For those of you who would rather read than listen, today we have an excerpt from the transcript of the TrainingBeta Podcast Episode 142: Zahan Billimoria on Core Training for Climbers. You can find the entire transcript and audio on the episode page. In the interview, Neely talks to Zahan about his bodyweight program (meaning no weights are involved) and how we can incorporate more sport-specific core work into our own training as climbers.

In this excerpt, Zahan defines ‘core’ and describes how we use it while we’re climbing.

He talks about:

  • What he thinks is the best way to train our core to become stronger
  • How we can get better at using our core
  • How most people train their core and what he thinks they could be doing differently

Be sure to check out the full episode or transcript! If you’re interested in training for climbing, check out our brand new Bouldering Program, or our Route Climbing and Finger Strength programs.

8:50

Neely Quinn: Let’s define core because a lot of times when people think of their core they just think of the front of their body and their abs, basically, but tell me what the core is and tell us about how we do use it in climbing.

Zahan Billimoria: That’s such an important distinction and I’m not sure that I can give one definitive answer to: ‘What is the core?’ I think that word can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people so I’ll just say what I’m referring to when I speak about the core.

For me, I’m using the very broadest conception of what the core is so that’s everything from abs to obliques, traps, even lats, diaphragm. I’m interested in the posterior chain, so that’s the backside of our body, as well as the anterior chain. If that seems really, really broad it is but ultimately, coming into your second question of how do we use the core as climbers, I sort of see the function of the core as having two functions and the first is providing stability.

Climbing being a sport that occurs on natural terrain, by nature there is so much time in climbing that is spent in these off-axis movements. Any kind of movement where your feet aren’t directly under your hands or if your hands are facing the wrong direction you’re in these off-axis positions. By nature of that you’re in an unstable position and the role of the core is to provide this corresponding stability to your position.

If you think about grabbing an undercling, especially an undercling at shoulder height or above, or twisting into a sidepull or backstepping, all of those movements and resulting body positions are very unstable and having not just a strong core, but I would say an intelligent core, that is able to provide stability in those positions is kind of the function of this program.

The second is coordination. What I mean by that is we spend so much time training our fingers and our pulling muscles but ultimately, elite level climbers aren’t just stronger than the rest of us. They don’t just have stronger fingers and are able to bang out more one-arm pull-ups. They are able to coordinate these movements between their upper and lower body into one seamless and efficient movement and all of that requires this really high level of engagement of your core muscles because in order to transfer force away from your fingers it has to go through that posterior and anterior chain down into your feet.

Coordination – that power transfer from your hands to your feet – and thinking of the core as a critical link in the critical chain and that’s how we want to train it really helps us think about how we should develop strength in our core.

Neely Quinn: That was very thorough yet succinct. I really appreciate that. It’s cool. I bet a lot of people are like, ‘Yeah, okay. That’s a really good description of the core and how we use it.’
It sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought and done a lot of research on it. What do you think are the best ways to make the core stronger or how do we get better at using our core?

Zahan Billimoria: Maybe even before diving into that I think one of the other foundational questions I was asking when I was developing this program is of the ways that climbing can be so different than a lot of other sports. I was thinking: if you’re a basketball player you get to hone your game every day of the week, if you want. It’s a very accessible sport.

Climbing is a very inaccessible sport. Certainly today with gyms – like if you live in Salt Lake you can pick from six or seven different gyms, but for the rest of us living all across the country who either don’t have access to good year round climbing or don’t have access to a gym – we often find ourselves training in a way that helps our bodies produce more force but as far as the application of that force and as far as the skill development side of the equation and developing the athleticism to harness that force into really sports-specific movements, we don’t really get to do that.

Part of what I wanted to do with this program was bridge that gap and start to integrate these sports-specific types of movements and these unique stresses that we put on the core into the way that we train.

Leading from that into your question, what I’m really passionate about is developing movement patterns that replicate the way that our core is stressed in climbing. A large part of that is rotational. So much of the way that we produce a stabilizing force in climbing is by reducing or countering that torque that results from your feet not being straight under your hands and having to backstep and twist. I think that’s one, and probably a major, function of this body weight core training.

Neely Quinn: Okay, so let’s go into how we have trained our core up to now and what you think we could be doing differently.

Zahan Billimoria: Sure, that’s a great question. I’ll speak for myself and I think that it’s representative of the climbing community at large. We have largely trained our core by moving our feet around in the air. We spend a lot of time on a bar doing movements like windshield wipers or leg raises or ankle-to-bar in which we’re using our feet as a lever or our legs entirely as a lever and we’re repeating relatively simple movements over and over again with our feet unweighted.

That replicates really well the challenge of when you stick a big dyno and you latch the hold and your feet come swinging off and then you’ve got to recruit the muscle fibers of your core in order to bring your feet back up and onto new holds, but in reality for me and I think for climbers at large, that’s maybe 10% of the function of the core.

Much more often the function of the core is: how can I keep my feet on when I’m making big moves? Like when I’m really extended, how can I produce more force in my feet to reduce the load on my fingers and also reduce the likelihood that my feet are going to come swinging off and then I put them back on after I finish that move?

Certainly that can sometimes be the right move but the more I’ve observed elite level climbers, more often they’re making those moves with their feet on. I’m really interested in how we produce more force through our feet and how we use our core as that critical link in the kinetic chain so that when I’m about to make a dynamic move I’m actually really, really engaged in my core to keep my feet on.

Instead of doing exercises that involve my feet swinging around in the air and lifting my feet up and putting them back down or swinging from side-to-side, I’m really interested in how I can reduce the stability in my position and produce more and more force at my toes.

38:31

Zahan Billimoria: A lot of people in the strength training world like to use the word ‘practice’ rather than ‘training’ and I think words do matter and I think that makes a lot of sense. The way I think about it is looking back on the way that I have trained strength for a really long time and my brain, the way it was sort of organized, was like, ‘Training is for the purpose of developing more force and climbing is for the purpose of learning to harness that force into the sports-specific movement that rock demands.’

Now I’m thinking, ‘No, not really.’ Training has to bridge that. It has to bridge force production, which is always going to be the primary function of training, but it has to bridge that athletic dimension of sport. It has to integrate the athletic demands of the way that we move on the rock and in the mountains. Otherwise, coming back to that basketball analogy, we just don’t get to practice enough.

We don’t get to climb as a part of our day-to-day lives. I know I certainly don’t. I get to go on a couple climbing trips a year and I’m psyched about that but if all I do is train force and train tension then all I’m going to bring to my climbing is more force and more tension, but that’s not my evolution as a climber. It’s how I harness and execute these really specific movements using force but also timing that tension and release and also being able to coordinate movements that are really three-dimensional and involve a lot of rotation and torque and things like that.

FULL EPISODE/TRANSCRIPT:: TBP 142: Zahan Billimoria on Core Training for Climbers

Zahan Billimoria Links 

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