Need Stronger Fingers? Build long-term finger strength
Build long-term finger strength with structured hangboarding. In climbing, when your fingers fail, the rest of your body falls. Focusing on this direct connection to the rock can benefit your climbing performance greatly, and luckily, finger strength is relatively easy to train. Need Stronger Fingers? Do Hangboard Ladders
The key with this, like any training, is to do it correctly. And in the right amount. As too much can be time-consuming, boring, and possibly harmful. In our 20+ years of training experience, we’ve found a simple way to maximize finger strength while staying far away from the zone where injury is possible.
The idea is to strategically change the volume of work in any given session via “hangboard ladders,” where easy, medium, and hard sets are cycled through and weights are adjusted in a way that increases strength while completely avoiding risk.
Finger : how Isometric Training Works
The most basic way to get stronger is to work against a load that is “maximal” for just one or two repetitions. Training close to one’s max yields the greatest gains in strength. But there is a major problem. The body can’t take it. Working with maximal loads takes a massive toll on the muscles and nervous system.
And it also risks injury to joints and tendons with intense repetition. Moreover, recovering from training with heavy weights can take 72 or more hours. Whereas training with a more moderate weight only requires about 24 hours to recover. This is particularly true in isometric (static) training, where the exercise involves holding a muscle in a static position, like planks, wall sits, or hangboarding.
Isometric training simply teaches the muscles to get strong in a fixed range, where the muscle is not significantly lengthening or shortening during the set of work. This is in contrast to more “traditional” modes of training, called isotonic training. That involve concentric and eccentric contractions.
