Your Body Can Get Stronger — It Requires More Intention to Advance Your Rock Climbing Skills We are designed to move, stretch, load, and rebuild across a lifetime. The more you load, tension, compress, and challenge your system, the more resilient and durable we become. We can send our longest and hardest routes. Our adaptability doesn’t disappear with age—it just becomes more dependent on how we train. And most women I work with are leaving a lot of that capacity untapped. W

Learn how women over 40 can train for rock climbing with better strength, power, endurance, recovery, and injury resilience. Evidence-based strategies for climbing performance and longevity.

Your Body Will Get Stronger — But It Requires More Intention when training to Climb Alpine Peaks I am ceaselessly in awe of what the human body can do—Regardless of you are age or fitness level, our bodies respond to the input we give them it until the day we die. While researching fitness and training for females I came across a study that took a goup of 86-94 year olds and had them do strength training exercises for their legs. Over 12 wks the working group improved quad s

Some climbers fix their elbow pain with exercises , changing climbing technique managing volume and intensity. If other strategies have truly been tired with good adherence over 2-3 months and you have had no significant improved it’s time to look somewhere else. The problem not be at the elbow. It’s upstream—in the neck and nervous system . The Neural Link: From Neck to Climber's Elbow The nerves that brach off of our spinal cord control every aspect of muscle function. In t

In the last article, we broke down what’s happening inside the tendon and how to rebuild it with the right kind of loading. But there’s still a problem: If you only treat the tendon and don’t address the cause, it will come back. Most climbers don’t develop elbow pain because the tendon is weak in isolation. It happens because: Load exceeds capacity Movement is inefficient Other parts of the system aren’t doing their job So the tendon adapts… until it can’t. This is where r

The Early Signs So you’ve started noticing your elbow. At first it’s just a whisper — a little soreness or stiffness on the inside or outside of the elbow. It might feel tight in the morning, but it eases once you warm up and start climbing. Then it grows louder. You feel a sting or quick “ping” of pain on certain holds. Gripping something the wrong hurts. Maybe picking up a bag of groceries reminds you it’s there. Eventually, for some climbers, it crescendos into something m

Consider, climbing to build strength, mobility, and balance in middle age and beyond.

If your impression of climbing is young men with defined muscles grunting their way up dime thin ledges, you are misled. Climbing is for...

How to reduce foot pain climbing We hang on hang boards and do pull ups for upper body strength but what do we do for our feet? If our feet are weak, our toes could be in trouble. Toe joints are pushed to end range extension compressing the joint cartilage and stretching passive structures (ligaments and the joint capsule) often leading to joint hypermobility. Strong feet reduce end range loading by providing dynamic stability to the joint and improves foot work through bet

Eighty to ninety percent of climbers have foot pain when climbing ( 1,2,3) . In those surveyed, climbing with foot pain was considered...