A hangboard training plan for home

You bought a hangboard. Now what?

“Homewall training tips” and “training at home” come up on climbing forums every month, and the story is usually the same: the board goes up, the first few sessions are enthusiastic and random, and a few weeks later it’s a place to hang a towel. What’s usually missing is a plan: what to do, on which day.

The sample week gives the hangboard two fixed days and gives climbing one, with rest days around all three. If you climb at the gym twice a week already, keep those sessions and use only the Tuesday and Saturday hangs.

Two kinds of hangs, two different days

The two hangboard days train the same fingers in different ways.

• Tuesday is short and strong. Five 10-second hangs with long rests. The load should feel moderately hard and every hang should be clean, with shoulders engaged and elbows slightly bent. It’s there to make you stronger without ever going near your max.
• Saturday is longer and lighter. Eight 30-second hangs, and you should finish each one knowing you could have held on for 10 seconds more. It builds time on the edge rather than peak strength.

Keeping them on separate days, with at least two days between, is what lets your fingers recover.

Warm up before the first hang

At home there’s no easy climbing to warm up on, so do it off the board: something that gets your heart rate up, arm, shoulder and wrist circles, then a few rounds of hand shapes. Before the first real hang, do two or three easier ones with a foot on a chair. The first hangs of the session are the ones that go wrong when you skip this.

When to make it harder

Keep the same hangs for several weeks. When every hang on Tuesday feels crisp and controlled, add load in small steps, or move on:

1. 7/3 repeaters in place of the Saturday hangs.
2. Max hangs in place of the Tuesday hangs.

Change one day at a time. Both are high injury risk: warm up fully, and stop at the first sign of pain in a finger.

If you have a home wall

Use it for Thursday. A home wall is great for setting short problems around one thing you’re bad at, like lock-offs, bad feet or wide moves, and climbing them a few times each. The one rule: rest between attempts as you would at the gym. On a home wall it’s easy to keep pulling on the same problem with 30 seconds between goes, and then it’s a pump session.

What goes wrong

• Hangboarding on top of everything. A full hangboard session the night before a hard gym session means both are done tired.
• Chasing a harder edge every session. The load goes up when the hangs are easy, not when you feel like it.
• No rest timer. Two minutes feels long at home, so it turns into 45 seconds. Time the rests.

Who this isn’t for

Climbers in their first year: climbing is still the best finger training you can do. And if a finger hurts right now, see a physio before you hang on anything.