Hangboard Training: A Step Toward Mastery

Most serious rock climbers probably have an old hangboard somewhere around the house, but I’ve only come across a few who enjoy hangboarding. That’s because it’s boring as hell. Not just that, but we typically feel sad and alone while we’re doing it.

Almost all the climbers I’ve met, when choosing between climbing outside and training at home alone on their hangboard, will choose the crag. I know I would!

But for committed athletes who want to improve, it’s natural to research and start specific training, commonly hangboard training, to increase the mastery of the sport.  Now, after witnessing the gains in my own training, which have translated to the hardest redpoints I’ve ever done, I’m a believer.

Hangboard Training: A Way Off the Plateau

I started specific training for climbing, including hangboarding, when I reached a performance plateau a few years ago. I had managed to climb my way to hard 5.13 sport routes, and even squeak out my first 5.14a, but my training couldn’t take me any further. At the time my training consisted mainly of projecting harder sport routes during the climbing reason and bouldering inside during the winter.

Routes that would challenge me at the appropriate level for me to progress, became fewer and far between. Plus, I began to have more time constraints, demands on my time, and responsibility growing in my life. I couldn’t spend as much time at the crag as I used to, and didn’t have the time to travel farther away from home to get to more hard routes.

But training at home–and hangboarding in particular–became more appealing because I am now able to train what I needed to train in the time I have available.

The Unexpected Benefit of Hangboard Training: Feedback

After a slow start, I became fascinated with hangboarding when I started tracking my training data. For the first time in my climbing career I started to  quantify my training. Now that I can objectively track my progress, it’s more like a climbing game. (See my earlier post on Building Your Hit Points.)

This contrasts sharply with the subjective feedback we typical settle for when we’re trying to redpoint hard sport climbs. We rely on not-so-refined indicators like, how did you feel? What was your high point? How many one hangs? Are you sticking the crux?

These aren’t the best objective measurements because it doesn’t tell you enough about progress. Even route grades can be deceiving because they’re subjective. I wanted more evidence that I was improving.

As it turns out, tracking my progress and getting that continuous flow of feedback makes hangboarding not only valuable, but a little bit exciting. While I recommend hangboard training, I also am an advocate for tracking that training.

Tracking helps me to manage my expectations, to set the pace for progress, and to overcome frustrations.

If you’ve struggled to start hangboarding, or specific training for rock climbing, what would help you to take the plunge? Let me know if the comment below and I’ll try to address it in a future post.