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Hangboard Training at Home: A Weekly Plan

Hangboard Training at Home: A Weekly Plan

Plan your training • • Julien Corneau • Updated

To train your fingers at home, split your week by what you want to train and set each hang as a share of your maximum: heavy and short for strength, repeaters for strength-endurance, light and long for endurance. Test your max first. In the studies, hard finger sessions were done about twice a week.

I wrote this in March 2020, when gyms were shut and we were all wondering how to keep what we had built over the winter. The plan below is the one I used then. I have since checked each part against the research and noted where it holds and where it is only my experience.

How do you choose exercises for training at home?

Keep the finger work simple and in line with the cycle you’re in and the goals ahead of you, and vary the routine from time to time. Do complementary strength work that is as specific as possible to your objectives. Guided workouts online help hold general fitness, but try to recreate positions close to the ones climbing demands.

Be careful about replacing the large volume of climbing you normally do with hangs. If your body isn’t used to that kind of effort, don’t grind out endless sessions on your board. Pain in a finger stops the session, and if it doesn’t go away, see a physiotherapist.

With Entralpi it’s straightforward to control the type of contraction you target. Start by finding the maximum force you can apply on a given hold with a given grip. Then, by setting the percentage of your maximum and the duration of the effort, you decide which energy system the session aims at. Training that way is supported: a 2023 meta-analysis found that finger-flexor resistance training beat climbing alone for finger strength, rate of force development and forearm endurance (Stien et al.).

What does a home finger-training week look like?

Here is the finger work I was doing. The hang times were set for my goals and my style of climbing, which is fairly fast.

Strength

I used voluntary contractions up to 90% of my maximum for about 7 seconds, with rests of at least 2 minutes. Sessions were short, about twice a week. This sits in the range the research supports: in a randomised trial of 54 experienced climbers, hanging at 100% of max, or intermittently at 80%, for four weeks, twice a week, improved maximal finger strength (Devise et al., 2022).

Contact strength

I did this right after the strength work. The goal is finger power: reaching high force very fast and holding for about 1 second, several maximal 1-second contractions with several seconds between each, then at least 2 minutes of rest. It is for people with solid hanging experience, and tries to recreate the effort of a campus board or limit bouldering. In a small study of 14 elite climbers, four weeks of hangs on small holds, twice a week, raised the rate of force development in the first 200 ms by about 27 to 32% (Levernier and Laffaye, 2019). Fast, maximal loading is demanding on the fingers, so build a base first.

Resistance

For me this meant sets of 6 contractions of 7 seconds with 3 seconds of rest, at roughly 65 to 75% of my maximum, about 6 sets, until performance dropped and I had a good pump. Intensity decides what you train here. In the 2022 trial, intermittent hangs at 80% of max improved both strength and endurance, while 60% improved endurance without a significant strength gain (Devise et al.). I rarely used this protocol in normal times, but in lockdown it stood in reasonably well for the one route session a week I’d normally do at the gym.

Endurance

For endurance I did 10-second contractions with 5-second rests for 15 minutes, at around 30% of my maximum. That intensity is below the average finger-flexor critical force of 41% of max measured in rock climbers (Giles et al., 2019), meaning an effort you can sustain. I felt it helped me shake out on holds while climbing, but that is my impression: I know of no trial that tested this exact routine. I did it almost every day, sometimes several times a day. No study has shown that this much is needed. A retrospective study of climbers logging frequent light hangs reported a 2.5% strength-to-weight gain, against 3.2% for max hangs, but the gain was not statistically different from climbing alone and the study was not randomised (Gilmore et al., 2024). Treat my frequency as one person’s experience, not a prescription.

This low-intensity, high-volume exercise suits a portable hangboard. In 2020 I used a Digitclimbing Yubiboard fixed to the Entralpi plate in a seated position, which avoids overtiring the shoulders with too much weekly hanging volume in the same position.

A portable board used with the Entralpi force plate

How did I organise the week?

Since there was no climbing, my finger training looked like this:

DaySession
SaturdayStrength
SundayActive rest (endurance)
MondayResistance
TuesdayActive rest (endurance)
WednesdayStrength
ThursdayActive rest (endurance)
FridayFull rest

This example covers finger training only. If you also climb, your climbing counts as finger load: see How often should you hangboard? for how to fit the two.

Where to go next

Do this in Entralpi

The max strength test measures your max; type it in Settings (Profile, then Settings, under Physical Profile, Max strength), and a load in % max becomes kilograms. Then start a workout from the Train tab or build your own with the hang times and loads you chose. Without the plate, the timer runs the intervals and you pick the load by feel.

Sources