing techniques but we should go over those in more detail in other articles for each and every climbing style.

For now, we will focus on techniques that will assist your overall climbing technique no matter where you climb.

How to improve your mountain climbing technique in 5 easy measures.

Please remember that these techniques are made to help your climbing technique and it is assumed that you already know the basics of climbing safety. Do not attempt all of these techniques if you are uncertain about proper climbing safety as well as seek professional guidance!

Step 1. - Remember the feet.

The biggest mistake that a smaller amount experienced climbers make is that they don’t use their footwork correctly. The feet and legs include the support system of the physique and improving foot technique could possibly be the key to improving your total climbing ability.

Here are some mistakes that folks often make when climbing and clues that they have to improve their footwork:

- If you climb indoors a lot, you will probably find that you will only use footholds you consider to be ‘big enough’ in contrast to the smaller holds. This can be bad whenever you move outdoors as you could find yourself on a route with tiny footholds in comparison with those you would find inside a gym.

- New climbers usually not trust their feet or their shoes enough. They don’t think that the rubber on their shoes will hold them on the more sloped or smaller keeps. This is obviously not true generally and this technique relies on weight and centre of gravity.

- Less experienced climbers will tend to be a lot more noisy and so are not precise with their feet all of which will often bang and scrape these people on the wall to cause them to become the next foothold. This shows they've already bad foot technique and aren't thinking properly about the route that they're climbing. It goes without saying that this is bad practice.

Tips to boost your foot technique

Because your legs are obviously a lot stronger than your arms, you should try and figure out how to use your legs to the top of their ability wherever possible, here are some tips to boost your footwork:

- Before an individual climb the route, visualize where you'll put your feet as well as the hands. Think about how you can place your feet to assist you with your hand placement. – If you are on the wall look down at the feet reguarly, especially when you might be about to make your following move. Think if there is a move you possibly can make with your feet that can help make your next handhold shift easier.

- Trust your sneakers. Your climbing shoes are designed with sticky rubber, some shoes are stickier than others but every climbing shoe is designed to stick to the wall. Normally, people will be afraid to trust their shoes to begin with, but gradually learn to put excess fat onto your feet and attempt to let the rubber hold someone to the smaller or more sloped keeps. This is a critical thing to get used to and learn as if you want to climb more advanced routes sometime soon, footholds will require a much more trust.

- Wear the right climbing shoes! Make sure that your shoes are befitting your foot and for the climbing that you'll be doing. Your shoes don’t necessarily must be mega tight, but if these are sloppy and baggy on the feet, then you aren’t going to get any purchase on the smaller holds along with your overall technique will suffer big-time.

Click here to read our guide on selecting the right climbing shoes to suit your needs

- Be as precise as possible with your foot placement. It is important to be deliberate with where an individual put your feet as this will help you to maximize their effort and stop your arms from tiring too rapidly, which is essential for extended climbs.

Click here for the full article
http://climbingthings.com/how-to-improve-your-rock-climbing-technique-in-5-easy-steps/