My friend Andy was a really strong climber back in the 1990s. He had unbelievable fingers and routinely schooled all of us on the training boards. He had a smooth and controlled style, which worked well for indoor bouldering on small holds, and he took this style and applied it to his climbing outdoors as well.
If climbing smoothly and controlled were always the answer, Andy would have been among the elite of the elite. Unfortunately, the performance environment in rock climbing requires being able to ride the pendulum between super slow and static movement and hyper-fast, decisive speed.
This is part of the beauty and part of the frustration with trying to be a good rock climber. Many of us are well suited genetically and through training to be smooth or flexible or extremely powerful. On the other end of the scale from my friend Andy is another local climber who has tremendous power but climbs in almost a spastic and out-of-control way. This climber also does well on the boards, but does so for a different reason and struggles to keep it together out on real rock.
Both climbers have mastered one tempo and would benefit substantially from experimenting with different velocities in training. Varying movement speed relative to what the performance environment demands manipulates mechanical load and motor control requirements, systematically improving our power, speed, and our movement economy. No matter what your default speed, you can see some real benefit from training faster or slower than you normally do.
Slower-Than-Normal
Climbing at a deliberate submaximal speed moves the primary adaptation from high-intensity power to neuromuscular motor control and forces biomechanical precision. When we are climbing at normal speeds, movement patterns rely heavily on learned motor programs. As we slow execution, we allow for sensory feedback loops to process new spatial positioning, improving our proprioception, joint alignment, and transfer of energy.
Sport scientist Wolfgang Schollhorn demonstrated that exposing the nervous system to intentional slower variations in movement forces the brain to actively correct movement errors. This builds a more adaptable and robust motor skill and makes us more able to assess movement needs, then always stay at performance speed. He called this method “differential learning.” By simply applying a few sets of slower climbing on a normal climbing day, we can start to see our most basic movement errors where we depend on momentum and maybe finger strength instead of excellent movement skill.
Although adding load to your climbing can blunt motor skill development (such as bouldering with a 40-pound weight vest on), we can see some benefit from overload of basic movement patterns. By adding load to a movement (such as foot-on pulls on a campus board or a basic wall crawl on a spray wall), we can enhance the effect of slower climbing. In practice, we probably want to avoid continually adding load as if we were resistance training and instead pick a load that is somewhere around 5% to 10% of our body weight and do some simple drills with that load. We don’t want to do a whole lot of this training, but a couple of sets in the warm-up or within a bouldering session will probably help us develop better skill quality because we are forced to climb at this slower-than-performance speed.
Faster-Than-Normal
In many sports, coaches program overspeed training using lighter implements, downhill slopes, or even towing bands to increase an athlete’s movement velocity beyond their natural maximum output. In climbing, this can be challenging to implement, but intentional faster training, or even slightly assisted climbing, has been used by climbers for years.
When we do faster-than-normal-speed climbing, there are a few physiological benefits that start to reveal themselves. The the most obvious of these is improved rate coding and intermuscular coordination. When we execute movements faster than our normal speed, we also force faster contraction-relaxation cycles. This improves our fast-twitch muscle fibers’ ability to shorten at high velocities and improves the synchronization between agonist and antagonist muscle groups.
A simple intention to climb a boulder more quickly or to do a speed top-rope lap is probably enough to start helping the athlete make these changes. Once again, you don’t need to go out and do a speed training day or a fast boulders workout. We can start to see the benefits of these by simply putting three or four boulder problems at fast velocity into our training sessions. Most climbers could benefit from doing a fast lap or two at the crag, and the most appropriate place to do this would be in the warm-up. One of my key recommendations is to lead a warm-up-level route, lower from the anchor, and then do a speed top-rope burn right afterwards. If you did this on two of your warm-ups, you would start to see the benefit of improved rate coding, and it would also enhance your overall climbing capacity.
Combination of Speeds
One of the most useful drills that came out of Gimme Kraft was one called Kontrast. In this drill, a climber would do a boulder problem at super slow speed, and then at super fast speed, and then at normal speed. A large body of research supports what sports science calls “paired-velocity training” methods.
A climber can benefit from contrast-style drills, and they also can benefit from implementing drills where their slower speeds are loaded and their faster speeds are unloaded. In practice, this might mean a slightly loaded set of ladders on a campus setup, and then dropping the weight and doing a very fast lap without load, or even with a bungee assist.
As I stated above, it’s easy for a climber to feel like they need to dedicate an entire session to this style of training, but it’s the same as most of the training we do. Regularity and consistency over time start to make a big difference, while a huge volume of any specific adaptation in a single session or two makes very little difference.
The most important factor here is to really be aware of your defaults. I tend to climb a bit slower than my partners, and so more of my practice needs to lead me toward higher velocity and slightly riskier movement. A climber that tends to jump between holds and has the tension of a wet noodle would benefit from loaded movements or super slow versions of the problems that they do quickly.
The really cool thing about playing with velocity is that we don’t have to be on particularly hard climbs to see big benefits from this. Whether we are climbing fast or slow, we open up our ability to improve our movement patterns, and we start to make improvements in our economy, which leads directly into better climbing.
No increase in finger strength necessary.