I thought it would be helpful to share some quick ideas this morning on how to squeeze in climbing training into a busy schedule. Ideally, all climbers would be able to climb 4 days a week, workout most days, etc. But in reality, for most climbers life is too busy to make that a reality. I thought I’d share some quick ideas on how to fit training into your schedule. For the sake of keeping this article short, refer to TrainingForClimbing.com, and PodClimber.com to get details on what some of the workouts I refer to are.

1. Get a hangboard for your house and mount in above a doorway. The Metolius Simulator is the one that I use. You can search the internet for training routines, and/or use the one that comes with the hangboard. You can easily do a 10 minute very effective hangboard workout at home every morning.
2. Use your countertops or 2 chairs next to each other to do dip workouts, as opposed to pushups. Dips lend themselves better to climbing sport specific workouts. You can do 3-5 sets of dips in less than 5 minutes
3. Choose 3 different ab exercises and alternate between dip sets. My favorite ab exercises are side-crunches, hanging leg lifts, and raised leg crunches.
4. 20 Minute Interval runs are effective. Intervals mean that you run hard for 30 seconds, jog for 1.5 minutes, and repeat.

That obviously is a very short workout, but something is better than nothing. So adding all that time up, let’s say you wake up, get dressed for a run, run for 20 minutes, come home, do a hangboard workout, dips, and abs. You can get that complete workout in in less than an hour, maybe in less than 45 minutes. Can you find 45 minutes to workout in the morning? If your answer is NO, then consider waking up earlier! It will be worth it. I remember when I started training for climbing years ago, I started out doing short workouts like this, and soon became addicted to it, and began waking up earlier and earlier so I could get in more training!