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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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LG, I think rings are excellent for some things, but there are certainly exercises I'd stay away from if shoulder problems are a concern. Two that come to mind are the hanging position in skin the cat and the back lever (see http://www.drillsandskills.com/article/17 for descriptions and photos). Dips and muscle-ups might also be problematic, because there is a tendency to lean way forward, and if you are too low when you do this, your shoulders will take a beating.
If dips and muscleups are on the agenda, then set your rings at first so that you press from a standing position on the ground, and very gradually raise the rings as you get stronger.
The surgical tubing I mentioned in the pullup manifesto was originally employed by gymnasts on the rings to learn iron crosses. It is just as effective for muscleups and front levers. You don't tie it to anything, you just drape it through the rings and then grasp on top of the tubing. But this makes it somewhat difficult to get your foot or feet in the foot loop (latex tubing has astonishing stretch; you use very short loops for training). Really the only solution before muscleups are comfortable is to stand on a stool so that you can step into support position. From there, get your foot or feet in the foot loop and then lower down to a full hang to do your exercise.
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divad
Trad climber
wmass
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Pull-ups have helped me do more pull-ups.
I haven't read the whole thread, so someone might have said this already.
I would think that out of 80 posts, someone would have.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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It's hard to improve on the excellent treatise by rgold. All I can add is that I never did more than 25 consecutive pull-ups, and stopped doing that many 56 years ago. For a number of years I would warm up with only 5. I don't think anyone benefits by doing big numbers. At 73 I warm up with a comfortable 10, then do a few additional bodyweight things. But I do these only because I like doing them, rather than keeping in some sort of climbing shape. In general, pull-ups will help some climbers and will be of no help to others. Depends on genetics, anatomy, etc. Be wary of still ring exercises - they are great fun, but you wouldn't want my arthritic shoulders as you age! The strength exercises I did 50 years ago were appropriate for that time, but there are many more climbing-specific feats available for today's high levels of difficulty.
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Hardman Knott
Gym climber
Muir Woods National Monument, Mill Valley, Ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 9, 2010 - 03:25pm PT
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If I can get up off the couch at 73 - let alone do 10 pull-ups - I'll be really stoked.
Badass!!!!!!!!!!1111
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Hardman Knott
Gym climber
Muir Woods National Monument, Mill Valley, Ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 18, 2010 - 02:42pm PT
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So having worked up to 5 sets of 12 (at the end of a 3 hour climbing session), I figured I might try a bit of weight.
I put a 25 lb plate on a waist belt and was able to do a maximum of 6. I followed with 4 more sets of 6; on the last
two sets I wasn't quite able to make it to six - in other words, close but knott quite. I just re-read RGold's most
excellent post, and I will try some of that stuff out. I also liked Coz' post about doing the finger hangs 30 sec on, 30
sec off for as long as you can. It's still too early to tell if this is helping my climbing, but if nothing else I'm definitely
looking way more "cut" from all the pull-ups - this alone makes it worthwhile. ;-)
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quartziteflight
climber
Who knows?
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Feb 19, 2010 - 09:04am PT
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Good work man.
As to looking like the guy in the video. It depends on what you look like now and how old you are. I'd say a couple years of lifting and a good diet. And that dude isnt that big, I highly doubt he's taking steroids.
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emankcin
Trad climber
KCMO
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Feb 19, 2010 - 10:28am PT
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Maybe I invented these, but unless I missed it, no one has discussed what I call "diagonals", or "half-Eldos". Instead of having your arms at a 30-degree angle (or less -- not sure of actual angle) and pulling up to each hand in alternation, you have one arm straight up and the other at an angle and pull up to each hand in alternation. Then you switch the straight and angled arms and repeat. I started doing these because I figured they would provide more varied work -- a wider range of muscles. Has anyone else done these? Found them helpful, or just a gimmick?
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tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
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Feb 19, 2010 - 10:48am PT
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My technique is good. It's the only thing that has kept me in the game all these years.
Looking around at what I want to climb in the buttermilks made me realize I am too fat and too weak. 5'10 and 185 pounds. I don't fail cuz I don't know where to put my feet, I fail because I don't have time to figure out where to put my feet because I'm too fat and weak.
I started doing pull ups this year because I have a baby at home and no time.
I'm running circles doing sets of 10 sit ups 10 push ups and 5 pull ups until I reach 100 and 50 pull ups. I can see that soon I will reach what rgold is talking about where my numbers are just a matter of time and I won't be making gains.
The beauty of being fat and weak, however, is that you can make gains pretty easy.
Thanks to rgold, I'm going to change my pull ups to five sets of ten, with twenty sit ups and push ups between.
If I can get there and be comfortable. I'll add weight.
The thing is, once the days get longer, I won't be training indoors much. Then things get weird because the training ends up on stuff I have so wired that I'm not sure I get a workout.
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Gilwad
climber
Frozen In Somewhere
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Feb 19, 2010 - 10:54am PT
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Yes, but pull-ups haven't helped as much as going climbing. If you were to spend 1/2 of your training time doing pullups and other non-climbing stuff then you would not progress as fast as someone who spent all of their training time climbing. But you might progress faster than someone who never did pullups and never climbed.
We all want to get stronger because it's easy to measure strength in pullups, bench press, whatever. It's harder to measure progress in climbing. But after 25 years of using various training tactics for climbing I've decided that for pure rock climbing the best training is climbing, either in the climbing gym, on the rock, whatever, but climbing. If you're specific about your climbing, for example, desert cracks, then climb a crack machine. Specific Adaption to Imposed Demand works wonders. The hardest I've ever climbed came when doing nothing but climbing 4 days a week, all day, for months. I didn't really advance in climbing until I gave up on weighted pullups and other wastes of time and actually went climbing a whole lot.
Look at the best rock climbers in the world today and you'll find that they spend the vast majority of their training time doing some version of climbing.
All of that said, I do train with non-climbing workouts for sure, but I'm not just a climber. I need to be able to deadlift, squat, run, etc. etc. for life, and climbing does not make one incredibly fit for a lot of life stuff.
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JoeSimo
Trad climber
New York
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Feb 19, 2010 - 11:13am PT
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Hmmm I thought my point was well illustrated. The guy that can do pull ups for hours a day 5 days a week can't climb well at all. The girl that can't do a single pull up can out climb the guy any day of the week. Having spent years working on his pull up technique his skill as a climber was well below that of someone that cannot even do a pull up and spends little to no time practicing them. To this day she continues to improve as a climber while he continues to flail up 5.8's and 59's like a dead fish.
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cliffhanger
Trad climber
California
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Feb 19, 2010 - 11:50am PT
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Working on my finger strength most improved my climbing. If you can't crimp onto the rock those big biceps are just dead weight. Whether working out on a finger board or bouldering, go until you burn your forearms out. Coz's workout looks good.
The only climbs that really required all of my pullup power are some off width cracks.
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tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
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Feb 19, 2010 - 12:57pm PT
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But you're forgetting about people like me who know how to climb, but are out of shape. I can make gains doing pull-ups.
I too have seen plenty of strong people fail on climbs, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't get stronger.
Technique will only get you so far. At some point, even with perfect technique you will run into endurance problems and power problems.
Rgold has it about right I think, once you are at a base level, you need to start upping the power with weights.
If you are strong and you suck, technique should be your focus, for the rest of us who have good technique, strength and endurance should be our focus.
Pull ups can help. CLimbing more always helps, but that takes more time than most people have. Which means gyms.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 19, 2010 - 01:05pm PT
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no.
they didn't even help me learn a one-arm.
i finally learned one-arms after i started climbing a lot more rope and doing a lot fewer pull-ups.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Feb 20, 2010 - 09:36am PT
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KLK brings up rope climbing. It is, in my opinion, the absolute king of pulling exercises. And I agree with him that you'll never achieve one-arm pullups by doing multiple unweighted two-arm pullups, no matter how many of those you manage. Even the weighted two-arm pullups will probably not get you all the way to a one-arm pullup (if you care about such party tricks), because the body mechanics are different. At some point, you have to shift to uneven grip pullups, and rope-climbing provides the best environment for training those.
I left rope climbing out of my "treatise" because I also think it provides a very high potential for elbow injury, as bad and perhaps worse than Bachar ladders. Personally, I have a lifetime problem with my elbows from climbing the rope, but this may be partially because I worked up to doing it very slowly, one arm at a time, each one-arm pull from a fully hanging position. It made everyone in the gym stop what they were doing and watch, so had great show-off value, but was of very questionable use for climbing and was ultimately, considering the essentially permanent injuries, a bad bargain for me.
Of course, not everyone's physiology is the same, so if you want to try, here's what I learned about progression in rope climbing.
1. Of course, the first problem is finding a rope to climb. They used to be available in lots of gyms, but have become rare. Body-building gyms rarely have the ceiling height to even consider a climbing rope. You might need to go to one of those cult gyms (Crossfit, Gym Jones, etc.) or buy your own gym rope and hang it from a tree (but a standard manila rope won't weather well at all). They aren't all that cheap---$120 to $160 depending on length (15 feet is minimum, and get the standard 1.5" diameter, not a 2" rope).
2. If you are going to do it, I would strongly recommend beginning with a course of weighted pullups, which allows you to fine-tune the training resistances much better. But I have to admit that I started right in, and only came upon weighted pullups much later as part of rehabbing injuries.
3. The very first thing to learn is how to climb the rope with assistance from your feet. This is essential for safety, so that you can get off your arms if you run out of steam. But you also need it for another reason, and that is that, in my opinion, the rope should be fully chalked. A manila rope climbed repeatedly without chalk will get downright slippery, and especially if you have gotten to the point where you are only using one arm at a time, you do not want to fall off from 15 to 24 feet up. So your warmup is to climb the rope, using your feet, with a block of chalk and chalk it up. Rub the chalk block on the rope and then rub that up and down with your hand a few times to distribute the chalk.
The basic foot lock for foot-assisted climbing goes like this: With the rope running between your legs, spin your right leg around in front of the rope, then bring it back and catch the rope on the instep of your right foot. Stand on the rope with your left foot where the rope crosses your right instep. If you are doing this right, you can hook an elbow around the rope and let go with both hands. Especially new, manila ropes can be splintery and you might want to wear long pants. Of course, "right" and "left" can be interchanged here.
You can climb the rope this way using mostly foot power. Hanging from both hands, you do the leg motions with bent legs so as to get a high foot lock, and then stand up with leg power, walking your hands up. Repeat.
4. Now for the climbing part. Start any way you can, just try to get to the top and then back down again. At this point, you have to decide whether you'll go for a dynamic style, using alternating leg kicks synchronized with your reaches, or a more static style with slower reaches and little to no leg action. As far as I can tell, either way leads to comparable strength gains, at least until you get too good at the dynamic style, at which point perhaps the strength component of the exercise decreases.
6. Progression comes in three forms.
(a) On the way up. Work on lengthening your "stride," by which I mean the distance between consecutive hand placements. The ultimate slow static stride goal has the low hand at armpit level and the high hand at full extension above that. At this point you are doing maximal uneven-grip pullups, with the low hand actually pressing and only the upper hand pulling. The ultimate dynamic stride goal powers the low hand to waist level or even lower and the the high hand at full extension above. One of several things that makes the rope better than a Bachar ladder is that the stride length is continuously variable and isn't predetermined by the spacing between rungs.
(b) On the way down. Work on one-arm lowering. This is done first by pinching the rope between the feet and lowering with one hand at a time. The foot-pinch gives a lot of help for this. You lower until hanging at full extension, then the other hand grabs the rope at the level of the armpit of the extended hand, locks off, and lowers. There is some ability to control how much help you get from pinching the rope between both feet. If foot-aided one-arm lowering is too hard at first, do foot-aided maximum stride lowering. The ultimate lowering goal is to get to controlled one-arm lowers without any help from the feet.
(c) Counterweight training. If you can rig it, this is and extremely effective way to make progress safely. You'll need two pulleys, one at the top of the rope and one at the same level but a few feet away. You wear a harness and the rope runs up from you, through the pulleys, to an appropriate weight. You begin by hauling the weight up to the ceiling and then clipping the rope to your harness so that as you climb, the weight descends. The second pulley is essential to keep the descending weight away from your ascent path. There is an obvious extreme danger factor for other folks in the vicinity if you haul the weight up to the ceiling and then accidentally drop it---'nuff said, I hope. I found that the best place to attach the weight to the harness is at the back of the harness, otherwise the weight rope is continually in your way.
Once you can climb the rope statically with maximum stride and lower slowly one arm at a time with no foot assistance, you'll be pretty close to being able to climb up one arm at a time.
5. Pay attention to elbow pain! Lateral and medial epicondylitis injuries are cumulative, not sudden. If you have the discipline, you can back off before you do long-term damage.
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426
climber
Buzzard Point, TN
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Feb 20, 2010 - 10:21am PT
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"Well 10c is V0+, maybe v1, so what's your point?"
Bouldering and route climbing cannot be correlated in all circumstances...take the East Butt of Middle for example, hehe. Ya it's only 10c but one of my proudest onsights all-time, even though I've os'ed many things 6 grades harder. V1 slab(?) nyuck, nyuck, but as Gill sez, on man's 6 is another man's 2 which is my point.
I think his point was that technique rules~which I agree with...climbing is movement based, not necessarily a pulling based, the boulders in the southeast bear this point out savagely.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 21, 2010 - 05:55pm PT
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Re: rgold and rope climbing
Competitive Rope Climbing
It's a one-time Olympic sport that is making a comeback. Believe me, it's as much a challenge as a lot of rock climbs! And I wouldn't denigrate bodyweight enthusiasts because they can't climb 5.12 . . . what they do is as meaningful to them as climbing is to climbers.
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Brock
Trad climber
RENO, NV
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Feb 21, 2010 - 07:37pm PT
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Pull ups help to some degree...I figure the more you can do, the better your endurance muscles. I often lock off pretending I am placing gear or looking for the next hold. I sometimes use a rope or towel to offset one arm lower than the other.
Honestly, the best thing that I think improved my climbing (other than climbing) was rowing with weights. I think cardio-endurance is a huge help too.
I have often tried to think up ways to put holds on the lat pull down bar.
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Jason Lantz
Trad climber
Moab, UT
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Feb 21, 2010 - 08:01pm PT
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about ten years ago i learned how to do the one finger pullup trick by practicing negatives. start with a pair of rock rings. pull one arm into the body and push one arm out. now slowly lower yourself trying to controll the entire motion... don't go all the way down or you will trash your elbows. once you can fully controll the downward aspect the upward aspect will fall into line. then just start dropping fingers. took about one month of negatives before i could start the upward motion. Hope this helps.
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thebravecowboy
Social climber
Colorado Plateau
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yes. might just be a confidence thing, but yes.
and ditto the first coupla jaybro comments - elbow trouble fer sure.
I am intrigued by the Scarpelli torture method of (max reps)^2 = total reps.
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