Hangboard Training 2 times per day for 2 years

foreign for sure that this is what's revolutionized why or like what's really changed how my fingers feel on the wall but I wouldn't be doing this for two years if I didn't somehow believe in it hello my friends that right there was my brother who two years ago came to me with this pretty crazy new training protocol where you would hang board two times per day and today we will take a deep dive into what that protocol looks like two years later I first made a video about this back in 2021 where I documented my process of hangboard training for 30 days straight the protocol was to do a 10 minutes of very low intensity lean hangs for two times per day and was constructed after my brother was given a Keith Barr study by his physio that in very basic terms showcased the most efficient way to strengthen your tendons the study showed that loading the tendons every six hours would yield the best molecular response which when applied to a real life scenario would mean that we could hang more train two and potentially even three times in a single day once in the morning and once in the evening this video is also sponsored by crimps an app for climbing training who have graciously put the new training workout in their app so you can try it for yourselves all you have to do is just download the app and you'll find it right away on top of that we'll talk about how I integrate this into my training today as well as talk to a specialist in the field who will kind of dissect some of the questions that arose from the previous video but we'll get to that a little bit later firstly the first protocol I tried was to do 10 seconds of light weighted hanging and then resting for a total of 50 seconds I would then repeat this with different grip types for total hang time of 100 seconds meaning I did 10 hangs in 10 minutes this protocol gave me some of the quickest and most insane gains that I have ever seen in my climbing and they were in fact so good that I'm gonna have to spray about them again here the most important ones were a 14 millimeter weighted hang for five seconds a one-arm hang on a 23 millimeter Edge [Music] as well as a six millimeter Edge I went from adding 48 kilograms with a 14 millimeter Edge hang to a total 67 kilograms added weight for the five second hang I went from around one maybe even two seconds of a one-arm hang to a total of 14 seconds [Music] and lastly I went from zero seconds on the six millimeter Edge to hanging for a total of eight seconds which is clearly undefinably much better [Music] anyway these results were clearly pretty ridiculous and I knew right away that these wouldn't keep on growing because if that was the case I would be floating up v20s and 10as by now and this brings me to the first point of this video and how the protocol have changed one thing is I've been traveling a bunch and do not have a hang board in my new apartment so what I do instead is use a portable hangboard with a TRX door attachment that allows me to hang board anywhere at any time because in the end all you need is a board and a counterweight and you can use practically anything for that moving on we have the protocol which as mentioned is in the crimped app today and briefly about crimped is that it's basically a library of workouts for climbers and there's both a free version with a lot of workouts as well as the plus version that I cannot describe as anything else but a perfect example of modern solutions for people who want to just structure and take their training to just another level there is more than 200 workouts and progressions right in there for you to try I'll put a link in the description and if you want to try it yourself the workout is called emuls sub max daily fingerboard routine the routine itself looks very similar to before but the biggest difference is my time under tension which is twice as high nowadays what I do is I do 10 seconds on and then 20 seconds rest this means I'll have 200 seconds of load in the 600 seconds workout I do the same hangs as before but just twice as many both when I did the original experiment and after I kept on climbing so when I did the original experiment I would do hangboard training in the morning the no Hanks lean Hanks and then climbing in the afternoon around say one-ish two-ish and then another neat lean hang in the evening but now here's the big twist I don't do the handboarding routine two times per day always I haven't done it for two years straight I don't have an argument for why I would stop doing this and I at times have done it for like two three four months straight but I do quit it every now and then just to see what happens to my body and it's always the same response and that's that I lose the hangboarding gains and I lose some of the finger strength gains on the wall I mean I'm a fairly high level climber so regardless I'll have strong fingers but this kind of like training related hang strength quickly gets removed if I stop doing this and that's one of the big things that I've noticed and one of the big things that I always take with me is that this is for me a recruitment protocol and a healthy fingers protocol and so a really good example of when I've done this and you can see the most clear games in my climbing is this past fall where I started doing it again I also added a bunch of other training routines and you know things and I I would say I was the strongest I probably ever went been and managed to do 159 for the first time and the 159 happened as soon as I started doing this protocol for a few weeks and and get my fingers recruited for it so I combined a lot of power to full training with the finger routine and that it amounted to 159 come here on top of this I also kept doing it for the titino trip which is when I did my first AC Boulder as well as just a bunch of hard climbing and felt very fit what I will mention is that for long-term gains this isn't the way like you won't keep on progressing if you do this protocol I don't think because you do need some sort of progressive overload some sort of uh just pushing your muscles but the difference I think is that a lot of climbers have strong enough muscles in their forearms that's not the limiting factor it's the tendon health or strength and for me it's been a combination of the two and so when I started doing this protocol I suddenly got access to all of the muscle strength that I had before but I think it that's kind of enough for me I want to go into the expert and talk with you a little bit about color color is a naturopath which our licensed Healthcare partitioners he reads just a ton of research on The Cutting Edge of finger health and climbing training and he's also a climber himself he runs a practice in Stockholm called Aloma they're the first finger Specialists special Sports Medicine practice in all of Scandinavia I can nothing recommend anyone in need of some assistance to visit their practice and I'll put a link in the description down below but yeah so one of the first things that I wanted to know was his thoughts on why I got such quick gains because it doesn't make much sense but I wanted to hear what he had to say about it yeah so so when you're so like the hardware the muscle was there uh but then the the neurological specialization to to kind of fire in those in those positions you hadn't really built that and that's also why you got these quick results I would say so when when you started to work on these positions then you built the neurological connections and then you were able to pull hard just like in a month's time and when we see that kind of adoption uh quickly then that's that's the only thing it could be is neurological it's not reasonable that you build extra muscles or something like this I think you're like you were strong from the beginning but just not in the in the Green grip because you hadn't really placed on order on that that function so when you did that you you oh you got strong what this basically means is that if we have the muscular strength we can get pretty massive gains really quickly from this type of exercise or this type of protocol and what I'm curious about is if it's possible to apply this to other strengths and to other parts of climbing and an example that I thought of was for instance if you want to prepare for something like the big island where it's all compression can you do compression recruitment like light weighted compression Recruitment and it's something I'll experiment with but I just wanted to toss the idea out there but I think this is more on the nerdy and you know upper limit of what climbers might want to dig into so what I was curious about is does he think it's good for beginners and most importantly should they do it as frequently I I would say that doing it at least daily I think is okay as long as it's sub-maximal but there are of course a few pointers to when it's less appropriate to kind of continue forcing it so that's if if you're really fatigued or you get some kind of tweaks or something like this or if you have some minor tweak that kind of persists for for longer period of time then it's probably idea to back off a while but sub maximally doing it often that's that's a good thing so clearly this protocol can be recommended to anyone which greatly calms my heart having spread this to a lot of people but another thing that popped up is regarding the rigidity of tendons I saw this in a lot of forums where people were claiming that since your tendons get more stiff it would increase the risk of injury and so I had to ask well how does this work and can you explain this to me color yeah okay so that's uh that's an interesting point sometimes we talk about stiffness like the the experience of stiffness in a tendon usually accompanying some kind of tendinopathy like a tendon problem so when we experience stiffness we think that we have to kind of stretch it and make it more pliable what we've seen from the literature is that if you have a softer tendon that's more more stretchy then it's actually a higher risk to to rupture the tendon which is kind of counter-intuitive when you when you think about the stiffness feeling right so soft tissue soft tendons if you they kind of elongate at the lower intensity at the lower weight right so if you have a stiffer tendon it elongates at a higher intensity at a higher rate but the the it's it's the elongation that kind of decides when when the rupture happens so if you like for example if you elongate the temple more than 10 percent or something like this then then you're in in like the rupture Zone and if you do that at a lower intensity at a lower weight lower Force then the risk for Rapture is higher according to colored risk of injury is actually lower when the tendons are stiffer another interesting point is that beginners often recommended not to do any form of hang boarding and I've always found that a bit absurd but I wanted to know that given this light intensity can they still perform this routine or not when we talk about finger training in general we have this this recommendation of not working on finger strength like in dead hang training or or specific finger training until you've been climbing for about two years that's more of a non-non recommendation than actually a good advice because we wouldn't tell anybody to not climb until they have been climbing for for two years right that's weird so I think the the the the tricky part with with finger training is that we we see it as only a way to build strength when when another output from loading and training is also building resilience and I think that for beginners working with hang board training or something like this in a in a reasonable way is uh you get to standardize that the type of loading and the volume and intensity much more precisely than in in just like chaotic climbing so I would say that it's It's tricky to kind of say that it it prevents injury it's it's reasonable that that it will [Laughter] all right there we have it from the expert I can now finally with good conscience recommend this protocol to other people and say try it for yourself everything points towards the fact that this is perfectly safe as long as you're not overdoing it and not trying to you know like hang board train every single day two times per day instead it's more of a of a stretch and the way that I would describe it is if you pull until the point where you feel a light stretch you need to exercise you're probably at a right at a good level and if you try and do it twice as hard well then maybe you're overdoing it but since I haven't done this consistently for the past two years I also wanted to share some insight from someone who has which again is my brother Felix to give some background I've always been someone who struggled a lot with finger injury so I think my fingers are maybe more injury prone than most people the the biggest change I noticed after I started with this program was that my fingers no longer felt Tweaky at the start of a session I would always have this like if I had a rest day and I went to The Climbing gym as I was warming up my fingers always felt a bit stiff and Tweaky especially if I when I started crimping a bit but after I started this that that just like completely disappeared and it's it's as if my base recruitment level was just generally higher so I would like always maintain some level of recruitment in my fingers I don't know if that's actually what's happening in the body but that's how it feels like anyway so I don't know who I would recommend this to because I don't think for everyone this will be like this revolutionary thing I think for someone who has climbed their whole life and never struggled with finger injuries probably is not gonna give you any major breakthrough but if you are someone who gets a lot of finger injuries and can sort of relate to what I'm talking about with this sensation of stiffness and feeling unrecruited and so on then maybe it could help I do miss some days here and there but you can probably count them on two hands obsessive indeed a bit Yeah okay as most things in sports science it's impossible to say what's right and what's not and at least with exact Precision but hopefully this gave you some insight to a protocol that you might be able to implement into your own training and I guess in the end without a proper expert guiding you through every step of the way in your training the only real option is trial and error and so try this if you're psyched and if you're not then move on to the next video and enjoy that one peace my homies

Channel: Emil Abrahamsson

Views: 475,141

Keywords: climbing, bouldering, eric karlsson bouldering, ifsc, emil abrahamsson, magnus midtbo, mellow, rock climbing, bouldering bobat, adam ondra

Id: 0rAkLqk3UXM

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023