Hey everyone! My goal with this video was to see what impact grip trainers or CARCing might have on an average climber for a month. My test at the beginning and end certainly isn't perfect, as I could have been more or less rested at the beginning or end, but I wanted to explore what the impact would be of actually training both arms with these for a month. The reason for this is because if someone watched the Lattice video, they likely will not train with grip trainers with one arm only, but instead both arms. I hoped to provide a real-world look into its effects. I hope you enjoyed the video! Let me know what I could have done differently with my test!
Great job Nate! Really cool to see this work for you and great point about this method of training being useful for when we can't get to the climbing gym.
Great job! Always interesting to see how different exercises affect different people. Especially seeing lots of pros doing this it is nice to see someone who is more in my realm of strength try this and log their results. Keep it up!
Great work on your test and explaining it. I use a couple of woodworking 6" pinch clamps similarly. I use them more for a shorter exercise regimen as opposed to becoming stronger all at once.
@@Natemitka Nothing strict. Holding both handles with my finger tips (like a pinch hold), 20, then holding in the palm of my hand, 20. I try to go for 5 reps throughout a day, but more often 4 times 🤣
Hello Nate! I'm excited to see you're going to 24hhh! Look out for my name there! What's your team name? I've also been arcing indoors and carcing in the meantime both in preparation. I concur that grippers are useful for maintaining fitness when you're off of climbing for too many days. I also found they’re an easy way to promote healing bloodflow to yours hands and give light stimulus in a rehab manner. My friend and I both felt less injurious/tweaky in the fingers after using the grippers for roughly 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening daily.
@@nathandevan3114 Haha oh my gosh I'd say it worked!! I was really pleased with how the comp went. Managed to do the full horseshoe and 112 routes. But more importantly I didn't full body cramp or shut down in any other way!! How'd it go for you?
@Natemitka Hell yeah! That's great! The full horseshoe sounds like a fun one. Also, a glowing report for endurance training. It went super great for me and my partner! We added a few hard climbs to our list from last year and had the stamina to complete all of them too! Vasya and Rob returned so we only got 3rd but we were super proud of our improvement over last year. We both have been arcing and carcing.
I think this experiment would have been more conclusive if you perfected cloning technology first. Then your clone could have been the control group, and you could compare your CARCing strategy against your clone’s pathetic existence. Just a thought before the next experiment. Also, I’m curious how effective CARCing is using different forearm workout modalities. I’ve used the grip curl ones like yours, but also the individual finger ones. The latter felt more comparable to the gripping motion.
Good question, and I like the thought of going for reps! I just timed myself and averaged about 70 reps in 1 minute. Just slightly faster than a rep a second. This is just a guess, but maybe around 1,000 reps each hand in a session? That would be about 15 minutes.
Thats a good point. I definitely have a love/hate feeling of being pumped, almost as if its a sign that it was a good workout, but also it may be a limiting factor of getting to the top of the route
@@Natemitka Being pumped is a signal of working in anaerobic energy system, with handgrip exercise the goal is improving aerobic endurance (which is low intensity but long lasting), so you must reduce intensity or stop when feeling pumped.
@@alonsogll8489 What about (personal thought) building another exercise that's focused on volume. We become stronger and less pumped when we do volume training, which means that this may help. Can't try it though, at least in the next month or two, because I'm injured. But will try in future probably.
Definitely could be. But I also went into the first test quite rested. It's so hard to tell what the final effect of the grip trainer was because of how I structured my month, but I thought I saw some definite gains!
I'm pretty sure better idea would be to increase the resistance so that you could use them in sets of 4-6, 10-20 reps each close to failure, take the last set to the failure. Just do that every other day and you'll probably better results, don't just copy from him. "I didn't want to feel ever pumped", they won't be pumped forever. As with every muscle the pupm will last for an hour or so. If you want your muscles to grow efficiently, you should experince some sort of a pump after your workout. Also doing this for hours will probably result in a pump, it's just easier to do a lot reps with higher resistance and you'd probably get better results.
The goal of this type of exercise is neither to get pumped nor to achieve hypertrophy but to improve your aerobic capacity. That is why the intensity is supposed to be low and the duration is long.
Thats an interesting idea. I'm sure the results from doing something like 4-6 sets each to failure would have a different outcome from what I was going for. Mainly that method would probably have time savings from doing what I did for an hour. I was going for endurance training though, not to get super strong/max power.
Lattice did one arm so that there is a control. By doing two arms, you basically made your experiment useless - you can't tell if your hangboard gains are from the grip trainer or from taking two extended rests. Repeating a route a second time typically has better performance better than the first attempt, so it's also hard to attribute anything to the grip trainer this way. Not sure you really shown anything here
My test certainly wasn't perfect and I never intended it to be. What I hoped to capture with my video was my experience in using a grip trainer for 30 days. And in my experience, I saw some clear benefits that I was proud of. Like using it while traveling or when not climbing. I hope climbers can see that as a takeaway from my video!
@@Natemitka no, don't get me wrong. We're not talking about "perfect" here, or even "good". I said your experiment doesn't show anything at all, i.e. zero. It sounds cruel, but that's just plain objectivity - without a control, it actually does not suggest anything, let alone "clear" benefits. It's entirely possible all your gains were from resting, diet, the weather, etc and for all anyone knows, you may have gotten even MORE just gains resting and NOT using the trainer - i.e. the trainer had a negative impact. No one can say any better because you simply don't have a baseline comparison. Your intention is great and I respect that, but learn some basic scientific method principles - there's no takeaway to be had at all from this video, not even a little bit or even an imperfect takeaway, just "this suggests nothing" - claiming otherwise is being misleading to your audience
@@wongpeiyi I do agree a control arm would be a better experiment, but you are obviously writing this in a rude way and you know it. This isn't a scientific journal, this is a youtube video try to have some class.
@@Bill-qk6oq Didn't find it rude at all. How else would you inform someone that without a control, you can't draw any conclusion from an experiment? He used english words to express this idea. He is right that nothin can be derived from this experiment. It's not rude to tell someone about it.
I am still not convinced about the ‘don’t want the pump’ thing in climbers. In weightlifting, we chase the pump. And we do two phases (we do more, but keep it simple). Muscle strength is related to cross sectional size. Pump is blood flow and stimulates size. Don’t want huge size of course but large forearms don’t weigh all that much. But… the size of the muscle can affect the amount of lactic that can build. But after hypertrophy, we usually then do a strength phase. To get hypertrophy (blood flow related) you need to complete reps that feel tough. Now you can go for heavy ‘weight’ and do less reps to failure or you can do light reps and do a ton of them … but at the end you get the pump which you then have to push through to failure. It’s this failure phase which really builds strength. I’ve upped what I’m doing to daily, for an hour. I’ve got a 20kg squeeze rubber donut think (climbers tool), and a 30kg. I’ll do 4x20reps at the kind of pace you are doing on the 20kg as a warm up. Then 50rep, drop sets, dropping 10 reps each time. I use switching hands as a break. Then it’s back to the 20kg and do the same rhythm as you but as fast as possible, at the end of which a massive pump and unable to continue. 4 sets again. When I started my endurance was bad. What I’ve been aiming for is getting my tolerance for pump up. The result has been fantastic in both strength and endurance. Pump comes on slower, but when it’s there there is no issue. When I started I had no ability to chisel hang or 3 finger drag. But this last month I’ve finally started being able to do it - I’m 54, for reference, and been climbing for only a year. So I’ve combined my weight training experience with climbing. So… have you got any understanding as to why you shouldn’t get pumped when training? Makes sense for when actually climbing but I don’t understand it when it comes to training. Check out hoopers beta, 4:25 ua-cam.com/video/X_KmOpM5ncw/v-deo.htmlsi=E98_SGuUwJOUUxKJ
The problem is fatigue. If you're doing a hard bouldering session on Monday, getting pumped while CARCing on Tuesday and then doing another hard bouldering on Wednesday then the quality of that third session will be very low. The idea of this very low intensity workout is to increase endurance without sacrificing time, skin and overall hard training volume, it's usually done on rest days and shouldn't impact recovery.
@@igvadaimon yeah that makes sense. In my case I’m hangboarding and doing other strength training twice a week, cycling other days, and climbing on weekends because where we climb is an hour away (and no where closer… infuriating!). So I don’t train the day before the climb. I still think there is a place for the pump however. It’s basically blood flow. The better the system for shifting lactate, the less exhaustion. Zone 2 in cycling is fatiguing, but next day you’re good to go again. And at the top of zone 2 you can feel a small element of ‘pump’ because of increased blood flow. The only way to really measure it is experiment with finding what you can do to failure yet still climb hard the next day. But if you’re going on a big climb, just don’t do it the day before. And of course, it’s ’what works for you’ thinking. I’ve got stupidly annoying muscle which builds size as soon as it gets a wiff on a weight. It’s kinda programmed from years of muscle training. I’ve given up trying to go light and strong and leaned into just do it. And it’s working.
Some of what you said is incorrect. For example, hypertrophy is not really blood flow related, it refers to the creation of more muscle fibers leading to an increase in corss sectional area of the muscle. This is very different from vascular considerations that are more related to anaerobic and aerobic endurance. Also failure is not necessary for either hypertrophy, strength, or endurance. There are tons of published papers on the topic, the important part is intensity and metabolic regimes. For example for a typical isometric strength training session, you should work at 80-100% max strength with a total time under tension between 30 and 90s according to a review on the topic. That kind of session does not lead to failure, and comes with minimal fatigue post-training, while still providing gains upwards to a 20% increase in strength if maintained over a few weeks. Generally speaking I suggest doing more research on strength training and associated mechanisms.
I should add that it is the same for endurance training. There are endurance training protocols for climbers in research that will lead to rapid and massive improvement in forearms muscles endurance while NOT eliciting a feeling of insane pump.
Hey everyone! My goal with this video was to see what impact grip trainers or CARCing might have on an average climber for a month.
My test at the beginning and end certainly isn't perfect, as I could have been more or less rested at the beginning or end, but I wanted to explore what the impact would be of actually training both arms with these for a month.
The reason for this is because if someone watched the Lattice video, they likely will not train with grip trainers with one arm only, but instead both arms. I hoped to provide a real-world look into its effects. I hope you enjoyed the video! Let me know what I could have done differently with my test!
Great job Nate! Really cool to see this work for you and great point about this method of training being useful for when we can't get to the climbing gym.
I was pleasantly surprised to see those results with the big breaks in my climbing! Thanks for the original video and inspiration!!
Great job! Always interesting to see how different exercises affect different people. Especially seeing lots of pros doing this it is nice to see someone who is more in my realm of strength try this and log their results.
Keep it up!
Aw thanks! Thats what I wanted to show with the video!
Ironmind's Captains of Crush are the best. My opinion, of course.
I'll have to check those out!
@@Natemitka They're calibrated from therapy to impossible.
Great work on your test and explaining it. I use a couple of woodworking 6" pinch clamps similarly. I use them more for a shorter exercise regimen as opposed to becoming stronger all at once.
Thank you! Interesting to hear about the pinch clamps! What does your exercise regimen entail?
@@Natemitka Nothing strict. Holding both handles with my finger tips (like a pinch hold), 20, then holding in the palm of my hand, 20. I try to go for 5 reps throughout a day, but more often 4 times 🤣
@@XLessThanZ haha love it. The motivation is definitely one of the harder parts of these workouts!
Hello Nate! I'm excited to see you're going to 24hhh! Look out for my name there! What's your team name?
I've also been arcing indoors and carcing in the meantime both in preparation.
I concur that grippers are useful for maintaining fitness when you're off of climbing for too many days. I also found they’re an easy way to promote healing bloodflow to yours hands and give light stimulus in a rehab manner. My friend and I both felt less injurious/tweaky in the fingers after using the grippers for roughly 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening daily.
That's really cool insight about the 10 minutes in the morning and night! And for HHH, my team name is the Mr World Wide Boys! Stoked!
@Natemitka How was it??
Do you think the grippers worked? My training seemed to pay off.
@@nathandevan3114 Haha oh my gosh I'd say it worked!! I was really pleased with how the comp went. Managed to do the full horseshoe and 112 routes. But more importantly I didn't full body cramp or shut down in any other way!! How'd it go for you?
@Natemitka Hell yeah! That's great! The full horseshoe sounds like a fun one. Also, a glowing report for endurance training.
It went super great for me and my partner! We added a few hard climbs to our list from last year and had the stamina to complete all of them too! Vasya and Rob returned so we only got 3rd but we were super proud of our improvement over last year. We both have been arcing and carcing.
@@nathandevan3114 That is so cool! Stoked for your achievement!!
I think this experiment would have been more conclusive if you perfected cloning technology first. Then your clone could have been the control group, and you could compare your CARCing strategy against your clone’s pathetic existence. Just a thought before the next experiment.
Also, I’m curious how effective CARCing is using different forearm workout modalities. I’ve used the grip curl ones like yours, but also the individual finger ones. The latter felt more comparable to the gripping motion.
LOVE that idea. i'll get right on it. Next video is about to be crazy.
Hey Nate, for someone focused on reps instead of time, do you have a recommendation of reps per session? 100x each hand? 200? 500?
thanks!
Good question, and I like the thought of going for reps! I just timed myself and averaged about 70 reps in 1 minute. Just slightly faster than a rep a second. This is just a guess, but maybe around 1,000 reps each hand in a session? That would be about 15 minutes.
@Nate At the 45 mm edge you improved 16,5%.
@Nate At the 20mm edge you had an improvement of 27%.
Oh no did I do the Math wrong??
@@Natemitka Yes,
1:50 = 110 1% = 1,1
2:20 = 140 110 + 27x1,1 = 139,7
140x100:110=127,27
4:20 = 260 1% = 2,6
5:03 = 303 260 + 16,5×2,6= 302,9
303×100:260=116,5
What if you go for the pump? To pump like you are at a route? This might help I think
Thats a good point. I definitely have a love/hate feeling of being pumped, almost as if its a sign that it was a good workout, but also it may be a limiting factor of getting to the top of the route
@@Natemitka Being pumped is a signal of working in anaerobic energy system, with handgrip exercise the goal is improving aerobic endurance (which is low intensity but long lasting), so you must reduce intensity or stop when feeling pumped.
@@alonsogll8489 What about (personal thought) building another exercise that's focused on volume. We become stronger and less pumped when we do volume training, which means that this may help.
Can't try it though, at least in the next month or two, because I'm injured.
But will try in future probably.
I would suspect that you were more rested at the end rather than at the beginning of the test.
Definitely could be. But I also went into the first test quite rested. It's so hard to tell what the final effect of the grip trainer was because of how I structured my month, but I thought I saw some definite gains!
Nice test!
Thanks Mark!!
I'm pretty sure better idea would be to increase the resistance so that you could use them in sets of 4-6, 10-20 reps each close to failure, take the last set to the failure. Just do that every other day and you'll probably better results, don't just copy from him. "I didn't want to feel ever pumped", they won't be pumped forever. As with every muscle the pupm will last for an hour or so. If you want your muscles to grow efficiently, you should experince some sort of a pump after your workout. Also doing this for hours will probably result in a pump, it's just easier to do a lot reps with higher resistance and you'd probably get better results.
The goal of this type of exercise is neither to get pumped nor to achieve hypertrophy but to improve your aerobic capacity. That is why the intensity is supposed to be low and the duration is long.
Thats an interesting idea. I'm sure the results from doing something like 4-6 sets each to failure would have a different outcome from what I was going for. Mainly that method would probably have time savings from doing what I did for an hour. I was going for endurance training though, not to get super strong/max power.
getting Stefano's name wrong though 💀
Sorry :(
Lattice did one arm so that there is a control. By doing two arms, you basically made your experiment useless - you can't tell if your hangboard gains are from the grip trainer or from taking two extended rests. Repeating a route a second time typically has better performance better than the first attempt, so it's also hard to attribute anything to the grip trainer this way. Not sure you really shown anything here
My test certainly wasn't perfect and I never intended it to be. What I hoped to capture with my video was my experience in using a grip trainer for 30 days. And in my experience, I saw some clear benefits that I was proud of. Like using it while traveling or when not climbing. I hope climbers can see that as a takeaway from my video!
@@Natemitka no, don't get me wrong. We're not talking about "perfect" here, or even "good". I said your experiment doesn't show anything at all, i.e. zero. It sounds cruel, but that's just plain objectivity - without a control, it actually does not suggest anything, let alone "clear" benefits. It's entirely possible all your gains were from resting, diet, the weather, etc and for all anyone knows, you may have gotten even MORE just gains resting and NOT using the trainer - i.e. the trainer had a negative impact. No one can say any better because you simply don't have a baseline comparison. Your intention is great and I respect that, but learn some basic scientific method principles - there's no takeaway to be had at all from this video, not even a little bit or even an imperfect takeaway, just "this suggests nothing" - claiming otherwise is being misleading to your audience
@@wongpeiyi I do agree a control arm would be a better experiment, but you are obviously writing this in a rude way and you know it. This isn't a scientific journal, this is a youtube video try to have some class.
@@Bill-qk6oq Didn't find it rude at all. How else would you inform someone that without a control, you can't draw any conclusion from an experiment? He used english words to express this idea. He is right that nothin can be derived from this experiment. It's not rude to tell someone about it.
@@wongpeiyi rude and harsh are synonyms, its not that big of a deal just try to be nice to people.
I am still not convinced about the ‘don’t want the pump’ thing in climbers. In weightlifting, we chase the pump. And we do two phases (we do more, but keep it simple). Muscle strength is related to cross sectional size. Pump is blood flow and stimulates size. Don’t want huge size of course but large forearms don’t weigh all that much. But… the size of the muscle can affect the amount of lactic that can build. But after hypertrophy, we usually then do a strength phase. To get hypertrophy (blood flow related) you need to complete reps that feel tough. Now you can go for heavy ‘weight’ and do less reps to failure or you can do light reps and do a ton of them … but at the end you get the pump which you then have to push through to failure. It’s this failure phase which really builds strength. I’ve upped what I’m doing to daily, for an hour. I’ve got a 20kg squeeze rubber donut think (climbers tool), and a 30kg. I’ll do 4x20reps at the kind of pace you are doing on the 20kg as a warm up. Then 50rep, drop sets, dropping 10 reps each time. I use switching hands as a break. Then it’s back to the 20kg and do the same rhythm as you but as fast as possible, at the end of which a massive pump and unable to continue. 4 sets again. When I started my endurance was bad. What I’ve been aiming for is getting my tolerance for pump up. The result has been fantastic in both strength and endurance. Pump comes on slower, but when it’s there there is no issue. When I started I had no ability to chisel hang or 3 finger drag. But this last month I’ve finally started being able to do it - I’m 54, for reference, and been climbing for only a year. So I’ve combined my weight training experience with climbing. So… have you got any understanding as to why you shouldn’t get pumped when training? Makes sense for when actually climbing but I don’t understand it when it comes to training. Check out hoopers beta, 4:25 ua-cam.com/video/X_KmOpM5ncw/v-deo.htmlsi=E98_SGuUwJOUUxKJ
The problem is fatigue. If you're doing a hard bouldering session on Monday, getting pumped while CARCing on Tuesday and then doing another hard bouldering on Wednesday then the quality of that third session will be very low. The idea of this very low intensity workout is to increase endurance without sacrificing time, skin and overall hard training volume, it's usually done on rest days and shouldn't impact recovery.
@@igvadaimon yeah that makes sense. In my case I’m hangboarding and doing other strength training twice a week, cycling other days, and climbing on weekends because where we climb is an hour away (and no where closer… infuriating!). So I don’t train the day before the climb. I still think there is a place for the pump however. It’s basically blood flow. The better the system for shifting lactate, the less exhaustion. Zone 2 in cycling is fatiguing, but next day you’re good to go again. And at the top of zone 2 you can feel a small element of ‘pump’ because of increased blood flow. The only way to really measure it is experiment with finding what you can do to failure yet still climb hard the next day. But if you’re going on a big climb, just don’t do it the day before. And of course, it’s ’what works for you’ thinking. I’ve got stupidly annoying muscle which builds size as soon as it gets a wiff on a weight. It’s kinda programmed from years of muscle training. I’ve given up trying to go light and strong and leaned into just do it. And it’s working.
Some of what you said is incorrect. For example, hypertrophy is not really blood flow related, it refers to the creation of more muscle fibers leading to an increase in corss sectional area of the muscle. This is very different from vascular considerations that are more related to anaerobic and aerobic endurance. Also failure is not necessary for either hypertrophy, strength, or endurance. There are tons of published papers on the topic, the important part is intensity and metabolic regimes. For example for a typical isometric strength training session, you should work at 80-100% max strength with a total time under tension between 30 and 90s according to a review on the topic. That kind of session does not lead to failure, and comes with minimal fatigue post-training, while still providing gains upwards to a 20% increase in strength if maintained over a few weeks. Generally speaking I suggest doing more research on strength training and associated mechanisms.
I should add that it is the same for endurance training. There are endurance training protocols for climbers in research that will lead to rapid and massive improvement in forearms muscles endurance while NOT eliciting a feeling of insane pump.
@@BeautifulFreakful you can’t increase the number of muscle fibres. You can increase the size.