Antagonist training

[Chris W]

I've heard people talk about the importance of training antagonist muscles and movements, primarily as it applies to injury prevention. This never seemed to make much sense to me; perhaps I'm just ignorant. 

Within the last several months, however, I've read through some information, primarily from Steve Bechtel, about antagonist training, primarily as it relates to strength development. The theory he puts forth is that the body will limit strength development in one area (such as climbing specific finger strength) if it is lacking appropriate strength in an antagonist area (such as finger extension). This seems to happen via feedback from the nervous system, though I'm not sure if this would be central or local (peripheral) feedback. 

Anyone have any experience with or knowledge of this?

[Charlie S]

Seem to recall reading something about this which refuted the whole balance notion, but I'm drawing a blank. I want to say it had something to do with power output being more efficient in "balanced" muscles, and it was related to isometric box jumps? But not so much a limiting factor on strength.


EDIT: I do antagonist on my rest days so that I don't go crazy.  Hasn't detracted, but can't say I've seen a noticeable benefit.

[erick]

I know little more than you Chris but what you mentioned is one of the main reasons I started doing Antagonist work. I did a strength and fitness assessment with Steve last summer and he basically told me that for where I am at my "climbing" muscles (fingers excluded) don't really need to be much stronger. But all the other stuff was pretty weak and that will keep me from improving more than anything else. That might by why I have never seen any tangable gains in my climbing from doing SEs. Now pretty much all my SEs are antagonist work at this point, here is what I have seen. Doing one arm pushups in rings has been huge in helping my shoulder stability while climbing steep stuff, other than that I cant really comment as to if its helped much, but not training my pull muscles certainly has not hurt my climbing at all.

[Chris W]

climber511?