Why Strength Training Isn’t Making You Climb Harder

Advanced climbing is a game of compensation. It’s long been said that the best athletes are the best at compensating around their weaknesses and leveraging their strengths. Climbing might be one of the best examples of this. We see people with a wide range of body types, strength levels, and skill sets climbing at a high level.

It’s for this reason that when an experienced climber begins to strength train for the first time they will often be underwhelmed with their initial results. Sure, they do feel a little stronger,  and there are glimpses of something happening when they do a move they couldn’t before, but the juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. Why is that?

What’s happening is that they’ve logged thousands of hours of climbing without that added strength. They spent years learning to move in ways that compensated for their weaknesses. All of that experience and movement proficiency is still in the driver’s seat after they strength train. They might be strong enough to do bigger moves, move in greater control, and access new techniques they couldn’t before, but until they put in the time to explore and practice these things they will feel like strength training wasn’t worth the effort.

Unfortunately, losing hope and abandoning strength training isn’t the only possible outcome in this situation. The opposite of this can happen, too. People will train to get stronger, only see minor improvements in their climbing performance, and then decide they need to double down on getting stronger because of how little transfer they saw. In reality, they need to take the time to combine their strength and skills to see the full value of their training. Climbers will dedicate years to getting “strong enough” when what they really need is to learn how to apply the strength they already have.

Strength training makes us more resilient against injury, it enables us to climb more each day, and it allows us to use new techniques and ranges of motion that our weaker selves couldn’t. As we gain access to these new techniques and positions we need to put in time and intentional practice to explore, understand, and make them automatic parts of our movement repertoire. Strength and skill are both important on their own, but it’s not until we combine the two that we can start to reach our potential.

Get stronger, learn how to apply it, send harder, repeat. It’s not an overnight solution, but that’s what makes climbing a lifelong pursuit of mastery.