As always, with activities such as weighted pull-ups, the question of "why?" needs to be addressed. If you are doing them as part of a general upper body workout or you just want to get better at doing pull-ups thats all good. If you are doing them as part of climbing training, then you should re-consider. There are going to be activities that are far more efficient for developing fitness and movement skills that apply directly to climbing movement.

John Gill could do a one-arm lever and John Bachar used to do 100 pull-ups a day. Coincidence?

What he's saying is that if you have a limited amount of time to train, you're better off working form than working on pullups.

If you have an unlimited amount of time and you climb plenty anyway, your form is going to be continually honed. Developing a very strong core to apply your technique through would probably be very beneficial.

It's Joe Friel training bible recycled into climbing. That's all.

Lockoffs and frenchies. I find myself needing isometric lockoff strength way more than pull-up strength. Weighted pulls just seem to hurt my elbows. As I approached 20+ rep sets on regular pull-ups, the returns seemed to diminish as far as climbing went, so I started including isometric exercises. That's when I really started noticing a difference during actual climbing.

1. Training you do is better than training you don't do. In the real world, there are plenty of people who wish to train at times and in places that do not have real or simulated climbing.

training by climbing with a pack on would cause this type of "negative transfer"; the pack changes the climber's center of gravity, and hence changes the movement

Rather than learning to effectively initiate movement in the lower body, they train upper body strength. They then transfer what they know -- pull-ups -- to their climbing, which reinforces their deficient movement skills. Obviously, this is a gross generalization, but I suspect that it contains more truth than puller-uppers realize.

[Training incorrectly can actually harm performance]. I'm assuming you mean bench press, with it's co-responding protraction and internal rotation of the humerus creating the "hunch-back" appearance.

[For instance, weighted sport-specific training has been shown to be harmful to performance in certain sports because the weighted movement is naturally performed differently than the unweighted movement, but the athlete transfers the incorrect movement to actual performance in the sport.] Most of these studies (using sleds/tires/cars pulling and pushing) are in relation to the sprint, and the transfer to the start and accelerative phases. The start (first 20-30M) has a high co-relation with strength rather than power/elastic properties. The "negative transfer" generally has to do with the max strength/power of the athlete and the percentage of resistance used. Sprinters (and distance runners now) squat, power clean, and deadlift to develop higher kinetic value to transfer to running and the "spring-mass" model. Are you suggesting that the principles of overload don't hold for rock climbing?

Kinetics (power/strength and all sub-forms) drive kinematics (technique). The pull-up is not climbing and those who oppose the pull-up seem to suggest that when climbers train on anything (campus board/hangboard/systems wall/pull-up bar) besides a climbing wall - that it is done in a "vacuum", where the climber doesn't do anything besides pull-up. No trainer/physiologist/strength coach would ever suggest that the athlete give up the kinematic aspect of their sport to rely soley on the kinetics.

I have seen many a climber perform (mainly overhanging) moves that require a certain level of shoulder girdle strength without having the requisite strength and either fall off the climb or subluxate or even dislocate their shoulder! Without question, the better performing climbers that I train have stronger kinetic values.

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David Wahl

2. The extremely sport-specific approach, while it certainly seems logical, is not characteristic of the training methods of other professional athletes, most of whom include some pretty generic weight-lifting as well as sports-specific exercises. One has to at least wonder whether all the paid specialists advising all these athletes are missing something that Fluxus has understood or whether, to be fair, climbing is intrinsically different from these other sports.

Thanks for a good post Rich. I think this point should get more attention:


1) It should be mentioned that it depends a great deal on what sport one is talking about, there are top level gymnasts, dancers, and figure skaters for example, that do little or no supplemental weight training. Also keep in mind the totally unique demands of balance found in climbing, this context must be addressed in our training.

2) I think its essential to take a historical approach to this issue. Climbing is very young in terms of the development of training programs and as your rightly pointed out climbing started as a sport where the most famous and popular training activities were indirect or supplemental in nature. So in a very real sense in the sport of climbing we put the cart before the horse, trying to gague the effectiveness of secondary training methods before we had any idea of what primary training even looked like. In the past 17 years with climbing gyms being more wide spread, and with there being many more crags developed in all regions of the country we have a historic opportunity to really learn about primary training methods for climbing. Very few people have even looked into the issue of primary training, so its something there is so much more to learn about.

3) Also thinking about other sports that do utilize supplemental training, it always makes up a small portion of the over all training load. Further in sports such as football, or golf or tennis, etc, there is a much larger body of bio-mechanical knowledge regarding effective movement. In that environment its a lot easier to create secondary training methods because one has a well developed understanding of the movement in question and what can be done outside of the sport specific realm to improve the movement. We just don't have that kind of knowledge in climbing. Last time I checked there were about 5 bio-mechanical studies of climbing movement available in English, all of which were very basic and inconclusive.

There are a few other points I'd like to address but I think this is enough to get the basic points across. Its not that supplemental training is always a waste of time, there are specific contexts in which it can help prevent injury, improve flexibility and range of motion, and in some cases improve fitness, but the performance gains that can be credited to these methods are much less significant than direct training in a sport that has such unique and demanding movement. Further, we need more people working with and innovating with direct training methods. Remember the goal of training should be the greatest amount of performance gain with the least amount of training. Well structured direct training is always going to be the best way to achieve that.

1) It should be mentioned that it depends a great deal on what sport one is talking about, there are top level gymnasts, dancers, and figure skaters for example, that do little or no supplemental weight training. Also keep in mind the totally unique demands of balance found in climbing, this context must be addressed in our training.

3) Also thinking about other sports that do utilize supplemental training, it always makes up a small portion of the over all training load. Further in sports such as football, or golf or tennis, etc, there is a much larger body of bio-mechanical knowledge regarding effective movement. In that environment its a lot easier to create secondary training methods because one has a well developed understanding of the movement in question and what can be done outside of the sport specific realm to improve the movement. We just don't have that kind of knowledge in climbing. Last time I checked there were about 5 bio-mechanical studies of climbing movement available in English, all of which were very basic and inconclusive.

I know you have a scientific background...that's why I replied to you. In addition, you are typically the first to disregard the value of supplemental training.

I defined the big words - they are common words in athletic development, which you know because of your frequent opinions on such matters.

All of the short list of research that I posted is, in fact, relevant because we are talking about using a strict kinetic exercise with very low kinematic value and it's transfer to climbing. That is what all of these papers are based on, that is what the topic of this discussion is - how we transfer gains in kinetic value to kinematics.

The pull-up, and many of its variances have solid transfer to climbing based on the volume and intensity used.

If you have any questions on nutrition - let me know.

David Wahl

All of the short list of research that I posted is, in fact, relevant because we are talking about using a strict kinetic exercise with very low kinematic value and it's transfer to climbing. That is what all of these papers are based on, that is what the topic of this discussion is - how we transfer gains in kinetic value to kinematics.

The pull-up, and many of its variances have solid transfer to climbing based on the volume and intensity used.

I’ve used various routines involving weighted pull-ups, but in the past couple of years I’ve discovered that even when only making incremental increases, akin to the cycling rgold discussed, I tend to reach a point where elbow tendonitis (medial epicondylitis) flares up. Unfortunately, this year the symptoms became apparent with lower weight than any previous time despite including exercises to strengthen the adjacent forearm muscles.

I don’t want to turn this into a discussion about my sore elbow, but I’d like to know if there’s any indication that doing Frenchies or lock-offs would be less likely to lead to this result.