Doing putty exercises is a great form of finger and grip strength training for climbing.  Unlike more traditional finger training like hangboarding and fingerboarding, using putty to train your fingers is very low impact and as result can be done more often with a lower risk of injury.

To help you get started doing putty exercises, here’s an article from Climbing Magazine by chiropractor and author Dr. Lisa Erikson in which she discusses the benefits of putty training and outlines a putty workout to get you started.

“Using flexible putty as resistance training is ideal for hands and fingers. Similar to core training while sitting on an unstable ball, squeezing and kneading pliable putty forces those smaller, overlooked muscles in the hands and fingers to do their fair share of the work, which also mimics the endless variety of hold shapes and sizes you’ll encounter when climbing.” – Dr. Lisa Erikson 

The beauty of training with exercise putty is, as Dr. Lisa points out, that it strengthens all the supporting muscles in the hands and fingers, which, in addition to being a form of strength training, is a great form of injury prevention or rehabilitation.

That being said, just doing putty exercises will not get you V14 crimp strength.  However, if you are newer to climbing or coming back from a finger injury, training with putty is a great intermediate step to get your fingers ready for more intense forms of training like hangboarding.

Dr. Lisa Erikson’s Recommend Putty Exercises

1. Warm up
2. Can opener twists
3. Ball explosions
4. Roll squashes
5. Crimp pinches
6. Web squeezes

All of these exercises are described in more detail in the full article.  Dr. Lisa also provides photos for each exercise which makes them easy to understand and learn.  As far as how much putty training you should be doing, she suggest starting out by doing these exercises for a total of ten minutes a day.

Goals of Putty Exercises

• Strengthen the smaller muscles of the hand
• Focus on weaknesses, correcting muscle imbalances, increasing strength and end range of motion, and improving overall range of motion.
• Decrease forearm and finger fatigue
• Increase and improve finger-joint stability and biomechanics
• Safe beginning for loading joints post-injury
• Healthy transition from full rest to climbing
• Good introduction to finger strength training for beginning/intermediate climbers

Click through below to read the full article and learn more about how to incorporate some putty exercises into your training.  Whether you are using putty to rehab from an injury, as part of your warm up, or as a form of strength training, doing these exercises is a great, low-impact form of finger training and injury prevention.  Take the ten minutes a day as Dr. Lisa recommends to do these exercises.  Your fingers will thank you!

Also if you are interested in learning more about injury prevention and rehabilitation from Dr. Lisa check out her book Climbing Injuries Solved.

Full Article: Putty Exercises for Stronger Hands and Fingers

(photo courtesy of climbing.com)

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