Why Hangboarding Isn't Making Your Hands Stronger

What if I told you that your obsession with getting stronger hands is one of the reasons you’re struggling to improve?

Almost everything we do in climbing involves grip to some degree. On one hand, this means that stronger and fitter hands have great carryover to climbing performance. On the other hand, it means it’s very easy to overtax our fingers without realizing it. If everything you do is a finger workout, then when do your hands get a chance to recover?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked with someone who was convinced their poor results from finger strength training were from: A) Bad genetics, B) Having a high training age, or C) Not having found the “perfect” training protocol yet, only for the truth to be that they are trying to do more in a week than their body can sufficiently recover from. 

I believe this is the primary reason people struggle to get great results from repeater hangboard protocols. These protocols (such as Will Anglin’s 6&10 workout, which I highly recommend), require far more recovery than a handful of max hangs. While repeaters are an amazing tool for developing high-level hand strength, many people don’t allow for enough recovery from session to session to see results.

Will Anglin on his ascent of Top Notch (V13), Rocky Mountain National Park

This is why you see so many climbers put in a tremendous amount of time and effort into their climbing and training, and still struggle to get stronger. Their body is doing everything it can just to recover from the workouts and return to baseline. They don’t have enough recovery time to get stronger.

If this sounds like you, you have two options. First, work to improve your recovery. If you can recover better then you’ll get more out of your current methods. The two best ways to do this are to get better sleep and to eat like an athlete. If you can learn to regularly sleep well and sufficiently fuel yourself for your workouts, you’ll be amazed at how much quality work you’re capable of.

The second option is to look for redundancy in your weekly schedule. If you’re board climbing, hangboarding, limit bouldering, projecting, doing recruitment hangs, no-hangs, working on your “lazy fingers”, and adding in supplemental wrist work, ALL of those things are directly taxing your forearms and will cancel each other out at a certain point.

I don’t know your situation so it’s impossible for me to give a blanket statement as to whether you are doing too much currently. But if you feel like you’re working hard and doing all the “right things” without seeing much payoff, then it’s worth making some changes and seeing if the problem is that your hands are constantly under-recovered.

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If you have no clue what to change in your program or just want a fresh starting point, a good place to look would be the training plans that we offer.