Using a Hanging Board when Indoor Rock Climbing

By Hal Thureson
Hal Thureson

Hal Thureson is part owner of Vertical Ventures, one of the largest indoor rock climbing gyms in the southeast, providing a training environment for climbers of all skill levels and offering an exciting new alternative to a conventional workout. Hal has been climbing more than 12 years and has climbed all over the United States and abroad including bouldering in Hueco, big walls out west and sport climbing in Rumney.

Learn what a hanging board is and how to use a hanging board for indoor rock climbing in this free rock climbing video lesson.

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Video transcription

In this segment we are going to go over hang boards. Now this is a hang board. This is something that climbers can use at home to strengthen their fingers and forearms and also their pull muscles, their back and their biceps. What you do is you take this and you mount it over a door way in your home as we've done here. Now, what you can do once you've mounted the hang board is first, just pull ups, basic pull ups. Now because of the variety of folds what you are doing is you are strengthening your fingers and forearms while also strengthening your back and your biceps. The second thing you can do on these is called dead hangs. Basically you're just not moving, just hanging, not moving at all and what you are doing here is strengthening specifically your fingers and your forearms. Now what a hang board offers is a variety of different holds. So you can train on crimps, very small holds. You can train on slopers there, like Caitlin is doing open handed. You can train on, yes, those bear claws for strengthening each individual finger and small crimps. And that variety is what's going to allow you to climb stronger in the gym. Strong fingers equate with strong climbing.