HÄNG · Training guide

How your plan is built

Your plan isn't a random workout generator. Every session is chosen from a small set of training building blocks — filtered by your goal, your facilities and your experience, then arranged across your week using the same principles strong climbers and coaches rely on. Here's the thinking behind it, pillar by pillar.

A plan is built from three pillars, in order of priority:

01
Climbing — the weekly schedule. This is the heart of the plan and everything else is dosed around it.
02
Nutrition — optional calorie and macro estimates to track against, never a prescription.
03
Other sports — optional cross-training, woven onto easy days so it supports climbing rather than blunting it.

Climbing

The heart of the plan — the weekly schedule everything else is dosed around.

Where to start

If you're climbing below about 6a, the best training is simply climbing. More time on the wall, more variety of movement, and more mileage will move you forward faster than any structured strength work — and it lets your fingers and tendons toughen up gradually.

Structured energy-system and finger-strength training starts to pay off once you're consolidating around 6a with a couple of seasons behind you. That's where a plan like this earns its keep.

The qualities we train

Climbing performance comes down to a handful of trainable qualities. A good block touches the ones your goal needs — without trying to train everything maximally at once.

Aerobic base

The engine underneath everything — how long you can keep climbing before the pump sets in.

How ARC and easy continuous climbing, several grades below your limit, long and low-intensity. It makes the hard work actually transfer.

Strength-endurance

Holding hard positions repeatedly — the grip stamina a long crux demands.

How Repeaters and boulder circuits: short, repeated efforts that mimic the grab-hold-release rhythm of climbing.

Power-endurance

Resisting and recovering from the pump on sustained, near-limit climbing.

How 4×4s, linked boulder circuits and lead burns near your grade, with generous rest between sets.

Max finger strength

The single biggest physical differentiator between grades — raw pulling force in the fingers.

How Limit bouldering, board sessions and, once you're ready, hangboard max-hangs. Gated by experience, never rushed.

Power & contact

Generating force fast — dynamic moves, hard single moves, snatching the next hold.

How Limit bouldering with intent and explosive board work. Campus-style work only for advanced, healthy fingers.

Projecting

Trying genuinely hard on one limit line — where recruitment, power and skill all meet.

How Working a project boulder or route: figuring beta, refining body position, committing on full-rest goes.

General strength & antagonist

Off-the-wall pulling strength to support the hard moves, and the pushing/shoulder work that keeps you uninjured.

How Optional, opt-in: a weighted-pull / posterior-chain / core session, plus light antagonist finishers (press, rotator cuff, wrist extensors) on hard days. Climbing always stays the priority.

Technique & skill

The cheapest grades there are, and the foundation strength is built on.

How Movement drills, quiet feet, efficient resting, and projecting — present in every block at every level.

The energy systems behind them

Those qualities are really your energy systems expressed on rock. Which one dominates depends on how hard and how long you climb — the crossover from anaerobic to aerobic sits around 45–90 seconds of sustained, hard climbing, which is exactly why power-endurance is its own beast. A rounded plan builds the engine from the base up before sharpening the top.

Aerobic base

Long, easy climbing well below your limit. Builds the capillary engine that clears the pump and powers recovery between hard efforts. Trained by ARC and high-volume easy mileage.

Aerobic power

Mid-to-high intensity, moderate volume — climbing that gets you genuinely pumped and teaches the body to keep working under it. Sustained routes and long circuits.

Anaerobic capacity

Near-max efforts of ~45 s–3 min that leave you powered-out — power-endurance. Split into short (15–30 s), intermediate (40–60 s) and long (1–3 min). 4×4s, linked circuits, lead burns.

Anaerobic power

The very top end — single hard moves and limit boulders, recruitment and contact strength. Short, maximal, fully rested. Limit bouldering, board work and campus.

How each session is chosen

For every slot in your week, the plan picks one concrete session from the building-block catalog — passing it through a chain of filters so you only ever get work that's both useful and safe for you.

Your facilities decide the menu. Your gear and walls hard-filter every session. No rope wall means no lead burns; no board means no board sessions; no hangboard means no max-hangs or repeaters. The closest feasible session always substitutes, so the plan only ever asks for things you can actually do.

Grade and experience set your level. Your current grade places you from beginner to elite — but that's capped by how long you've climbed. A strong grade with only a season behind it is still trained conservatively, because the tissue hasn't had time to catch up to the numbers.

Finger-readiness gates the risky work. Isolated finger loading — hangboard and campus work — stays locked until you've climbed roughly two years and are physically mature. Until then the plan builds finger strength through climbing itself. Once you are ready and own a board, a hangboard session is guaranteed in every working week — finger strength is too central to leave to chance.

Outdoor rock earns its own day. If you have access to real rock, the plan offers a distinct outdoor performance day — applying your fitness to your project or a clutch of on-sights. Specificity wins: nothing transfers to outdoor sends like climbing outdoors, so it's biased up as a trip approaches.

Strength & prehab are opt-in. Ask for it and the plan adds general strength (weighted pulls, posterior chain, core — bodyweight if you have no gym) plus light antagonist finishers on hard days. Ask for prehab only and you get the finishers without the extra day. Say just-climbing and neither appears.

Session length trims the options. A short 50-minute session won't be handed a 95-minute combined day. The plan only schedules work that fits the time you told it you have.

Your favourites win the toss. When two sessions train the same quality, the one you enjoy — and the one that fits your discipline, bouldering or ropes — is the one picked. When several fit equally well, the plan rotates between them week to week so no two weeks read the same.

You can swap any flexible slot. The power-endurance and max-strength slots carry alternatives behind them. Swap one and the tracker remembers your choice; the menu only ever offers sessions you can do.

Fingers first — and stay healthy

Finger strength is the biggest physical lever in climbing — and the easiest way to get hurt. Tendons and pulleys adapt much more slowly than muscle, and many finger injuries arrive with no warning at all.

Because of that, hard hangboard training is held back until you've been climbing for roughly two years and are physically mature. If you're earlier in your climbing, your plan deliberately keeps you on volume and technique and leaves the hangboard out — that isn't caution for its own sake, it's the faster route that also keeps your fingers intact.

When the hangboard does come in, the edge depth scales with your level — bigger, lower-risk edges first, the small ones earned only once you're advanced. If you've had recent finger niggles, you can ask for extra-conservative loading in the questionnaire and the plan keeps you on the largest edges.

Whatever your level: warm up your fingers thoroughly before loading them, and back off at the first hint of joint or tendon pain.

Finger-strength training in depth

Once you're finger-ready, isolated finger training is the most measurable lever you have. There are several tools, each best at something different — the plan reaches for them through max-hangs and repeaters, but it's worth knowing the whole toolbox.

Max hangs

Heavy, brief isometric holds — the most direct driver of raw finger strength.

How 3–5 sets of a ~7–10 s near-max hang, full 2–3 min rest. Add weight (or shrink the edge) so the last second is hard but clean. Controlled trials show roughly +15% in 4 weeks, ~+28% in 8.

Repeaters (7/3)

Intermittent holds that mirror climbing's grab-hold-release rhythm — strength-endurance and tissue volume.

How 7 s hang / 3 s rest × 6 = one set, 5–6 sets, 2–3 min between. By total volume, repeaters rival or beat max hangs for hypertrophy.

Density / long hangs

Longer, sub-maximal holds that build connective-tissue tolerance and work capacity.

How 20–30 s holds at a moderate intensity. Lower peak force and gentler on the joints — a good on-ramp, rehab tool, or higher-volume block.

No-hangs / lifts

Pulling on a portable edge or load cell instead of hanging — precise, low-skill, easy to load and measure.

How Lets you train one arm, isolate a grip and track force to the kilo (load-cell tools, Tyler Nelson's protocols). 2024 app-data analysis found light, long-duration loading can add to — not replace — heavy hangs.

20 mm is the benchmark. It's the edge most research and grade-comparisons use, roughly one finger pad deep. Train mostly here; 14–20 mm builds max strength that carries to smaller holds. Start larger (25–35 mm) if 20 mm is too hard, and earn the small edges.

Half-crimp is the workhorse. Train the half-crimp and open-hand grips — they're strong, transferable and safer. Keep heavy full-crimp loading off the board until your fingers are well-seasoned.

Warm, then load. Never hang cold. Work up with a few ascending-intensity hangs before the top set, and stop the instant a joint or tendon complains.

How your week fits together

Hard and easy days alternate. Adaptation happens between sessions, not during them. Stacking hard days just digs a hole.

Hard finger days are capped and spaced. At most one truly hard finger day a week as a beginner, two at intermediate, three when advanced — never back-to-back, and never three maximal-finger days in a week. Fingers and tendons recover far slower than muscle; this is the line between getting strong and getting injured.

At least one full rest day. Every non-training day is genuine rest. That's where you actually get stronger.

At most one combined day. When it fits your time and readiness, max-hangs and limit climbing can be stacked into one focused hard day — followed by rest. Never more than one such day a week.

Your available days drive the layout. Train two days a week or six — the plan fits the highest-value work into the time you have, then spaces the hard days as far apart as your week allows, rather than squeezing a full week into fewer days.

Cycles & progression

Real progress is built in nested cycles — touch a quality once and nothing happens; load it, recover, and repeat a little harder, and it adapts.

The week

Microcycle

One week. Touch several qualities and vary the intensity day to day — hard, easy, rest.

The block

4-week mesocycle

Three weeks of building load, then a deload week that cuts volume so your body absorbs the work.

The season

Macrocycle

Blocks chained to the length you choose — 4 to 16 weeks — each a step harder, with a quick reassessment every four weeks.

Each week is set to one of four phases, and the phase decides how much load it carries:

Build

The working weeks. Volume ramps up across the block — harder problems, more sets — driving the adaptation.

Deload

Cuts both volume and intensity so your body absorbs the work and your fingers catch up. Skipping it is how crimping finds your weak link.

Peak

Full intensity, trimmed volume, biased to the most specific work for your goal. A sharpening, not an overreach.

Taper

Peaking blocks only — when you're training for a trip or a comp. Cuts volume ~50% but holds the intensity sharp, with extra rest, so you arrive fresh and strong rather than tired.

Why your weeks vary

Inside a four-week block, the three building weeks don't repeat — they undulate. One week leans into max strength, the next into power, the next into endurance, and the concrete sessions rotate underneath. This is non-linear periodization (Steve Bechtel's Logical Progression): research shows it matches or beats grinding the same week on repeat, it keeps every quality ticking over rather than letting one fade while you chase another, and — not trivially — it stops training from getting monotonous. The deload week then sits in clear relief: roughly half the volume, no limit or max-finger work, easy and playful.

Warming up — the RAMP

A good warm-up is the cheapest injury prevention there is, and it makes your hard efforts better. The RAMP structure takes you from cold to ready in four steps — the last one matters most for fingers.

Raise. 5–10 min of easy movement to lift heart rate, temperature and blood flow — easy traversing or light cardio.

Mobilise. Take the shoulders, wrists, hips and spine through their range — band dislocates, wrist circles, hip openers.

Activate. Wake up the pulling chain and shoulders — scapular pulls, light hangs, a handful of easy boulders.

Potentiate (primers). Climb up in intensity toward the day's hardest work — a few ascending-difficulty boulders or hangs. Never throw at a limit move cold.

General strength & staying balanced

Off-the-wall strength is optional — ask for it in the questionnaire — but antagonist and shoulder work pays for itself in durability for nearly everyone. The principle is simple: balance the relentless pulling.

Push as hard as you pull. Climbing is overwhelmingly a pulling sport. Balancing it with pressing, wrist-extensor and rotator-cuff work is the simplest insurance against the shoulder and elbow injuries that sideline 50–80% of climbers each year.

Strong and balanced. Weighted pull-ups or rows, a hip hinge and core carry over to hard pulling and steep tension; antagonist and scapular work keep the joints healthy over a season.

Match the volume. However much you pull, push roughly as much. High-volume endurance climbing calls for higher-rep, lower-intensity antagonist work; low-volume power for heavier, briefer sets.

Climbing comes first. Lift after climbing or on a separate day, and leave 2–3 reps in the tank. Strength work supports the wall — it never replaces time on it.

Recovery, skin & sleep

You get stronger between sessions, not during them. Recovery isn't the absence of training — it's where the training lands.

Sleep is the biggest lever. Aim for 7–9 hours. The bulk of tendon repair, muscle adaptation and skill consolidation happens while you sleep — no protocol out-trains a chronic sleep debt.

Rest days are training. Fingers and tendons rebuild between sessions, not during them. Keep at least one full rest day, more when you're loading hard.

Mind your skin. Skin recovers slower than muscle and often decides session length. File glassy calluses, moisturise, and stop before a flapper — torn skin costs more days than tired forearms.

Listen to readiness. Sleep, soreness, mood and resting pulse all signal recovery. When several are off, take the easy option — the deloads and rest days exist to be used.

Staying healthy

Most climbing injuries are overuse, not accidents — and overwhelmingly in the fingers and shoulders. The plan is built to keep you the right side of that line; these are the habits that finish the job.

Tendons lag muscle. Fingers get strong faster than the pulleys and connective tissue that hold them, and many finger injuries arrive with no warning. Progress finger load patiently, in small steps.

Respect pain. Sharp, or joint/tendon, pain means stop — back off, settle it, reload gradually. Climbing through a niggle is how it becomes a season-ender.

Know the A2 pulley. A pop or pain at the base of a finger is often an A2 pulley strain, the most common climbing injury. Rest, then reload progressively; see a climbing-literate physio if it lingers.

Manage the load. Sudden spikes in volume or intensity drive most overuse injury. The plan caps and spaces hard finger days; choose the conservative option in the questionnaire and it pulls them back further.

Training for a trip or an event

When you're working toward a date — a climbing trip or a comp — the plan switches from year-round building to a peaking block, sized to your runway: a short two-week taper at one end, a full multi-week build at the other. It builds the engine, sharpens it at the Peak, then tapers — cutting volume while keeping the intensity — so you arrive fresh and strong rather than tired. The closer the date, the more the block is shaped around it; if your trip is more than 8 weeks out, keep training generally and start the block 8 weeks before you leave.

Nutrition

Optional calorie and macro estimates to fuel the training and track against — never a prescription.

How we estimate your needs

If you share your body stats and a goal, the plan estimates how much to eat in four steps. Without those, you still get the timing and fuelling guidance below.

Resting needs (BMR). We estimate the calories your body burns at rest from your height, weight, age and sex, using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — the most accurate of the common formulas.

Daily burn (TDEE). That resting rate is scaled by how much you train: more training days and longer sessions raise your total daily energy expenditure.

Goal adjustment. Your goal nudges the target — a modest ~15% deficit to lean out, level to maintain and perform, or a small ~10% surplus to build. The cut comes out of fat, never the carbs that fuel climbing.

Periodized by the day. Each day gets its own target: more on hard days, less on rest days. Calories also ease back automatically on Deload and Taper weeks.

The macros

The daily target is split three ways, each tied to the day's training load:

Carbs

Your performance lever, scaled to the day's load — roughly 5–7 g/kg on hard days, 4–5 on moderate, 3–4 on rest. They stay high even in a deficit.

Protein

1.8–2.2 g/kg to protect and build muscle, nudged toward the top of that range when you're in a deficit.

Fat

Fills the rest of the calories, with a floor of ~0.8 g/kg for hormonal health — if a tight cut would push it below that, carbs give way instead.

A safety floor

Even on a cut, the target is held at a safe minimum for your size. Eating too little for too long risks under-fuelling — low energy availability, or RED-S — which costs you strength, recovery and health. If a deficit would push your intake below that floor, the plan raises it back up and flags it.

Fuelling around sessions

Before. A complex-carb meal 2–4 h out, then ~30 g quick carbs plus a little protein 30–60 min before you climb.

During. Short sessions need only water; past ~60–90 min, 20–30 g quick carbs keeps power and skin endurance up.

After. Within 1–2 h, a protein-forward meal (~20–40 g) plus carbs to refill glycogen — bigger if you climb again tomorrow.

Hydration & supplements. Drink to thirst with sodium on long, sweaty sessions. Creatine (3–5 g/day) is the most evidence-backed aid for finger and repeat-effort strength; caffeine helps on hard days. Most else is marginal.

Estimates, not prescriptions

Calorie, macro, and load figures are estimates to track against, not medical or dietary advice. Treat the calorie and macro figures as a starting point to track against and adjust — watch how you feel, recover and perform, and tune from there. Your own logbook always beats the model.

Other sports

Optional cross-training, woven onto easy days so it supports climbing rather than blunting it.

The ground rules

Climbing comes first. If you're tired before a hard climbing session, drop the conditioning, not the climbing.

Keep it easy most of the time. Conversational Zone-2 aerobic work supports recovery. Hard intervals compete with hard climbing and belong in an off-season base, not near a peak.

Separate the stress. Don't stack cardio before a hard finger day. Put it after climbing or in a separate session, ideally on a different day.

Back off when peaking. Conditioning tapers down in Peak and Taper weeks so you arrive fresh for your goal, and long sessions are downgraded on Deload weeks too.

How each sport is placed

Modality matters — what a sport taxes decides where it lands in your week. The plan places each one differently:

Running

Mostly legs — little overlap with climbing.

Where Easy Zone-2 runs on easy/aero days, the long run on the easy day. Allowed on your lightest hard day only if you train often.

Cycling

Legs, low-impact.

Where Zone-2 spins on easy days, the long ride on the easy day. Lightest hard day only at high frequency.

Swimming

Loads shoulders and forearms — competes with pulling.

Where Kept off hard finger days entirely. Best on the rest day or after easy climbing.

Yoga / mobility

Recovery, not aerobic load.

Where Anytime — best on the rest day or evenings. Aids recovery rather than adding stress.

Other cardio

General aerobic conditioning.

Where Slots onto easy days; keep it genuinely easy Zone-2, not interval-heavy.

Training two sports in earnest

If you're genuinely training for an event in another sport — not just keeping fit — expect climbing to progress more slowly. The plan protects your hard finger days, splits the two sports across different days where it can, and asks you to accept the trade-off rather than pretending there isn't one.