Heavy finger rolls for endurance?

I have only ever seen people mention heavy finger rolls and the classic few reps + heavy weight (relative) = best results for strength (contact strength especially).

I dont disagree and I love Todd Skinner for introducing these to Eric Horst who introduced them to me via a book of his. Phenomenal workout, totally worth your time (mine at least). I have been really stoked with the results of incorporating this workout into my weekly routine.

Now has anyone tried these out as a endurance workout? I have been. I apparently was alot weaker than I thought because I couldnt curl (at first) a plate (45lb) on each side, nor a 35lb plate. So I went bare bar (45lb) and taught/trained/lightly stressed my fingers and forearms. By and by I turned this into an endurance workout doing low weight (low weight = 5s, 10s, 15lbs on each side or bare bar for a warmup/cool down). Just going to failure some times, some times not (not always repeating the same thing over and over).

I am heading to my local sports crag this weekend (first time pushing my limit since starting this HFR endurance routine) and am stoked to see where Im at.

Anyone else try this? I think this is a great/easy way to work/support endurance + strength for anyone especially the climber who doesnt/cant climb but 1-2 days a week or so. Basically the weekend warrior OR the beginner who wants to build up to full weight heavy finger rolls.

Thank you.

Just a note (and a bump): I apply the weight (or lack there of) based off of how I feel. Sometimes its just the bar, sometimes its 35s, sometimes its 5s. I dont just work endurance with this technique, I try and maximizes the workouts potential by covering strength + endurance.

I also never do these on climbing days, only days off so I minimize the stress to the regions of my body that this workout effects.

I've never done HFRs for endurance, so I can't speak to that, but I just wanted to quickly clarify that HFRs are not particularly useful for improving contact strength. Contact Strength is essentially your ability to latch the target hold at the end of a dyno. Max finger strength is certainly an element of contact strength, and its possible (though debatable) that HFRs will improve max finger strength. However, the key element of contact strength is contraction speed. To improve contraction speed you need to train with quick contractions, and HFRs are not very good for this. In theory I suppose you could try it with relatively low weight, but the way most climbers do HFRs, with large loads, it would be nearly impossible to contract quickly.

The bigger problem with HFRs, IMO, is that the hand positions involved are not at all specific to rock climbing (nor are the contraction types; primarily concentric and eccentric). Finger strength for climbing is all about isometric contractions, so it follows that we should train with isometric contractions, and we should train with the grip positions we use while climbing.

Long story long, if you want to improve contact strength, dynos are the way to go. The most controlled way to train dynos is to use a campus board, but you can also do them on a bouldering or systems wall.

What about supplemental hypertrophy training with HFRs (ie not main hyp training)

Monomaniac wrote:Finger strength for climbing is all about isometric contractions, so it follows that we should train with isometric contractions, and we should train with the grip positions we use while climbing.

actually Eccentric contractions of the finger/forearm muscles are very important for high-level dynamic climbing moves. Every time you launch a dynamic move off one of your hands, your finger flexor digitorum superficialis and flexor digitorum profundus muscles+tendons "give" a little -- they extend. Since that extension is in the opposite direction to their application of force, it is an Eccentric contraction.

Same thing when catching or latching a dynamic move with one or both of the hands (on a non-bucket hold).

It's a bit complicated since the arm flexor muscles (e.g. biceps) are simultaneously making a Concentric contraction during the Launch phase of a dynamic move.

So training for Eccentric-contraction finger strength is a great idea if you think non-quasi-static climbing is useful (or fun).

How endurance HFRs (as opposed to Hyp HFRs) might help with that, I have no idea.

That is correct; I was being simplistic for the sake of brevity. However, the range of motion used in HFRs is enormous compared to the length of eccentric contraction during a successful dyno latch. The point is, dynos are the way to train Contact Strength, not HFRs.

If you want the whole story on training Contact Strength, visit my blog.

what about training them to cause sarcoplasmic growth of the forearms that may aid in depumping you while resting on route? Something like doing them at the end of some climbing sessions?

So for the people who do, and advocate this exercise, I wonder how much you've actually done it?

I ask this because I come from a weight training for sports background since about 15 years old. We had an enormous weight room setup at my high school that was larger than many commercial gym's free weight rooms. And anyone who played would take weight training as a PE course every quarter.

This was a staple exercise in the program our coach prescribed. And my experience after doing them a couple times a week for 4 years was, they are basically useless and a good way to tweak your wrists if you try to isolate by doing them on a bench or similar.

If you do them standing at the squat rack *(and you should be somewhere like a power rack because it's easy to drop them), it's too easy to use your traps or legs to cheat the movement.

As the movement progresses, it becomes a wrist movement rather than a finger movement, even if you are palms back rather than forward. To reduce the very real chance of dropping the bar, most end up with the bar centered at the DIP joint or very slightly distal to that. So we're basically talking about an effect that is like a hold bigger than a full-pad edge from a leverage standpoint. Which then means enormous weight for a training effect.

If you want to mimic the very small, very brief eccentric effect of latching a dyno...why would you not campus or dyno? Specificity = the first concept of athletic training.

Then there is a whole other discussion of whether campusing truly creates a "plyometric" effect due to the time between ecc/con(not that it isn't highly beneficial, just not truly "plyometric")

Keeping in mind that the concentric needs to fire within 350 ms to get the plyo effect, campusing is probably not a truly plyometric exercise. Marvin wrote about a French graduate student's study on this some years ago (study cite is on the linked page at Marvin's):

"the conclusions of this study we can see that the times of force development until the arms take off in the campus jump are 691 + - 10,5 ms; keeping in mind that after 450 ms the nervous system can regulate the movement by the intervention of the antagonistic muscles, and the myotatic reflex, impeding the development of the increased power involved in plyometric activities. Due to that duration of the force expression, the campus jump cannot be considered a dynamic expression as a jump. "

Link: marvinclimbing.com/english/…;page=2

We could probably pick at that and claim it doesn't isolate the fingers and other semantic wankery, but at the end of the day campusing is a power exercise for the prime movers and requires speed of force development ("contact" strength) for the fingers and trains them both quite well. We only have so much time to train and so much capacity to recover, (which is probably why we spent so much time blabbing about this stuff rather than actually doing it), so choose your methods wisely to make the most out of that limited time and volume.

Monomaniac wrote:That is correct; I was being simplistic for the sake of brevity. However, the range of motion used in HFRs is enormous compared to the length of eccentric contraction during a successful dyno latch. The point is, dynos are the way to train Contact Strength, not HFRs. If you want the whole story on training Contact Strength, visit my blog.

(edited to say...) i posted before reading the response above, which does a much better job describing my thoughts on the matter.

i think another really big difference is speed. it is hard to perform the HFR's at high speed and still keep them in control. i really advise against them for endurance - it is too easy to start cheating and overusing your wrist, and this motion is pretty tough on your wrists.