5 Ways to Maximise Your Grip (without a Hangboard)

five top tips to make the most of your grip strength for while climbing let's get into it [Music] we've said it many times grip strength in climbing is probably the number one factor in performance and this makes a lot of sense however not everyone develops grip strength as easily as some of these people we see doing incredible Feats of Strength on the hangboard So today we're going to go through how to make the most out of the grip strength you have so that you can get away with not necessarily having the strongest fingers in the world first tip is to become a rear-wheel drive climber and what I mean by this is using your legs your rear wheels rather than your front wheel switch we're talking about your hands and your upper body probably the most basic principle about being a rear wheel drive climber is being able to mean really good tension on your lower body now this is where you're like driving pressure in through your toe into the Rock and in most cases trying to draw your hips into the Rock so that firstly you're taking some weight off your hands but as you come under and into the rock often the profile of the holds gets a lot better now this is quite obvious to feel when you're on like undercuts and you're driving your feet into the Rock but what tends to happen is when you're on smaller holds and uh downward pulling you often tend to start pulling so much of your upper body that sometimes you can just pull your feet off or at least you lose that tension and your feet cut so you need to think about trying to relax your upper body a little bit and then equal that pressure by pulling in with your toes so that you're keeping the weight on your lower body so this is the basic principle of keeping tension for your lower body but when the footholds get bigger or we have different shapes we're going to have more options to look at to keep our lower body engaged so we're going to look at this black climb here now it's obviously got quite big holes on it so we're not talking about it being limited by finger strength but this foothold gives a really good example of how we can use our lower body in different ways to make the most of that part of our body here there's a really obvious place for a good foot so if we're Towing in and by this I mean drawing with your hips and just putting down with your toe this is obviously a big option it's probably the obvious option for most people but then there's a big scoop here and if you've got long legs like me or the foothold is quite close to your hand holds placing a heel off often means you can sink your hips lower into the hold keeping your weight in your lower body rather than your upper body here we have another example of where you have the option of using a toe or a heel so my move here is I need to pull in with my hips take the weight off this hand to move it up to this small hold up here now I can use a toe to do that or a heel but I know if I use a heel I'm going to be able to pull in closer to my hips and the closer my hips get to this hole the more weight it's going to go onto that foot hold if I use a toe I'm going a bit further out and it's actually more physical for me to make the move using just the toe a big asset of the rear wheel drive climber is having a big set of Tricks they can pull out the bag when it gets to using your lower body particularly different parts of your shoe so this red one here has got pretty big holes in it but actually there's a number of cool places we can figure out getting heel toe cams bicycles which allow you to get more pressure into your downwards toe particularly when you're on really sloppy surfaces like this massive red hole here the foothold's huge but actually it's really slopy so I need to try and get tension on that our next tip is that if you are going to be using really bad holds and I think this works particularly for Sharp or ink cut holes is take your time to set the grip on these holes so move to them really slowly if you can this is going to require you using the bigger muscle groups in your body to you know lock off or move to hold slowly but this gives you time to settle in the grip really well particularly on outdoor holes where the hold is not uniform and you have to be really precise with how you get the hold for it to feel any good in contrast to moving to a hold really slowly to get that good grip you're also going to find yourself in situations where you're on really small holds moving to a big hold and in this example what we're going to try and do is move quite dynamically to the big hole so that we don't have to apply a lot of force or spend a lot of time on the small hold this is generally only going to work when you've also got quite good footholds so in this example you're going to try and generate as much of the movement from your lower body and use as little as your upper body in your fingers as possible our next tip is make as much use of flexibility in your climbing as possible the reason this can be such a useful tactic in your climbing is because firstly you're going to be able to get your hips closer to the Rock in many cases taking more weight over your feet but it also opens up loads more opportunities for using your feet and your heels on hand holds where you might not otherwise be able to this last one is less of a tip and more of a tactic and that is to get more confident in the full crimp position now this is where you're going to be able to hold your knuckle is probably going to be at quite a high angle and you're wrapping the fun the reason this is such a good crimp position for people with you know weaker fingers or struggle with grips is because you're going to be quite in a mechanically advantageous position particularly on small crimps that are in Cut you're going to get really good purchase into the Rock so it's a really useful skill to develop you'll see a lot of climbers that specialize on these really small hold climbs using this full crimp position so if you're not used to using it it's definitely something you should build up over time and get comfortable doing it's worth mentioning that this fulcrum position does have a bit of a rep for being a higher risk of injury particularly to the pulleys which get loaded more in this position this is something to be aware of but we don't think it's a reason to not use this grip position in climbing because of how useful it is rather if you're not comfortable with this position or you don't use a lot just build up slowly over time and that risk of G will come down because you get more confident with it and it's been exposed in your training so there you have it five tips to work your way up hard climbs without necessarily having the finger strength that others do and if you do have good finger strength then this will help you climb even harder again and remember this isn't to say that finger strength doesn't still need to be a focus in your training it's just to help you maximize your grip strength you do have if you want to look more into grip strength training go check out this video over here and we'll see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Lattice Training

Views: 47,321

Keywords: climbing, training, climbing training, lattice training, climbing technique

Id: -cSUBVA9TK8

Length: 6min 16sec (376 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023