I made a follow along hang board workout, 30 minutes long and pitched for beginner/intermediate climbers (two handed hangs). In the rests in between the hangs I discuss various aspects of adjusting the hang board loading depending on your level and climbing goals. Enjoy the workout!

This is very similar to the basic workout I used when I started fingerboarding and went from 8b+ to 9a in a couple of years.

Maddy and Ollie at Lattice Training recently invited me to their HQ in Chesterfield for their finger strength and endurance testing protocol. It was fun and interesting to see how I compare to their ever growing database of high level climbers for these basic measures of strength and endurance. As you can see in the video, it yielded a couple of surprising results for me and a little food for thought for my general approach to climbing goals in the future.

My annoying tennis elbow improved enough to start bouldering regularly again a month ago. Since then I feel like its stronger every session. A good feeling. In this session I keep on with working through the established problems on my board, building up to starting on the projects. At the end I’m getting close to my Pjs on the fingerboard, which is kind of surprising to me, but great! I also go through some of your questions about training from my last full session vlog episode. If you have more, leave a comment here on my YouTube.

BTW Did you subscribe to my YouTube channel yet? Lots more videos sharing climbing, training, nutrition and nice routes and mountains coming in 2022.

I plateaued at around 7C+ boulder/8b sport for quite a few years in my twenties. Then I made a jump to 8c and then 9a in a surprisingly short period of time. In this episode I go through what I did. Yes it involved a hangboard! I'm not sure my intervention would have the same effect on most climbers these days, but I will suggest some other equally important training for climbing that should reach the same place.

A decent discussion of the principles I apply to structure my bouldering sessions, both during lockdown and at any other time.

Many of you are getting to grips with the hangboard for the first time right now. Here is a deep dive on most of the priorities to think about to get the most out of the tool and stay uninjured. My Hangboard: The Edge.

In this video I reference a review of studies comparing high and low loads for strength training. If you would like to read the study, it is here.

Its taken a while but we had a big delivery of Edge Hangboards today. Thanks to everyone who waited patiently. UK orders will go out tomorrow.

https://www.davemacleod.com/shop/edge

Over the coming weeks I’ll be discussing my thoughts on hang boarding during the current lockdown situation and the routines I use. They are quite simple really.

Due to the current situation we are only shipping to the UK at the moment. As soon as we can be confident that international post services are running a reliable service we’ll restart international shipping.

Lots of you buy my Edge Hangboard together with one or both of my books. For a few days we are running a bundle discount - all three together for GBP140, saving GBP24. Shipping worldwide as usual. We'll run it for a few days or while the current stock of the Edge lasts. You'll find it here.

Nice patterning on the Edge board

We just collected a big batch of Edge Hangboards and these are back in stock in the shop shipping worldwide as always. Thanks to everyone who messaged and waited patiently with us for the new stock. The demand caught us a little by surprise! If you are unfamiliar with the Edge, what follows are some details about why I developed it.

I’ve used wooden fingerboards for 12 or 13 years and they propelled my standard in climbing beyond what I imagined they could. So despite being an extremely simple device, it is hard to overstate their importance in climbing training. I’d call fingerboards and fingerboarding the core exercise and equipment for strength in climbing. Something every climber ought to have in their home and use year round.

My first fingerboard was a single campus rung which cost me a few pounds. I used it to go from being stuck at around 8b/V10 for quite a few years to jumping forward to E11/9a/V14 in the space of about a year and a half. However, it wasn’t just any old piece of wood! The rounding and finish was just right for pain free comfortable training, and so I could do more on it and get stronger. Since then I’ve used some of the more popular models of wood fingerboard which are also pretty good. I’ve also visited some climbing walls with some fingerboard models which I feel are just nasty. Perhaps you can get away with lots of training on these for a while, but they just make my fingers hurt and as such end up being counterproductive in the long run. Obviously you can still make something great to train on by yourself if you have the skills. The problem is most people don’t do it and just want to buy one. So when asked to help design the Edge, I tried to think of the things I’d always wanted to make a fingerboard that is just right.

First, I wanted to avoid plunged pockets. I’ve seen some climbers do exactly what I tend to do and use poor form by ‘nestling’ fingers against the sides of the pockets for extra advantage. After a quarter of a century of climbing, my index finger joints have become permanently twisted. It could be just normal climbing that does this, I cannot be sure. However, I wanted to ensure my core training tool could not contribute to this. So I wanted a fingerboard to have an open rung to force the user to use good form.

Second, I wanted three rung sizes, all with a carefully designed profile. I experimented with lots of profiles and settled on shapes that for me hit the right balance of depth, roundedness and finish and would most likely suit most folks strength levels. The board is 580mm wide. Some climbers have asked me about the rung depths which are 45mm, 21mm and 15mm, so that they might compare between other hangboards, but this does not tell you anything useful as the difficulty of hanging the rung is a function of not just the depth but the roundedness and texture/finish of the wood. I’m all for looking at numbers in training where they can be genuinely informative. However, in my view this is not one of those cases. Which brings me to simplicity.

My overriding goal with the Edge was to make the design simple. Removing unnecessary complexity to me is a highly desirable goal in all aspects of training, including the equipment. Simplicity re-focuses the athlete on the important things like level of effort, strict form, completion of the training and listening to the body. Additionally I’m acutely aware through coaching many climbers that the somewhat garish appearance of some fingerboards are an impediment to building fingerboarding into the regular routine of climbers with family/shared homes and busy schedules. A fingerboard that is conveniently situated is a lot more likely to get used, but some non-climbing relatives or friends legitimately object to a loud or ‘homemade’ looking training setup being installed in an otherwise nicely decorated kitchen or living room! So we wanted to make the appearance of the Edge as low-key and neutral as it could be without sacrificing any functionality. Climbers who live in a climbing household, or alone, might scoff at this idea, but I’m certain that a good number of climbers I’ve coached will welcome it and finally get their home fingerboard installed.

Finally, we wanted to make the hangboard from wood that is sustainably and locally sourced and manufactured. The hardwoods used to make fingerboards is a resource which can be a contributor to environmental damage along several lines (GHG emissions, transport, deforestation etc) and we didn’t want to be a contributor to this. We knew this would noticeably raise the cost compared to some other boards which sometimes use imported wood and/or manufacture in distant corners of the globe. Edge boards are made from Scottish Ash and each board carries the precise grid reference of the source tree. It also carries the Scottish Working Woods logo. As a licensee of this label scheme, it ensures that the wood and manufacturing is local, and the scheme is managed by a range of environmental organisations such as The Forestry Commission and Reforesting Scotland, which promote sustainable practice of both forest management in Scotland and production of wood products. Clearly, this is something that’s important to me, and my guess is that it will be important to lot of climbers, who as a group are more environmentally aware in general and supportive of efforts to minimise the impact of our activities on the environment.

So, with all that said, if you are thinking “that all sounds good, I would like one, but how do I use it” I took some time to make the video above, with a good deal of information about most aspects of how to fingerboard. My view would be that what’s not in this video is less important, but if it leaves you with further questions, please leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer it, and if need be update the video. The video is aimed at folk who don’t yet habitually fingerboard, or do a bit and want to get more out of it. In due course I’ll make another one with some even more geeky details for real board monsters. I’ve also made the one below, dealing with some of the issues around metrics and measuring with respect to hangboard training.

Vlog #16 In preparation for my climbing goal for later in the year, I reset my whole board to sharpen my best training tool. In this episode I get into why I did it and what the strategy was.

"What gets measured, gets managed". Measuring aspects of performance in sport is a good thing, but only if you are measuring the right things and interpreting the data correctly. In this vlog, I draw attention to potential problems with performance metrics in climbing, especially related to basic finger strength, both at an individual level and with normative group data.