Indoor climbing for fitness.
Indoor climbing is a great way to build strength and endurance, improve balance, and add variety to your regular strength training, sports training or personal training work.
Climbing is very good for the posterior chain muscles through the back of the body – the lats, glutes, hamstrings and calves.
Indoor climbing for fitness is also a fantastic way to improve your grip strength and work the muscles in the core, biceps and forearms.
Climbing is a great alternative to your regular back workout for bodybuilders and strength athletes.
It’s also great as an endurance based upper body workout – to ‘balance out the body’ – for runners and endurance athletes.
It’s a good choice for boxers too, as climbing works the ‘pulling’ muscles in the back and biceps – balancing out all the boxer’s regular work to the ‘pushing’ muscles. ?Increasing your grip and forearm strength will also increase punching power.
Indoor climbing for fitness can also be used as an extremely effective metabolic conditioning and fat burning workout.
It’s a good way to put your body under enough pressure to get over a plateau and trigger fat burning.
Start with the easiest climbing routes (they will be colour coded) and try to complete 12 climbs with 3 minutes rest in between each climb.
Next time cut the rest period down to 2 minutes between climbs, and over subsequent sessions try to build up to 20 climbs with 90 seconds rest periods per workout.
This sort of workout will build muscle, boosting your metabolism and getting your body into a fat burning oxygen debt pretty quickly.
I recently did some indoor climbing for fitness at Urban Ascent in Parsons Green.
The staff there were friendly and extremely helpful and I would recommend this climbing centre to anyone who is based in South West London.
You can check them out at www.urbanascent.co.uk
Good luck and happy climbing!
121personaltraining.com – indoor climbing for fitness
