Does climbing count as a pull day?
For pulling and grip, yes. Climbing moves your body up a wall by holding on with your fingers and pulling with your arms, shoulders and back. A review of resistance training for climbers by Saeterbakken and colleagues notes that measures of the forearm flexors, the muscles that close your fingers, separate climbers of different levels, and that climbers prize strength and power in the shoulder girdle and back. That is the job a gym pull day does, and a hard session on the wall has already done a lot of it.
Bouldering and route climbing spend it differently. In the description Stien and colleagues use, bouldering happens on walls under 6 metres and often consists of a few highly explosive, difficult moves, while lead climbing goes up walls of 10 to 30 metres in 20 to 50 moves of repeated effort below your maximum. In gym terms, a hard bouldering night looks like a heavy, low-rep pull session, and a long route session looks like high-rep grip endurance. Both land on the same fingers and pulling muscles.
The shoulders show it too. In a study of 31 experienced sport climbers and 27 non-climbers, the climbers' inward rotators did relatively more work than their outward rotators: an outward-to-inward work ratio of 0.79, against 1.03 in the non-climbers. The authors suggested climbing training as the cause and said the clinical meaning had yet to be examined. Read it as a hint about what climbing builds, not as evidence of harm.
| Area | What climbing does to it | Does lifting it compete? | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fingers and forearms | Works them on every hold; their strength and endurance separate climbing levels | Yes, with anything you grip hard: deadlifts, rows, pull-ups, carries | Add nothing for them in the gym. Keep grip-heavy lifts off hard climbing days |
| Pulling: back and biceps | Works them every session | Yes | Optional. A few heavy sets, short of failure, well away from hard sessions |
| Shoulders | Loads them hanging and pulling; the inward rotators come out relatively strong | Partly | Light outward-rotation work, on any day |
| Pushing: chest, triceps, front of the shoulders | Little, apart from mantling onto a hold | Barely | Presses and push-ups. Can sit near climbing days |
| Legs | Standing, stepping, high steps; seldom a heavy effort | Barely, unless the lift is held in the hands | Squats, split squats, step-ups. Can sit near climbing days |
| Trunk | Holds body tension on steep ground | Little | Trunk work anywhere in the week |
Lift before or after climbing?
No trial we found has tested lifting and climbing on the same day, so this borrows from research on other pairings. The clearest lesson is that fatigue seems to stay local. Sporer and Wenger had 16 men lift 4, 8 and 24 hours after aerobic training: leg press repetitions were down at 4 and 8 hours and back to normal at 24, and the authors concluded that the impairment "appears to be localized to the muscle groups involved" in the aerobic training.
The larger reviews point the same way. A 2024 meta-analysis of 59 studies in 1,346 adults aged 18 to 50, mixing strength training with endurance work such as running, cycling, rowing or swimming, found a small interference with lower-body strength gains in men, not in women, and a small to moderate one for power in both sexes, but none for upper-body strength. A 2022 meta-analysis of 43 studies in 1,090 healthy adults found maximal strength and muscle size were not blunted, while explosive strength gains were, more so when both kinds of training shared a session than when they were at least 3 hours apart.
None of those studies used climbing. Read across, climbing is the endurance work, and the muscles it tires are your fingers, forearms and pulling muscles. So the order question mostly answers itself:
- Legs or pushing on a climbing day. Our reading of that evidence is that the order matters little, because the two barely share muscles. Put the one you care about most first and leave hours between them if you can.
- Heavy pulling or grip work on a climbing day. This is the pairing that competes. Lift first and you climb on tired fingers and arms; climb first and you pull with whatever is left. Our view is to give them different days, well away from your hard sessions.
- Explosive lifts. Explosive strength, the kind jumps and fast lifts train, was the one that suffered when both kinds of training shared a session in the 2022 review, so keep explosive work apart from climbing by hours, not minutes.
The research on mixing strength and endurance training is covered in more depth in running and lifting.
Does lifting make you a better climber?
It can help, on the evidence so far, but the evidence is narrower than the headline. Stien and colleagues reviewed randomised trials in active climbers in a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis: 11 studies and 225 climbers, from lower grades to world-ranked, with programmes of four to ten weeks, five of which they could pool. Women were under-represented, and no study included only women.
- The headline result. Across five studies with a control group, 110 climbers in all, climbing-specific resistance training improved climbing-specific test results more than climbing alone, a standardised difference in means of 0.57. The tests were dead-hang time and finger strength, not climbing grades.
- Most of that training was finger training. Four of the five studies trained the fingers on a board, and finger strength improved more than with climbing alone, a standardised difference of 0.41. The fifth used general upper-body lifting that included forearm curls with dumbbells.
- Finger training missed some tests. Among the studies that could not be pooled, most found no significant gain in finger strength or forearm endurance; the authors put that down to elite participants and small samples.
- General gym lifting has the thinnest evidence. In that fifth study, a 10-week trial in lower-grade and intermediate climbers, upper-body resistance training, with pull-downs, biceps curls and forearm curls among its exercises, was followed by lead climbing gains of 12.0% and 11.3% in its two groups, neither statistically significant. A trunk training study improved trunk tests with no difference between its two programmes, and did not test climbing at all.
The authors' own conclusion is careful: resistance training "may be more effective than just climbing-training for improving performance outcomes", and more research is needed. By their own sample-size calculation, only one of the five pooled studies had enough participants.
Targeted finger and forearm training improves the tests climbers use to measure fingers and forearms, in mostly male, mostly advanced climbers, over a few weeks. It does not show that a general gym programme raises your grade. Our view: lift for the parts climbing leaves out, and let your climbing plan look after your fingers.
What to lift, and what to leave
The World Health Organization advises adults to do muscle-strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups on two or more days a week. A climbing week covers the fingers, forearms, back and arms well. What it leaves out is where the gym earns its place.
Add: legs
Squats, split squats, step-ups, lunges and leg presses load your legs without asking much of your hands. They barely compete with climbing, so they can sit near climbing days. A heavy deadlift is the exception: it is a grip test as much as a leg one, so count it with your pulling.
Add: pushing
Presses, push-ups and dips work the chest, the triceps and the front of the shoulders, which climbing asks far less of than pulling. They can also sit near climbing days.
Add: the other side of the shoulder
Light outward-rotation work with a band or a cable takes a few minutes and fits any day. The study of climbers' shoulders does not show that the work ratio matters for injury, so treat this as balance, not protection, and keep it light: it is not a second pull day.
Add: trunk
Core strength has been identified as a secondary factor in climbing performance, after shoulder strength and power. Trunk work fits anywhere in the week; the one trial of it in climbers improved trunk tests but did not test climbing.
Keep away from hard sessions: heavy pulling and grip
Pull-ups, rows, pull-downs, deadlifts and carries all lean on the fingers or the pulling muscles that climbing uses. If you lift them, Saeterbakken and colleagues recommend brief, structured, low-volume, high-intensity work over long, high-volume sessions, and note that sessions combining high volume with high intensity need longer recovery, which may compromise how much you can climb. In practice: a few heavy sets, stopped short of failure, on a day well away from your hardest climbing. Lifting straps take some of the grip out of a heavy row or deadlift.
Leave to your climbing plan: finger training
Fingerboard and campus board work is climbing training, and this page does not cover it. One caution from the same review: because of the high load on the finger flexors, it advises limiting fingerboard and campus board training in lower-graded climbers.
Grappling has the same problem with grip and pulling; see BJJ and lifting for how that week is built.
Where do climbers get hurt?
Mostly the fingers and shoulders, and mostly from overuse: a 2024 review names fingers and shoulders as the most frequent non-acute injury locations in climbing, and a 2025 systematic review of 7 studies covering over 4,000 climbers, adolescents included, found overuse injuries more prevalent than acute ones in adults, with the evidence on risk factors inconclusive.
If a finger or a shoulder hurts, see a physio or a doctor. This page does not diagnose or treat injuries, and a lifting plan is no substitute for having the pain looked at.
A sample week around two hard bouldering sessions
A general example, not a prescription: built from the sources above for someone who boulders hard twice a week and wants to lift. Shift the days to fit your wall and your gym.
| Day | Session | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Legs and pushing: squats or split squats, a press, push-ups, trunk | Barely shares muscles with the next day's bouldering; fatigue seems to stay in the muscles used |
| Tuesday | Hard bouldering | The first pull and grip session of the week |
| Wednesday | Rest | A day off for the fingers and arms |
| Thursday | Easy climbing, or rest | Well below your limit, so Friday gets fresh fingers |
| Friday | Hard bouldering | The second pull and grip session of the week |
| Saturday | Rest | Nothing for the hands |
| Sunday | Optional: a few heavy sets of rows or weighted pull-ups, short of failure; light outward-rotation work | As far from both hard sessions as the week allows. Skip it if climbing already leaves your back and arms tired |
If your hard sessions fall on other days, keep the shape rather than the days: legs and pushing can sit next to a climbing day, and heavy pulling goes in the biggest gap. If you climb routes rather than boulder, the shape holds too. A long route day spends grip endurance more than maximal grip, but it is still your pull day.
Add what you climb from You, under SPORTS STACK, with + ADD. Climbing and Bouldering are separate sports in the list, so pick the one you do, or both. With Pro or during your trial, your coach plans around them instead of on top of them. More in Add a sport or a class.
Each sport has its own settings: Flexible, where the app picks the days, or Fixed days, where each day you pick is one session a week, plus your usual session length. At the top is a line about what that sport does to your body; with Pro or during your trial, that is what your coach is working around. See Sport settings.
In workout mode, if the rack is taken, DO IT LATER moves that exercise to the end of the workout, before any cool-down, when it can be moved. If the kit is missing, swap suggestions offer replacements that train the same thing, with Pro or during your trial. Either change is for that session only. More in Swap an exercise mid-session.
Exercises are shown as clean illustrations: the movement on a plain background, with nothing extra, so you see what to do at a glance. The team is exploring video and moving images. More in Exercise illustrations.
If a finger or a shoulder flares up, get it looked at, and report it under LIMITATIONS with how serious it is, from Cleared to Serious. With Pro or during your trial, your plan is rebuilt around what you report. Your coach is a training tool, not a medical service, and it tells you to see a physio or a doctor. More in Report an injury.