One of the biggest challenges that a lot of climbers face is how to gain strength, a lot of strength without gain weight. At the end of the day climbing is a relative strength sport, how hard can you pull, push, move yourself around while remaining as light or nimble as you can, the other kind of strong Maximal Strong is more along the lines of power lifters, hell yes they can move a lot of weight but the end up gaining a lot of weight too, I have friends in this category who have bench pressed upwards of 300kg which is amazing but at a bodyweight of just over 180kg not super efficient for climbing.
How do we get stronger while remaining light? I will answer this below.
The kettlebell, a tool from a time in old Russia when they needed to weigh cargo that went on ships, originally just a hunk of metal it soon had a handle added to it to make it easier to be moved around and as men like to do when they get together it turned into a pissing contest, who could move the heaviest weight, who could throw it the furtherest and who could keep it off the ground for the longest and the kettlebell was born.
*Image from breakingmuscle.com
On the left a pro-grade kettlebell, typically the focus of this style kettlebell is the sport of kettlebells, endurance style challenges. Each of these bells stay the same shape and size as they get heavier to allow for uniform competitions.
On the right a hard style kettlebell, typically used for more strength style training. As these bells get heavier they get bigger, both in handle size and the size of the ball.
Foundational Knowledge:
The Principle Of Irradiation, I like to describe it this way, Image a garden hose, when the tap is turn off the pressure is going to start to build inside you, any holes in the hose and water will leak out, the pressure will drop. If you have muscles in the system that you are not tensing then these are the holes in your hose, learning how to apply tension to your body completely will vastly improve the amount of pressure you can out put.
Muscles Only Pull, they do not push.
Stability, the amount of control your muscles have over a joint.
Back to the original question, how do we get stronger while remaining light?
The first things I would focus on is learning how to apply tension better and functional improvement. Both of which the kettlebell is a perfect tool, their off centre of balance design forces you to have to work harder to stabilise your movement patterns, their small nature allows them to be moved around to challenge mobility and their simple structure allows you to focus on what your body is doing, i.e how much tension you are holding everywhere else while you are pressing it overhead.
The most common thing I see with climbers in terms of tension generation is that their core often becomes disengaged when their arms are over head, one of the simplest ways to improve this is to hold a kettlebell overhead and either stand still with your other hand on your stomach to check for tension or to progress this to walking in the same manor.
Stability, I believe is the biggest bang for your buck style training to improve strength, providing to have the mobility to complete a movement in its full range of motion you then want to be able to handle load through that full range of motion with control. The more stable a joint the more load it will be able to handle safely, an example of this is the kettlebell bottoms up press, seen below:
This is not forearm or grip strength, it is your shoulders ability to keep your hand stable with load, the beauty of these style of exercises is they are auto-regulatory, you will either be able to hold the kettlebell bottoms up…. or you won’t. A very low injury risk.
Some of the exercises to keep an eye out for!
Turkish Get Up
Kettlebell Deadlift
Kettlebell Arm Bar
Half Kneeling Halos
Kettlebell Racked Squats
and for overall athletic development the swing and snatch.
These are just some of the reasons why I think that Kettlebells are the perfect tool to help progress climbing, any questions let me know!
