How To Improve Grip Strength For Climbing – Top 10 Ways In 2023

For climbers, their grip strength is probably the most important thing that is keeping them from falling. This is because certain sections of climbs are incredibly difficult, where you are hanging with just your fingers and your grip strength. Climbers go through extensive training just to be able to increase their grip strength.

So how to improve grip strength for climbing? It is easier said than done! Because grip strength is focused on your fingers, wrist, and forearm, it is very to injure them. The delicate mechanism of the muscles and tendons means that improving grip strength is difficult. But not to worry! Here are 10 easy to difficult exercises that you can do to help you improve your grip strength for climbing.

Key Takeaways

• For grip strength training, it is good to do some warm-up exercises such as finger extensions, crushing, and curling exercises.
• It is important to focus on the whole arm to increase core strength such as dead hangs and deadlifting to improve grip strength.
• Hangboarding, climbing, and wide pinch plate exercises will help mimic climbing scenarios, improving grip strength with different types of grip.
• Eventually, all climbers will reach a grip strength plateau, but there are other ways to improve grip strength than just increasing it.

Top 10 ways To Improve Grip Strength For Climbing

The focus of grip strength is to improve the strength of your fingers, wrists, and forearm. That does not mean you should only focus on these parts alone! Your core strength and shoulder strength also matter in terms of grip strength. So let’s look at the 10 exercises that will improve grip strength. We will give a difficulty rating and some tips on how to not injure yourself while doing these exercises.
Effective 10 exercise are:

1. Finger Extension Exercisers

For the first few exercises, we shall focus on some warm-up exercises. Finger extension exercises are a great way to start off to increase grip strength. For this, you can use a finger exerciser to do it. Put the exerciser around all your fingers, then stretch the band with your fingers by pushing the rubber band as wide as possible. Complete a few sets of this exercise to get your fingers warmed up for the other exercises on the list.

• Difficulty: Very easy, could even do this exercise with a wide rubber band at home.
• Tip: This is a good exercise to warm up your fingers. Keep to within 15 to 20 sets of 10 stretches at the beginning of your exercise. You can also get finger exercisers that have high resistance to help build up your grip strength over time. Don’t overdo it or else you risk causing damage to the tendons in your fingers. Gradually increase the resistance of the band.

2. Crushing Exercises

Crushing exercises are good to get your wrist warmed up as well as improving your grip strength slowly. For this exercise, you will have to get a hand gripper with adjustable tension so you can increase or decrease the strength of the gripper according to your comfort.

• Difficult: Easy, can do at home with a hand gripper.
• Tip: With your fingers, this will increase strength in your wrist. Keep to within 10 sets of about 10 reps. If you are doing it for the first time, do about 5 sets and gradually increase the number of sets as your strength increases. Try to avoid overdoing it as you might risk getting carpel tunnel syndrome from overdoing the exercise.

3. Curling Exercises

The great thing about curling exercises is that you can focus on your fingers, wrists, and your forearm with a few weights around at home. With each, you will be focusing on the different parts of your arm and gradually increase your strength over time.

• Difficulty: Easy to do at home, but can increase the difficulty by increasing the weight of the dumbbells.
• Tip: Focus on each part of the arm evenly, you wouldn’t want to create an imbalance of muscles in your arm. For finger curls, keep to within 10 sets of 10 reps. For wrist curls, try to do reverse wrist curls so you are mimicking your hand position during a climb. Wrist curls should also be limited to 10 sets of 10 reps. Reverse forearm curls should also have the same reps and sets. Don’t overdo the exercises as you might injure and cause muscle imbalance. If you feel uncomfortable, then do it with lower weights or let your armrest for a day or two before starting again.

4.Wrist Rotation

Because of how your wrist will be positioned during climbs, it is important to free up the movement so you can get into position easily. For wrist rotation, you can do it with dumbbells, but it is much easier to do the exercises with a long handle with a heavy weight on the end, for example, a hammer.

• Difficulty: Moderate difficulty because it causes unnatural movement of the wrist, but can be done at home.
• Tips: Wrist rotations should be done with a gap of a few days so you can gradually increase the movement of your wrist and improve grip strength by holding on to the hammer. Remember this, the longer the handle the harder it will be to rotate your wrist due to the torque. For this, you should limit yourself to 5 to 8 sets of similar reps so as not to injure yourself.

5.Wide Pinch Plates

Pinch plates are great to get your fingers to hold the weight of an object. While it uses the whole hand to hold up the plate, the fingers are under the most strain during the exercise so it gets your grip strength up very easily.

• Difficulty: Hard, but will get easier with each exercise.
• Tips: This exercise will utilize your whole arm so it is a good one to get an even amount of exercise. However, your fingers will have the most burden so it is very easy to injure yourself. Not only that but dropping the plate on your feet might injure it so you have to be careful doing this exercise. Do about 5 sets of 10 reps at most with a day gap between each exercise. Start with low weights to get accustomed to using your fingers to grip and hold weights. You are limited with the number of grips you can apply on the plates but you are open to trying some of the easier ones.

6. Hangboard Exercises

For exercises that will get your grip strength to improve with different grips, then look no further than hangboard exercises. This is specially made for climbers to practice different types of grips and crimps so if you want to improve grip strength for climbing, this is the perfect way to do so.

• Difficulty: Depends on the person, but it will be very hard for beginners who don’t know how to use their grips properly. However, it is very easy to install a wooden hangboard at a comfortable height at home.
• Tips: If you are serious about climbing, then you should get a hangboard for sure! Different grips require different amounts of strength to be effective and nothing is better than using a hang

7. Dead Hang and Offset Hangs

Along with grip strength, it is important to improve your core strength as well. That is where dead hangs come in. And for a more extreme dead hang, you can do offset hangs where you are hanging by one hand to stimulate scenarios in climbing.

• Difficulty: Easy for a shorter time, but harder as time goes along. Could be done at home with a pull-up bar. Offset hangs are a harder difficulty.
• Tips: Dead hangs are great for increasing both grip and core strength. 3 to 5 sets of 1-minute hanging are advised, but you can start off with a shorter time and increase in 5 to 10-second increments, that is completely up to you. It is great to get used to moving your body weight around with your hands. However, you should be careful of shoulder injuries as your putting your whole weight on there.

8. Deadlifting

Deadlifting is another great way to give your core strength and increase the capacity of the whole arm. The way you hang, you are utilizing your whole arm and deadlifting gives an even distribution of exercise for the arm which in turn will increase your grip strength.

• Difficulty: Increases in difficulty with more weight added.
• Tips: Deadlifts are a great show of strength. In the beginning, start off with smaller weights. You can do 5 sets of 1-minute hold, which you can then either increase the weight or increase the sets and duration of the hold. As deadlifting will exercise your whole arm, you should do it every other day to give your shoulders and arms rest to build the muscles.

9. Calisthenics with Fingers

Calisthenics, or freehand exercising with your body weight, is another great way to get used to your body weight. This can include finger pushups and planks, which focus on using your fingers to carry your weight.

• Difficulty: Finger calisthenics is notoriously difficult because all your weight will be on your fingers. Can be done at home but with caution.
• Tips: Having your fingers bear the brunt of your whole weight is difficult because they aren’t used to doing so. Therefore, whatever calisthenics you are doing should be done carefully. If you feel like you are getting hurt, then you should stop doing them.

10. Climbing

There is no better exercise than climbing. It will improve your grip, core, shoulder, and arm strength all simultaneously. As you practice, your grip strength will gradually increase.

• Difficulty: Easier to do at gyms, but harder to do in actual climbing.
• Tips: Climbing is not only difficult, but it is also a dangerous activity if you don’t know the proper procedures and etiquette. This should be done once every week, twice to thrice a week if you already have experience in climbing. You should also be wary that while it increases grip strength, not properly climbing could result in muscle imbalance. For example, beginners use their legs more than their hands. If they continue to do so as they gain more experience, it could cause muscle imbalance.

What is Grip Strength Plateau?

The fundamental problem with grip strength is that it is mainly concentrated in your fingers. After a certain point, no matter how much you train them, you won’t get any increase in grip strength. This is known as the grip strength plateau. A large imbalance of muscles around your fingers will cause your nervous system to hold back on your strength. And overworking your muscles will cause injury, which could even result in a loss of grip strength.

This is why it is important to maintain a muscle balance when you are training for climbing. It reduces the risk of injury and helps maintain good progress in improvement. If you do reach the grip strength plateau, you could improve your core, wrist, or shoulder strength instead to help your grip strength. It might not increase your grip strength, but it will help increase your stability and endurance of your grip strength.

FAQs

Final Thoughts

Grip strength will take time to develop, and your fingers will hurt a lot during the process! Your skin will break and rebuild, the same as your muscles. It is important to maintain this cycle of exercising and resting because that will eventually build up on your strength. Any sort of strength training doesn’t happen overnight. It is the same for grip strength which will hit a plateau in your fingers. But you could do other exercises to help improve your overall grip strength.