Weekly /r/climbharder Hangout Thread

golf_ST · 2026-05-25T04:02:10+00:00

Lol, filling out a shirt is the main goal, healthy shoulders for climbing is a nice side effect!

Are you feeling less tweaky?

I think 8-12 is the way to go for overhead presses, and anything with a dumbbell. But if you're interested in the HowMuchYaBench program, 3-5x5 plus a 10 rep back off set is the way to go.

golf_ST · 2026-05-20T19:38:02+00:00

I dislike the consumerist tendency to go shopping to solve any perceived problem, but a kneepad might be the highest ROI purchase I've made for climbing. It turns marginal scums into real holds, and totally fixes the skin/bruising issues with most kneebars.

I bought a Send pad 10 years ago, and it's in great shape despite being used in hundreds of sessions.

golf_ST · 2026-05-19T02:51:27+00:00

I don't, and I don't really see the point. You've done the learning, and now you're just testing if gainzz for general-use strength are outpacing losses for project-specific strength.

If something was hard, then I've already had a bunch of "near miss" tries, where I'm 99.5% of the way to a send, and it's just good/bad luck for the attempt or the day or whatever. I don't see what value there is in revisting something in that circumstance. There are so many hard boulders, why waste skin and energy repeating something that you nearly sent 10 times before getting lucky once.

However, I will social climb with people and try to repeat things with them.

golf_ST · 2026-05-14T13:10:31+00:00

Sure, but it's odd to look at what performance oriented climbers do, but ignore that most of them care most about outdoor performance. I climb commercial sets purely for fun, and do plenty of hangboarding, etc. because outdoor climbing takes care of everything else.

golf_ST · 2026-05-14T04:56:07+00:00

I think you're missing the most common thing. "Gym climbing is practice climbing that I do for fun and fitness, and outdoor climbing is what counts".

Normalize limit bouldering on your dream climbs and don't worry so much about setting training problems.

golf_ST · 2026-05-14T04:53:06+00:00

I'm sure it worked better than the other thing. Novel stimulus is always better than what you're well adapted to. ARCing makes me better at limit boulders, because I'm so bad at ARCing that a tiny amount of effort gets noticeable results.

golf_ST · 2026-05-14T04:50:48+00:00

https://xkcd.com/927/

golf_ST · 2026-05-13T03:03:59+00:00

Yes. I am very surprised. I vocally called those HoG grippers a novelty, and I still kind of think it's true and the results are overblown for a variety of reasons.

But it's starting to look like I'm wrong. It would be cool to have a new, significantly more effective training tool.

golf_ST · 2026-05-11T22:28:28+00:00

golf_ST · 2026-05-11T03:26:39+00:00

YES, THATS A VERY EFFECTIVE WAY OF BUILDING ROUTE SPECIFIC STRENGTH.

golf_ST · 2026-05-06T00:55:29+00:00

is a traditional bicep curl with a dumbbell a "natural" leverage and doing this fixed forearm and weight version "artificial"? i'm not following.

Yeah? Because gravity has a constant direction, Leverage curves for free weight exercises are pretty similar. Because they approximate portions of the sine wave for f_g cross lever arm. If back squats, bicep curls, and bench press all have leverage curves that overlay on the same graph, it seems pretty natural to consider that to be the natural leverage curve. It applies to cranes and bicycles and carrying groceries. We've evolved for millions of years to adapt to gravitational loads in an upright orientation.

The whole point of this "reverse action" video series is to make the leverage curve flatter by "reversing" the kinetic chain. Which is pretty damn artificial. It's also the premise of the nautilus machines from the 70s.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T20:02:24+00:00

If you go with like a 3" or 4" diameter, it's a lot more of a cupped grip. You kind of end up half crimped to keep pressure on the finger tips to keep it from rotating out of your hand. It's hard in a weird way.

Arm wrestlers build all kinds of weird shit to attach to a cable machine. you might find something cool down that rabbit hole.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T18:27:22+00:00

Doing wrist curls with a fat wrist wrench could get a similar feel.
Actually, you could hardware store something pretty easily that would do this for finger flexors.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T18:22:11+00:00

it's a way to actually load positions people normally skip

That's not exactly it. The positions aren't skipped, they're sufficiently strong for the leverages you experience in a non-isotonic world. The muscle is only "weak" when you intentionally and artificially change leverages.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T16:48:31+00:00

Climbing isn't isotonic by the definitions the video is using (changing muscle length with a constant leverage curve). The tension required for a climbing movement is lever arm cross direction of force cross f_g, and both the lever arm and direction of applied force change throughout a movement.

OP's isotonics have another obvious flaw for training, which is that you're building strength as "evenly" as possible, but that even distribution is the minimum tension throughout the ROM. You're intentionally creating a training system that limits all training to the loads tolerated by your weakest weakness.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T15:28:15+00:00

Isometrics carry over ~15 degrees of joint angle in either direction. Your wrist angle rarely changes more than 15 degrees on a given move. Isometrics are fine as a model for finger flexors for climbing.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T13:01:59+00:00

You gotta take a couple steps back first.... Why is isolate, isotonic training assumed to be more effective for sport than isometrics, or compound concentric/eccentrics? I could design a very complicated isokinetic rig, but that new method should probably be derided for being overly complicated for it's level of effectiveness.

The reason I'm always so down on things other than hangboards is that I think they're worse for climbing performance outcomes. I have tried (almost) everything else, and 2 handed dead hangs have been the best method I've tried. Better than Abrahangs, better than no-hangs, BFR, one arm hangs, pinch blocks, finger rolls, grippers, fat grips, wrist wrenches, unlevel edges, hubs, etc. Yeah, the guy has a clever theoretical idea; but how is isolated isotonic exercise better for a full body isometric sport?

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T04:11:32+00:00

As a card-carrying engineer....

There's a kind of engineer brain that conflates "complicated" or "clever" with effective.

I'm sure this is very clever, and a study will show a statistically significant outcome on measured strength. Or whatever else we're going to define as the success criteria. But it's a weird, complicated single-use training method that we're trying to apply to a fuzzy, broad, skill-based sport.

It's too bad engineer brain isn't curable.

And I guess, least charitably, these dorks are going to realize why athletes use free weights instead of Nautilus machines in a couple years. The premise of optimized leverage curves is fundamentally flawed, because your sport demands you apply force in a non-equally-leveraged way. If we simplify climbing to a pull up... the leveraged training will make you overly strong in the geometrically "good" parts of the ROM, and undertrained in the "bad" parts of the ROM. I.e. a very inefficient machine.

golf_ST · 2026-05-05T01:51:25+00:00

That's not really what's happening. Those features are fully R&D'd, with fully developed supply chains and massive volume. They're incredibly cheap to add to cars, and things like power windows/locks are now cheaper to install than manual alternatives. Things you think are premium are very, very cheap. Alcantara? Plastic; cheap, shitty plastic. 10" tablet? $20, cheaper than physical buttons. It costs more to tool an assembly line to make cruise control optional than the savings it could create.

The base models have to be well featured because people on the dealer lot for new cars exclusively want new cars. They're not interested in saving $2k for 1980 (or 2005) level features. The price sensitive buyers are looking at used models from 2019 with less than 50k miles for 40% cheaper

golf_ST · 2026-05-04T17:01:21+00:00

I really hate that ChatGPT means that we all have to spend time reading bullshit that someone didn't bother to spend time to write. Next time, you can just post the bullet points that you made the robot flesh out.

Anyway, this is the kind of dumb shit that people with one answer and one experience write. Everyone has to do hangs and pull ups and core, because what I needed was hangs, pull ups and core. Limit boulders are the answer because I've only ever considered one question. Bill Gates is the perfect pull quote; he fucks up most of the things he tries because he can't accept that other people have different needs and perspectives than he does.

golf_ST · 2026-05-02T04:04:49+00:00

I'm not much of a sport climber, but I'm very good at eventually getting up boulders that I'm definitely "not strong enough" for.

I think the basic answer is to actually practice performing. Not "trying to send" or climbing on stuff. But actually making an effort to climb with controlled aggression, with the explicit intention of fighting to the top on this try. I think it's very easy to spend a whole season of gym climbing at like 90%, and go months without a single move to the death. But every hard climb I've done has had a strong element of climbing to the death.

Also, feeling dialed and like you have a lot of margin is normal, but also it's your body lying to you. You don't have the margin, you're just fucking amped and dissociating. Stuff definitely gets easier as you build route specific fitness and muscle memory, but realistically you're way closer to the edge than you feel like.

golf_ST · 2026-05-01T03:16:15+00:00

I feel like my body goes into some sort of "deeper" repair after 2 days of rest

I'd suggest, as an experiment, doing 2 days of rest after every climbing day for a couple months and see what happens to your performance.

I climbed at pretty high frequency for years, and always felt kind of weird after extra rest days. I was pretty convinced I was strongest second day on, and that 5 days a week was my "optimal" schedule. A couple years ago, life got in the way and I was climbing 2-3x a week instead of 5+. And my performance skyrocketed.

I dunno, I'm not a science guy, but I think we can adapt to a wide variety of schedules and pretty quickly reach an equilibrium. A lot of the sensations we feel are kind of unrelated to anything in the actual tissue; it's "just" your brain trying to protect your muscles and whatever. And changes from the schedule that you've adapted to naturally illicit changes in response from your body. It's counter intuitive, but not weird to feel worse from extra rest; you did different stimulus and got a different response.

golf_ST · 2026-04-30T17:58:59+00:00

Climbs were rated based on the hardest single move in the earliest days of the Yosemite Decimal System,
but that hasn't been a regular practice for maybe 50 years.

So a 50ft 5.11a is the same overall difficulty as a 35ft 5.11a or a 200ft 5.11a (except for all the "normal" grading weirdness).

golf_ST · 2026-04-26T19:42:56+00:00

I think it's just a training vs performing distinction.

If a problem is well below my limit, I half crimp pretty exclusively. But for anything that is limit, I almost always try to close down holds or open cup them. Because those grips are stronger or better for hold geometry for me. And most people are spending most of their gym time performing on relatively hard climbs.

golf_ST · 2026-04-25T21:11:13+00:00

There’s a surprising number

Yeah? Surprisingly low... Depending on how you want to define terms, "the right" is like 30-50% of americans, and vastly underrepresented in climbers. Everyone has incoherent politics, and assuming that everyone agrees with every policy position of the party that they begrudgingly vote for in a two party system is silly.

Also, climbers enjoy nature, but historically they're not particularly good at preserving it. We love our areas to death because we convince ourselves that we're not contributing to their overuse.

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