No, not to start with. In your first year or two, climbing itself is the strength training that matters most, and time in the weights room is time you’re not spending learning to move on the wall. What is worth adding, if you have twenty minutes twice a week, is a short routine for the pushing and shoulder muscles that climbing barely uses. Heavier lifting can earn a place later, once climbing alone has stopped making you stronger.
That’s the short answer. Below is what the research does and doesn’t say, why the wall comes first, and a simple routine you can do after your climbing sessions.
What the research says about weights for climbers
Less than you’d hope. The best summary is a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis by Stien and colleagues, Effects of climbing- and resistance-training on climbing-specific performance, published in Biology of Sport. It found 11 randomised trials with 225 climbers in total, and pooled five of them. Its conclusion was cautious: added resistance training may improve climbing-specific fitness more than climbing alone, but there are too few studies to recommend specific methods.
Two details matter more than the headline:
- Most of the “resistance training” was finger training. Fingerboard hangs, isometric crimp work and campus boarding made up much of the evidence. None of the included studies tested squats, deadlifts or any lower-body lifting.
- The one general gym programme was modest. Hermans and colleagues gave lower-grade and intermediate climbers ten weeks of upper-body work, such as pull-downs, biceps curls and forearm curls, twice a week. Lead climbing performance trended upwards by around 12%, but the change didn’t reach statistical significance.
The studies were also small and short, mostly four to eight weeks. So the honest reading is this: there’s no evidence that a general weights programme will move your grade faster than climbing more, and some evidence that training specific to climbing, especially your fingers, helps once you’re ready for it.
Why climbing comes first
Climbing strength is unusually specific. What limits most new climbers isn’t how much they can pull on a cable machine; it’s holding small edges, keeping tension on steep ground, and moving efficiently enough not to waste what strength they have. The wall trains all three at once. A barbell trains none of them directly.
There are three more reasons to keep the gym in its place early on.
Technique is still your biggest lever. Precise feet, straight arms and turned hips save more energy than an extra few kilos of pulling strength can make up. What matters in your first year covers why skill outranks strength for new climbers.
Your fingers are the bottleneck, and weights don’t train them safely either. Tendons and pulleys adapt more slowly than muscle. Climbing already loads your fingers every session. Heavy grip work in the gym adds load to the same tissue that’s already struggling to keep up, without teaching you anything about holding a hold.
Recovery is shared. Your arms, shoulders and forearms recover from climbing and lifting out of the same budget. A hard upper-body gym session on Tuesday can leave you flat on the wall on Wednesday. If you only have so many hours a week, spend most of them climbing; how often you should climb explains how to space those sessions.
What lifting is actually good for
Weights aren’t useless for climbers. They’re just good for different jobs than most people expect.
Balancing all that pulling
Climbing is almost all pulling and gripping. The pushing muscles of the chest, shoulders and triceps, the small rotator cuff muscles around the shoulder, and the forearm extensors on the back of the forearm get very little work. Lattice Training recommends training these antagonist muscles alongside your climbing, arguing that it limits a growing imbalance between what climbing trains and what it neglects, and that this can help reduce injury risk. Their prescription is deliberately light: moderate intensity, two short sessions a week.
When you can’t get to the wall
If work, travel or a closed gym keeps you off the wall for a few weeks, a general strength session keeps your pulling and pushing muscles ticking over until you’re back. It won’t replace climbing, but it beats doing nothing.
Later, when climbing alone stops working
After a couple of years of consistent climbing, many climbers find that more climbing no longer makes them noticeably stronger. That’s the point where targeted strength work, on and off the wall, starts to pay for its time. For most, the first addition is finger training rather than the barbell; when to start hangboarding has the readiness checklist. General pulling strength, such as pull-ups and rows, can follow once you’ve confirmed that’s where you’re actually falling short.
A simple antagonist routine
This is the kind of routine Lattice describes, laid out so you can do it at the gym. Do it at the end of a climbing session, twice a week, rather than on a rest day. Rest days are for recovering, not for adding training.
| Area | Exercise (pick one) | Sets × reps | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chest and triceps | Push-ups, dips or bench press | 3 × 8–12 | Push-ups are plenty for most climbers |
| Shoulders and upper back | Shoulder press or shrugs | 3 × 8–12 | Light dumbbells; smooth, full range |
| Rotator cuff | External rotations or IYTs | 3 × 8–12 | Very light. This is control, not strength |
| Forearm extensors | Reverse wrist curls (palms down) | 3 × 8–12 | A light dumbbell; slow on the way down |
A few rules make it work:
- Moderate weight. Finish each set feeling you could have done two or three more reps. The goal is balance, not a new personal best.
- Rest a couple of minutes between sets, and keep the whole thing to about twenty minutes.
- Progress slowly. When three sets of twelve feel easy for two sessions running, add a little weight or a harder variation and drop back to eight reps.
- Stop if anything hurts. Mild muscle tiredness is expected. Sharp pain, pain in a joint, or pain that’s still there the next day is not; stop and see a physiotherapist or doctor.
If you’re following a structured climbing week, add the routine to the end of your volume session and one other session, not the day you try your hardest problems.
Will lifting make you bulky?
This is the fear that keeps a lot of climbers out of the weights room, and for the routine above it’s not a realistic concern. Adding meaningful muscle takes a lot of hard, high-volume training over a long time. Two short, moderate sessions a week for muscles you barely use on the wall won’t do it, and Lattice makes the same point about their own prescription.
The bigger risk is the opposite: lifting so hard that your climbing sessions suffer. That’s a recovery problem, not a muscle problem, and it’s easy to avoid by keeping the gym work light.
Common mistakes
Lifting before you climb. Tired arms and shoulders make for sloppy movement and worse attempts on hard problems. Climb first, lift after.
Swapping wall time for gym time. If you have three hours a week, an hour of weights means an hour less learning to climb. In your first year, that’s almost always a bad trade.
Heavy grip and forearm work on top of climbing. Grip trainers, heavy wrist curls and dead hangs from a bar all load the same fingers and forearms that climbing already works hard. Keep forearm work in the gym to the light extensor exercise above.
Turning rest days into gym days. A rest day with a heavy upper-body session isn’t a rest day. Put strength work after climbing so your rest days stay rest days.
Copying a strong climber’s programme. Elite climbers who lift do it on top of years of climbing, with their training built around it. What works for someone at their limit on V12 isn’t the next step for someone working on V3.
Where this leaves you
Climb first and climb often. Add a short antagonist routine after two of your sessions if you have the time, and treat it as maintenance rather than the thing that makes you better. Save heavier, more specific strength work for when you’ve climbed consistently for a couple of years and the wall alone has stopped moving you forward.
If you’d like the routine slotted into your week around your climbing, Mantle plans your sessions from what you log, so the strength work lands after the right sessions and your rest days stay free.