Power/Rung size

[Dylan]

I started reading kris hamptons blog at the same time as I picked up the rock prodigy article a few years ago. I had already been climbing mostly sport and bouldering for 7-8 years at that point, and was plateaued pretty good at v6-7/5.12. After a few rounds I am up to 13a/V9.



My background may not matter, but maybe it helps with the answer. On powercompanyclimbing.com kris just wrote a post on campusing advocating using predominantly the larger rungs. I suppose this comes down to specificity, but I would like to hear thoughts on this. I primarily have been using the smallest rungs in search of contact strength. Kris seems to be advocating the large rungs for pure pulling power...

[joev9]

I read the same blog post, and he seemed to be on the exact same page as the Anderson Bros. (no up and down campusing, less volume, more quality, long rests, etc.) except for the large rung concept. He did say in the blog, he would be having a follow-up post on using the small rungs, so maybe we should wait for that before rendering an opinion.

[slimshaky]

i think it really depends on 2 things - what is more important for the type of climbing you do, and where you are in terms of campusing ability.

for the first one, i think chris climbs a lot at the red, so it makes pretty good sense to make bigger moves on bigger rungs.

in a lot of ways, the second one is probably more important really. for example, it would be a waste of time for mark to campus on the large rungs. as it is, he is going big enough on the small rungs that he probably needs a custom set of extra small rungs. for me, i am still struggling with the medium rungs, and i am not awesome on the big rungs (at all). i use the small rungs with a kick plate and bad feet.  i could use some serious improvement in both big muscle pulling power and small hold latching.

i think either point of view can have merits, depending on these 2 factors.

[joev9]

New blog post from Kris on small rungs: www.powercompanyclimbing.com/2015/05/campusing-part-2-when-and-why-to-use.html

[jonfrisby]

Good read - I think it highlights the fact that Mark is sometimes referring to himself (who can actually do the movement necessary for small rungs to provide both power and contact strength training), while for many of us, small rungs are mostly valuable for contact strength but not really for pulling power. I think I'm going to do several workouts focused on bigger moves on medium rungs and then move to smaller rungs/smaller moves. This will also correlate to my strength peak, meaning that the ability to hold small rungs will probably be at its best once I move to them

[robertorama]

I have one set of really big selfmade rungs on my campus board (bigger than the Metolius Large). I even placed them on the board in a way that the angle is slightly positive. I use this rungs not in my power phase but in my strength phase after the hangboard workout. They are so easy to hold on to that its no problem training on them after the HB workout. Of course there are no gains in contact finger strenght but there is a huge gain in just raw upper body power.
For example I can now do 1-6 on this rungs which I was not even close to when I first started training this. I think you just train 2 completely different things on small or large rungs and I´m convinced that they are both pretty usefull (especially in bouldering, maybe not so much in climbing which does not depend on raw upper body power so much).
Another benefit is one arm lockoff strenght if you do negativ ladders on this big rungs (where your fingers are not the limiting factor but your arm is)
And they are incredible fun!