A Comprehensive Guide To Hangboarding (Part I)
Image Credit: Ben Agro
I’ve created this blog series as a one-stop shop for everything you need to know about getting started with finger strength training. This series will summarize my finger strength training research as well as my own experiences with hangboarding.
In this first blog, I will discuss:
The motivation behind hangboarding
How to know if you are ready to start training finger strength
Things to take into consideration before getting started
Future blogs in the series will explore the anatomy of our hands, various grip types we can train with, and the different protocols for gaining finger strength.
Why Hangboard?
Hangboarding is a simple yet effective tool that climbers of nearly all levels can use to gain finger strength and improve their climbing performance. Harder climbs are often characterized by small edges (especially on climbs outdoors or on training boards like the MoonBoard). Finger injuries may develop if we begin climbing on these types of climbs too early and too often, typically before our fingers are prepared to handle that kind of load. By strengthening our fingers through hangboarding, we can be more equipped to handle finger-intensive climbs.
We all know at least one person who has been sidelined from climbing and training for many months due to recurring finger injuries. Even mild finger injuries can take many months to heal and can prevent us from being able to climb at our limit, thus hindering our climbing progression. This is why fingerboarding can not only act as a way to strengthen our fingers, but as a finger injury prevention tool since we are loading our fingers and forearm tendons in a controlled manner.
I am a bit of a hangboard junkie; during the pandemic, I spent most of my training time hangboarding since gyms were closed and discovered how much I enjoyed experimenting with different ways of training finger strength. In 3 years, I went from needing 25 lbs of assistance to hang on the middle BeastMaker 2000 edge (~22mm) to reliably hanging on 15mm for ~6 seconds.
Getting started with hangboard training can be confusing. If you’ve done any research on hangboarding, you might have come across your fair share of 8-week hangboard programs, various protocols you can follow, people debating on how many seconds to hang, what edge size to hang on, what grip type to use… It’s no wonder so many people get so overwhelmed they avoid hangboarding altogether.
So is there a perfect hangboarding protocol? The short answer is no. There are endless ways we can structure our hangboard routine and how we do so will depend on our goals, our morphology, and our preferences.
When we climb and grip onto holds, our forearm and finger flexor muscles are contracting and curling around them. As we become stronger climbers, we get better at hanging on holds for longer periods of time and progressively start pulling on smaller and smaller holds. This is grip strength and it is precisely what we are training when we hangboard.
And what is it that differentiates the recreational climber/non-climber from the elite climber? There is an abundance of data showing large correlations between finger strength as measured with a hangboard and max climbing grade.
Image Credit: Lattice Training
I’ve heard many people talk about various ways to get strong fingers: a finger strength training phase, an 8-week hangboard cycle, following some person on the internet’s training routine, etc. The truth is, if you want strong, healthy fingers that stay strong and healthy, that isn’t going to happen if you follow a random hangboard protocol that lasts X weeks long and then stop doing finger training afterward.
Tendons take a long time to adapt to training/loading, much longer than muscles. Many studies have not been able to detect significant tendon hypertrophy in response to short-term loading (after a few months of training), however, with long-term loading (years of training), it was clear that the tendon size had considerably increased (Kjaer et al., 2011).
Interestingly, research shows that climbers with over a decade of experience have A2 and A4 pulleys that are 82% thicker than non-climbers, and their proximal interphalangeal (PIP) and distal interphalangeal (DIP) joints are around 40% larger (Frohlich et al., 2021).
Image Credit: Will Anglin
Yes, climbing in and of itself can help us gain finger strength, and many climbers are able to get very strong with no training at all. However, it can be hard to specifically target finger strength just by climbing since climbing is a full-body sport, we use a wide variety of grip positions, and there is no easy way to quantitatively measure finger strength gains. This is where hangboarding comes in.
When should one start hangboarding?
If you have been climbing for less than two years or climb below V4, then your time and energy should be spent building lots of experience on the wall. Climbing is, first and foremost, a skill-based sport. When starting, you should focus on building body awareness, exploring different movements and styles, and learning the fundamentals of climbing technique.
Pulling too much of your energy and focus toward the training aspect of climbing may result in you neglecting to work on your technique/footwork which will impede your progress. Also, novice climbers are able to get enough finger stimulus from climbing alone, and at this early stage, adding on hangboarding may simply be too much load for the fingers.
You would most likely benefit from hangboarding once or twice per week if:
You have at least two years of climbing experience/climb higher than V4
You are older than 16 years old (this is around when your growth plates close)
You are not presently injured
You have been climbing in a systemized fashion (2-3 days per week on a regular basis)
You know that finger strength is holding you back (you struggle on crimpy problems that are at your redpoint grade)
Before you start training your fingers, your baseline finger strength needs to be high enough that you don’t end up overloading your tendons. You can determine if you have enough base finger strength by trying to hang bodyweight off of a 25mm edge for >10 seconds. If this is too challenging, just climbing would likely provide sufficient stimulus to promote finger strength gains. Otherwise, you should be fine to start hangboarding.
A Few Considerations Before You Start Hangboarding
Your hangboard routine can and should be quick and simple
Your hangboard routine doesn’t need to be complicated or take up much time. A hangboard workout can take as little as 20 minutes (excluding your warm-up), you can do it before you climb, and still have lots of energy left for climbing. You can even hangboard separately from your climbing session to give your fingers a few hours of rest before your climbing session. This is ideal if you have a hangboard at home.
Don’t overdo it
When we start hangboarding, and frankly when we are doing any type of physical training, it is important to employ the Minimum Effective Dose (MED) rule, which states that we should pick the easiest method and lightest load that still has a positive effect (Lopez-Rivera, 2021). We should continue training this way until we plateau, at which point we should change our training to generate new stimuli.
It can be hard to follow this rule, especially when we are psyched to dive deep into the training, push ourselves, and see results. But training without the MED rule makes us more susceptible to injuries since we aren’t leaving a margin for muscular fatigue and failure. We may cause excessive damage to our muscles which negatively affects our recovery.
Consistency is key
Ultimately, the best training program is one that you stick to. Stick to your training plan for a minimum of 6-8 weeks so your body can adapt. Then, at the end of your cycle, you can reassess what is working and what isn’t. Not only is this going to help you find the best training for your body, but it also makes training more fun and explorative.
That is all for this blog. In the next one, I will explore the different grip positions we may use while hangboarding and figure out if there is an “optimal” grip position to train.
Your routine should be specific to you and your goals
We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and as such, our hangboarding routine should be reflective of those strengths and weaknesses. The best thing you can do is speak with an experienced coach about your climbing goals. They can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and give you a personalized training plan that includes finger strength training (wink, wink).
This concludes Part I of my series “A Comprehensive Guide To Hangboarding”. I hope it was interesting and that you learned something new. In the next one, we will take a deep dive into the world of the anatomy of the hand and why hangboard training can feel inconsistent.
References
Anglin, Will. “A Comparative Review of Pulley Injury Literature.” Tension Climbing - Hangboards | Campus Rungs | Wood Climbing Holds, 3 Jan. 2020, tensionclimbing.com/a-comparative-review-of-pulley-injury-literature/.
Feehally, Ned. Beastmaking: A Fingers-First Approach to Becoming a Better Climber. Vertebrate Publishing, 2021.
Frohlich, Stefan, et al. “Long Term Evolution of Soft Tissue Response in the Fingers of High-Level Sport Climbers: A Cross-Sectional 10 Year Follow-up Study.” Physical Therapy in Sport, 14 Sept. 2021, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1466853X21001528.
Kjaer, M, and KM Heinemeier. “In Vivo Investigation of Tendon Responses to Mechanical Loading.” Journal of Musculoskeletal & Neuronal Interactions, June 2011, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21625048/.
López-Rivera, Eva. Finger Strength Training for Climbing: A Basic Guide to Hangboarding., Jan. 2021, www.researchgate.net/publication/362068736_Finger_Strength_Training_for_Climbing_A_basic_guide_to_Hangboarding.
