This will be the last post about warm-ups for a while. There are other things I would like to get to. To wrap things up I walk you through my own warm-up routine. It has stayed essentially the same or the last couple of years.
Upper Body
I start my warm-up with range of motion exercises for the upper body joints that are most involved in bouldering and most prone to injuries.
I begin with the fingers, and work my way back, moving the wrists, the elbows, the shoulders. I do one round only, about 10 reps per exercise. Sometimes more if I feel like 10 didn’t do enough.
- Tendon glides
- Wrist CARs – I do them as in the video, once with my fingers straight, once with my hand as a fist.
- Elbow CARs – I love this video. Given that I don’t do Kung Fu, I could not care less about keeping the fist on my central line, and I do both arms at a time.
- Shoulders 1 – I begin in a prayer position, palms together in front of the chest. I keep them pressed together as long as possible and raise my hands towards the sky. From there I do what seems to be called a “reverse snow angel“. I do them because they warn me of an impending impingement, with subtle discomfort in the first part of the movement.
- Shoulders 2 – External rotations using a band.
- Shoulders 3 – Dislocations using a band.
Lower Body
- Squat – I simply sit down in a deep squat and stay there for a while, somewhere between 30s and 60s, depending on how well I feel. Meaning: If I don’t feel so good, I stay a little longer. Afterwards, I add some internal rotations, 5-10 per side.
- Lunge – Same thing as with the squat. Get into position and stay there for a moment. Again, throw in some rotations afterwards, 5-10 per side.
Fingers
- At the moment, I simply follow the warm-up as Coach Grip Gains prescribes it. I do the above mentioned exercises in between the hand times. If you don’t have the Hand of God grippers, that is not an option, of course. And even if you bought them right now, you would need to wait for a couple of weeks until they arrive and then build a basic power curve to get a prescribed warm-up. If you need something right now, there are other warm-ups that work(ed) for me:
- Finger curls using a resistance band. I went for a lazy sunday session outside today and warmed my fingers up with one set of 50 very easy curls and one set of 20 moderately more demanding ones. I did these after the general upper body warm-up and then went on to do my projects of the day.
- Max hangs with a number of warm-up sets. I used to do them for quite a while. They were inspired by Tyler Nelson’s No Hang Protocol, though what I ended up doing had very little to do with what he does… I did one arm hangs, three sets of three reps, where one rep was a five second. Rest between reps was also five seconds, rest between sets around three minutes. (3 x) 3 x 5s on/5s off; 180s rest. These were done on the middle edge of the Beastmaker 2000, which is around 22mm. I used a pulley system to take of weight, and did two to three warm up sets, gradually increasing the weight, up to whatever working weight I used that session (-20 kg, -16kg, -12kg, 3 x -8kg).
These worked pretty well for me. Given that I did them before the warm-up on the wall, I stayed in an somewhat open half-crimp (if that sounds like non-sense: I aimed for around 100° in my index fingers).
On the Wall
- Repeat 10-12 boulders.
If the new set at the gym is fairly easy, I might only do eight repeats and then move on to do the easy ones of the new set. Just as with the repeats, the aim is to climb them as well as I can. To achieve that, I might take a second more to look at and think about them than I normally would.
And that is that. If you want to know why you should warm up, check out the earlier posts on the topic. You should warm up to prevent injuries, improve the quality of your session and practice better movement.
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