How To Add Lifting Into Your Climbing Week

Lifting has multiple benefits including improving your climbing and more importantly your health. But since we are talking climbing here, lifting helps increase ones’ strength which will improve your performance in climbing as you are now stronger.

Yet a hurdle for climbers to start lifting is knowing how to add it into there already busy lives and continue to keep climbing. First misconception is that lifting will take a while. That is not the case, lifting takes up less time than your climbing session most likely. Additionally, since lifting is going to be a supplement to your climbing and not the sole focus, it won’t be like those gym rats that go lifting at the gym for 2+ hours doing 10+ different exercises in a session. We are not bodybuilders, we are climbers. And we want our lifting to supplement our climbing and be the minimal effective dose so we can still climb.

This results in our lifting, depending on how we set it up, to be no more than an hour long. Most likely it will be around that 30-45 minutes. The climbers I work with, their lifting sessions never go longer than an hour and usually fall underneath that 45 minute mark.  If you are looking for what exercises to do you can find that here in this blog post. 

So what can it look like? Below we have 3 different examples of what a week of lifting and climbing could look like. All three examples show a 3 day schedule, which is what majority of climbers I have worked with and talked to already do. 

If this seems overwhelming and you are not a 3 day/week person, more like a 2 day/week person. That is still possible! You could cut down your climbing sessions to 1.5 or 1 hour long and add lifting at the end. 

Why do all of these show lifting after climbing? Because climbing is the main focus for the majority of climbers who are beginning to lift and start their lifting journey.  You 100% could do lifting at the beginning of your sessions and flip flop, so lifting then climbing. This would put the emphasis on lifting over climbing. It is your choice. If you want to train strength and have that be your focus for your next training block, I would suggest lifting first, so you are fresh for the lifting and not going into the lifting with already a little bit of fatigue. Going off of that, if you are lifting after climbing, it is crucial that you recognize you need to stop your climbing BEFORE you begin to feel fatigued. If you stop when you begin to feel tired, it is too late, you are going to go into your lifting fatigued and not reap the benefits from the lifting. This takes some practice and alot of self discipline. If you find you are the type of person who just can’t stop climbing or gets super psyched and climbs always to being tired, I would suggest lifting first. Even if lifting is not the focus, this is for the better. 

You can learn more about adding lifting to your climbing week by listening to Face The Climb podcast episode here: