What climbing kit do I need?

There are a few pieces of essential kit.  For me, these are:

• a few carabiners – these link everything together, like robust safety pins
• a few slings – you attach your weight plates together using these
• a harness – you attach slings with weights to yourself with this
• a pulley – this is great for taking weight off rather than adding it on

Apart from the harness, which set me back about £40, you should be able to pick up most of these for a couple of quid each, depending on the brands you choose.

What exercises can I do?

There is so much you can do and so much that climbing kit can help you with.  If you start with a basic full body programme, it might look something like this:

• Weighted pull-up or chin
• Weighted dip
• Weighted pistol
• Assisted glute-ham raise

Climbing kit can help you with each of these exercises.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg!  You can also use it to help with:

• hanging leg raises
• assisted one-arm pull ups
• rope upright rows
• seated cable rows
• face pulls

I’ll look at these latter five exercises another time but for the time being, here are the basics…

Weighted pull-ups

I could bore for England on the subject of weighted pull-ups but in brief:

• Put the harness on
• Loop the sling through some weights plates and connect the ends with a carabiner
• Attach the carabiner to the harness
• Do a pull-up off your pull-up bar

If you can get to the point where you are putting a weight roughly equal to your 2/3 your bodyweight on the harness, you’ll find that you may start to feel that the weight is pulling your lower back into lordosis.  You can get around this by using a harness with belt loops and using one of the belt loops at the back to hang about 15 – 20% of the weight.

If you can hang your bodyweight off the harness and do a good, clean chin or pull up, I’d be interested to compare notes as to how you got there to see whether it was similar to my journey.

Weighted dip

For the weighted dip, you basically follow exactly the same routine as for pull-ups but using your “dip station” instead of the pull-up bar.  I use inverted commas around “dip station” because I keep meaning to sort a proper one out.   I have been using the bar on my squat rack plus a kitchen stool for 3 years now and I’ve got up to a bodyweight dip with that set-up.

Weighted pistol

I hate holding dumbbells when I do pistols.  I don’t know why but I prefer to use 10kg (22lb) plates in my hands and then strap whatever extra weight I need to my upper body with a couple of slings and carabiners.  As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to do my pistols off a 12″ box for the following reasons:

• the inactive leg can hang down a bit, which decreases the amount of rounding that my lower back does and therefore reduces the stress
• I can hold weights where I like and not hit the ground with them
• I can balance more easily

If you look carefully, you can see a blue sling hanging over my back with a carabiner.  Then there is a 2.5kg weight hanging down behind me.  When I stand up, it looks like this.

Assisted glute-ham raises

With your pulley, a sling, two carabiners and a bit of gear cord, you can create a glute-ham raise.  I’ve written about this in detail before but I’ll cover it again here for completeness.  As well as your shiny new climbing kit, you will need a spare pull-up bar to hook your feet under and a pad to protect the backs of your ankles.  It looks like this:

Close up, the pulley system looks like this. 

The pulley itself is attached to a carabiner.  The carabiner is attached to the pull up bar using a short length of gear cord.  I have probably tied off the cord is with an overhand knot but really you should use a double fisherman’s if you have the length for it.  You should also leave a longer tail than I have left.  You really don’t want your assistance weight crashing down on your undefended feet as they lie pinned underneath the other pull up bar.

The cord on the pulley is then run through and tied off in a loop, again using an overhand knot on a bight.  But again, you should probably use a figure-of-eight knot on a bight for added security.  The bight is then clipped into another wiregate carabiner.  The weight plates are then looped onto a sling and clipped together with a third carabiner.

Wrapping up

Well that’s four basic exercises, a pull, a push, a lower quad-dominant and a lower-ham dominant that only require a few bits of climbing kit and some ingenuity.  If you find some small inspiration here, I’m glad.  If you have any other ideas to share, I’d be delighted to hear them.