1 year check in with no gyms - have you lost strength?

We are nearing the 1 year mark on this COVID pandemic where our beloved gyms have been closed.  my only climbing outlet has been outdoors (which is great), but i can only climb outdoors 1-2 days a week.  previously i was getting ~3 gym days midweek on top of my weekends.

Are you guys/gals about the same strength as you were in Feb 2020?  Weaker?  Better head game but weaker fingers?  

Me personally, i’ve been about the same.  my head game is slightly better, but my body is slightly weaker.  I ain’t no hardman, just a borderline trad dad climbing <5.9 moderates.

My gyms are open now. Even without them, I'm far stronger than I was last year, mostly due to a lot more summer climbing than previously.

I bested my hardest boulder, sport and trad climbs multiple times over. I went once and was like this is a bad idea.

Also if I wanna flex my hangboard gains on Instagram now people think I’m being safe when I just want reinforcement to my ego.

where have the gyms been closed a whole year? I think they opened in ohio end of may 2020.     

Bill Fisher wrote:

where have the gyms been closed a whole year? I think they opened in ohio end of may 2020.     

Cali probably. 

Some of WA's have been opening now but they've been closed since at least April iirc. 

CA - opened for ~3 weeks at one point last year, but that was it.

I’m approaching a full number increase on my redpoint currently after nearly a decade plateau. 
here’s my jaded viewpoint, based on personal reflection, and outside observations: 

most people go to the gym to socialize, climb the new set of the same grade they always climb quickly, and frankly waste their time.

Gyms closing out a fire under my ass to lift weights, work on my weaknesses, try harder when I go outside, and make my days count.
I look forward to gyms opening again for ease of training, but I’m glad I was forced to swallow the hard pill that I was never “training” when I’d go to the Boulder cave to chat the whole time. 

ove the summer I ticked over 250 pitches, and was at my best now having. Not gone to the gym in three months and been ice climbing just now I. Can onsight 11- which is harder than i could over summer so I guess lockdown helped?

Gyms have been open for like 9 months now.

Anthony Balestreri wrote:

Gyms have been open for like 9 months now.

Tell that to the gyms that are still closed and those that had to shutter for good.  

Anthony Balestreri wrote:

Gyms have been open for like 9 months now.

still closed in CA.  

Chances are people lost some fitness but are getting to rock more, thus sending harder on rock.  Said people may also be realizing that the mantra "outdoor climbing is harder than indoor climbing" is definitely true when you spend 99% of your inside, but perhaps not entirely true.

Oh I suck even more now! 

Got way stronger doing hangboard religiously and lots of pull ups. Then gyms opened, got biceps tendinitis, now probably lost everything. 

We built our own 4x8 tension board and I made strength gains on that thing. Now that the gyms are open again I have a totally different approach. I used to lead and top rope a lot and now I just moonboard. I've been plateaued at mid 5.11 for a while and I think that all this bouldering will let me break through that barrier easily when the rock dries.

Not sure. I had a shoulder injury which seems mostly recovered so I'm working back into it, but a) I'm not pushing grades and b) my head game is a bit off due to not leading in a while, so I'm definitely not climbing at my full strength. There are some indications I may have actually gotten stronger due to PT/rest/training, though: my max 10s hang on a 20mm edge is up by 15lbs, and my weighted pull-ups were up 10lbs before I deloaded recently. I'll be careful to say that these sorts of training numbers don't inherently translate into stronger climbing in my experience, but I'm hopeful for the spring.

That's comparing where I am now with where I was at the end of the fall. I'm confident I'm stronger than I was a year ago, because I'm flashing Tension board grades I couldn't do at all a year ago. I guess technically I still can't say how that translates to face-y trad on real rock (which is what I care about) but in my experience there's better correlation there, and the difference is big enough that I'm more sure.

Stronger?  No idea, but I have fingerprints again.

Our gyms remained open on a limited basis, and we kept our memberships to support the community. That said, we haven’t been to the gym since March of last year.

Like the OP, we can get out only one to two days per week, but I built a hangboard complex and a systems wall. We both feel like we are stronger now past fifty than we were in our thirties. My wife is sending harder than she ever has, and I’m feeling like I’m breaking a twenty-year plateau.

I’m seriously debating whether it is worth it to return to the gym as our training has been much more focused, but we do miss seeing our friends and the overall social aspect. 

adam gong wrote:

Oh I suck even more now! 

I think there is going to be strong bias in this thread of people who climbed outside pre-covid and then just climbed even more outside. The majority of people on Facebook are complaining about how much weaker they got.

From CA:  

I've gotten weaker (could do a one arm ---> can do maybe 1/2 of a one arm).  But, due to the fact that I've climbed exclusively on rock for the last year now, I've become a much better climber overall. I was able to maintain my previous highest grade, and after a bunch of hangboarding, I'm now looking to push grades even though I'm still not as strong as I used to be (by a considerable amount, honestly).

I think where not having access to a gym really hurt was just consistency and volume in climbing.  CA had closures, new permit systems, restrictions, along with wildfires creating more closures and bad air quality, and now it's winter which means it rains/snows.  I've to go pretty far out of my way to climb consistently, and keep my fitness up.  I had no hangboard for the majority of this time, and no other way to climb either.  For the last month or two I was going alone at night to climb outdoors, which was absolutely fucking awful.   I ran into a mountain lion my first time, which was an unpleasant experience to say the least.  Though by this time I purchased a hangboard, so I was able to supplement/offset my lack of climbing a bit.  It's been tough but, I'm coming out of it stronger and more motivated than I've ever been.

Thankfully, I made a home wall and everything is on the up-and-up now.  Time to get strong and crush some shit.  

It has given me the opportunity to climb a lot more outside, and I don't really miss gyms tbh. That said, I'm lucky enough to find myself in places where there's a lot of easily accessible climbing and I know that's not the case for a lot of y'all. Some people said it but yeah I realized I mostly went to the gym to hang out but its more fun to just hang out at the crag anyways.