Things to Avoid - Training for Speed Climbing - Off the Wall

I was getting my workout in yesterday and was upset at the fact that my local gym just doesn't care about speed. I also haven't had time to finish my wall to practice the start and skip, so climbing just isn't happening much right now. 

I wanted to feel like I was speed climbing though so I rigged up some fat grip pullups and did some rate of force development pulls on them. And you know what? 

They were... Dumb. And that was when I remembered a key principle of training that I like to follow. 

You can be fancy, or you can be fast. (Stolen from legendary track coach Boo Schexnayder)

And this was too fancy.

The fat grip made my muscles unable to produce peak force.

And the fat grip with bodyweight isn't enough of a stimulus to actually develop finger strength or rate of force development (aka contact strength)

I would have been better off doing a complex of band assisted pull ups (or heavy weighted pulls if I wanted to work max strength) to really work rate of force for arms and back, and then done some large edge campus boarding for rate of force for fingers

Each take their component part to the far end of the spectrum that actually drives adaptation. The sum of both would have been far better than the single exercise trying to mimic the sport

When you get too fancy, you might look good for the gram but you probably aren't developing optimally.

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