Your forearms are the first thing that quits. Two problems in, your hands feel like they belong to someone else, and the moves that felt easy in the warm up are suddenly a fight.

Almost everyone reads that as a strength problem and goes looking for a hangboard. Sometimes it is. More often you are holding on far harder than the hold requires, for far longer than the move needs, and no amount of extra strength fixes a leak that size. This page covers both: how to hold things well, and when training your grip is actually the answer.

What am I actually holding?

Every hold has a way it wants to be used, and using it any other way costs you strength you did not need to spend. A crimp asks for a different hand shape than a sloper. An undercling only works once your feet are high enough. A gaston is mostly shoulder, not fingers.

This is the cheapest improvement available to most climbers, because it costs nothing physically. You are not getting stronger, you are stopping the waste.

Start here

• 14 Types of Climbing Holds and How to Use ThemStart here
  The full map: every hold you will meet in a gym and the grip each one is asking for.
• What Is A Crimp And How To Use Them
  The most misused hold in climbing, and the difference between the grips that hurt you and the ones that do not.
• Slopers: How To Use The Hardest Climbing Hold
  Why squeezing harder makes slopers worse, and what to do with your body instead.
• Underclings, and Why Climbers Love and Hate Them
  A hold that is useless until your feet are right, then suddenly generous.
• What Is a Gaston and How to Train For It
  The awkward one. Mostly shoulder strength, which is why it feels impossible at first.

Why do my forearms pump out so early?

Pump is not really a hand problem. It is a circulation problem caused by squeezing continuously, and the fix is intermittent effort: grip hard for the move, relax between moves, keep your arms straight when you are not pulling.

Straight arms are the single biggest lever here. A bent arm is a muscle working; a straight arm is a skeleton hanging. Most climbers spend whole routes with their elbows at ninety degrees and wonder why they are exhausted by the fourth clip.

Start here

• Straight Arms in ClimbingStart here
  The habit that saves the most energy for the least effort, and how to notice you are not doing it.
• Climbing Endurance: Muscle, Skin and Mental Training
  Why you run out, across all three things that actually run out.

Should I be training my grip?

Eventually, yes. Sooner than most people think for general hand strength, later than most people think for hangboarding. The order matters: finger tendons adapt far more slowly than muscle does, so the climber who starts hanging in month three usually ends up injured rather than strong.

If you have been climbing under a year, climbing more is still the best grip training available to you. After that, targeted work starts to pay, and it does not require expensive equipment.

Start here

• When Should You Start Hangboarding?Start here
  The readiness question, answered honestly, including why the answer is usually not yet.
• 12 Grip Training Exercises for Climbers
  Hand and forearm work you can do without a hangboard, and without risking your tendons.
• DIY Hangboard With Jugs and Edges for Less Than $15
  Build one yourself when you are ready for it, for the price of a coffee and a plank of wood.
• Can I Improve Without Weightlifting and Hangboarding?
  Yes, and for most climbers below V5 it is the faster route.
• How a Pro Climber Trains for Crimps and Pockets
  What deliberate finger training looks like at the top end, for context on what you are building toward.

My hands hurt

Skin and tendons are the two things that stop climbers, and they fail differently. Skin fails loudly and heals in days. Tendons fail quietly and heal in months, which is why the finger that aches slightly is worth more attention than the one that is bleeding.

Tape helps with both, but for different reasons and in different ways, and most gym taping is doing nothing at all.

Start here

• Taping Fingers For Climbing: Why and HowStart here
  What tape does, what it does not do, and the methods worth learning.
• How Do You Deal With Climbing Flappers?
  Prevention and care for the injury that ends sessions early.

Where to go next

Grip is one of seven things that hold climbers back, and it is the one people most often blame when the real problem is somewhere else. If your feet are cutting loose, you are gripping harder to compensate, and stronger fingers will only buy you a little more time.

Start here

• The Climbing Training Hub
  How often to climb, how to tell whether it is working, and when to add something harder.
• 20 Climbing Drills, Grouped by What They Fix
  Ten minute drills with video, including the ones that target overgripping directly.