As climbers, we tend to think that all of our training should focus on the upper body in an effort to improve things like finger strength and pulling power.  However, while upper body strength is certainly important for climbing, by only training your upper body and not doing any leg exercises you are only training part of your body and are missing out on potential climbing performance gains as a result.

To help you incorporate some lower body training into your regiment, here’s an article from Climbing Magazine by Kyle Ward that outlines the importance of not neglecting your legs and gives you a handful of diverse leg exercises that will help you develop some climbing specific lower body/core strength.

“Having a strong, powerful, and flexible lower half gives you more endurance, allows you to do bigger, harder moves, and exponentially improves footwork and thus technique…  And with any type of climbing, the more weight you can put on your feet and legs, the longer your comparatively weaker arms and upper body will last.” – Kyle Ward

The article describes a wide range of leg exercises so you have plenty of options to choose from.  However, they are divided into several categories to let you know how they will transfer to climbing.  They include:

• Universal lifts: squat and deadlift
• Toeing in
• High stepping
• Stemming

Click through below to check out the complete article and all of the exercises for yourself.  Once you have, give them a shot.  You may be surprised at how much a little bit of lower body training can help your climbing performance.

Click Here: Leg Exercises for Climbing

(photo by Andrew Bydlon; courtesy of climbing.com) 

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