Skills

Injuring your digital nerves through climbing can create numbness. The real question is when (or whether) it will go away.

With the right type of supportive weight-lifting routine climbers can work to avoid injury and in many cases climb harder, too.

The main thing that scientists have learned in the last decade is that we can use nutrition to trigger the release of the specific enzymes or hormones that play vital roles in the processes of getting strong or improving endurance.

Want to enhance your rappelling skillset? Build better anchors? Perfect your gear placements? Crush your first multi-pitch?

Slopers may be harder to use than edges, but a climber can learn and practice how to use them, and the knowledge is part of being versatile and able to climb anywhere. Sooner or later, you will encounter them.

When we talk about our training, we usually default to talking about how much we do. We talk about hours spent under the hangboard, or how we climbed late into the evening at the crag. Yet the thing we tend to miss, and that is a bigger key to progress, is quality: What, precisely, did we do with those hours and how focused were we?

Climbing gyms are great. But you can also train for climbing by climbing outside. Here are eight tips from veteran crusher Chris Schulte.

Training produces harmful free radicals. Counter them with antioxidants.

We climbers often underestimate the importance of our lower body, and specifically the hips. When we fall, we tend to think we just need to pull more and pull harder. And when we train, we focus solely on the upper body. However, the hips play a number of important roles in both the physicality and technique of climbing.

Check out Emily Ipsen BS CHN CNTP & MNT's author page.

Hangboard training is one of the most efficient, effective ways to improve finger strength. Here's how to get started, safely and in good style.

We all seem to have some notion, likely passed on by a mentor or seen in a climbing video, of how long to rest between boulder problems or pitches, especially at max effort. But do these “tried and true” rules really hold up? And could we be resting smarter?