Being able to clip your rope while sport or trad climbing is the key to any ascent. Holding a position while bringing up rope and clipping in can be taxing to say the least and training forearm endurance and strength helps in sending hard routes. Building up the forearms will inherently lead to better grip strength and more projects sent. Here are some ways to target climbing movement to send your next hard project.
Reverse Curls
The reverse curl is a regular barbell curl with your hands in the reverse position, palms up. You can calculate your one-rep max for this exercise and build the sets according to your cycle.
Pull up Bar
A quintessential tool for building up forearm endurance. Training with a chin up bar will develop grip strength and lock off ability while building up hypertrophy in the forearms and biceps. Chin ups will eventually lead to frenchies.
Frenchies
First coined by Eric Horst around 1990, this climbing specific exercise was developed by French climbers to specifically target the muscles used in a lock off. So the exercise goes like this: start by doing a chin up and holding it for five seconds, lower yourself halfway so that your arms are at 90 degrees, hold for 5 seconds and lower yourself to the hanging position….and hold five seconds. This exercise will leave the arms burning and generate results.
Hangboard
One of the first rock climbing training devices, hang boards will increase your forearm endurance and grip strength. You can use the hang board to simply practice grips on dead hangs or increase intensity by incorporating different grips into an offset chin up. Check out the following link for a great article on hang board training.