Representative appearances

• The Best & Worst Gym Exercises for Climbers

  I'm going to start with one of the most popular exercises that everyone always bangs on about, the deadlift. For me, I think it's somewhere between good and okay. Uh I'd probably go for good. The reason being is I do think it's a really good exercise. It's great for the posterior chain. It's good for building trunk stability, which transfers really well into body tension on the wall. But having seen a lot of climbers do this over the years, they do tend to struggle or a lot of climbers do struggle with the bottom part of that lift. And they can definitely develop strength in that area. But because climbers tend to have really strong backs and relatively weak quads, um you end up with the climbers deadlift, which is aka the slot drop, which fundamentally is you don't displace the bar when your legs straighten and then you stand up afterwards. So legs straighten, then hinge at the hips. Yeah. So it looks more like a straight leg deadlift. Exactly. So that's something I often see climbers doing and for me obviously you can learn to do it properly but it has its limitations and I think there's other exercises that can produce similar results which are really useful. Um another reason why it's in the good and I think this is where it's going to divide opinions. We were talking earlier that maybe a lot of people will say this in the god tier is a lot of trainers and coaches will put this in the god tier. I think this is absolutely brilliant and amazing exercise. Yeah. But I know a lot of elite athletes who don't enjoy doing this exercise. They find it very fatiguing um and they feel like the transfer isn't quite as good. So I want to take a very holistic approach here. There's good training uh aspects of this and there's good opinions from coaches, but there's also really valid opinions from the elite athletes that actually performing this day in day out. And so that's why I put it in the good category. Okay. So good, but not not the best because there are some downsides to it.