When I first started climbing, I was obsessed and wanted to get on the wall every single day. That’s what got me chewing on the real question every psyched climber runs into sooner or later: how often and hard should you climb to get gains without wrecking your body in the process?
Climbers should climb between 3 to 4 days per week to get the most gains while keeping the risk of tendon injuries low. If you climb more than 4 days a week, you seriously bump up your chance of a tendon injury, and that pushes back any gains you’d made. As you get into harder training, you’ve got to take more rest days so your body can recover enough for the next session.
Depending on your goals, you might need to climb more or less often, so it’s worth figuring out what you actually want and which part of the training cycle you’re in. That’s what helps you decide how often you should be climbing. If you just want a simple answer for the week, we broke that down over in how many days you should climb per week too.
How often and hard should you climb to get gains in each training cycle
There are three main training cycles a climber moves through. Each one has its own goal, and that goal changes how often you should be climbing and at what intensity.
- Learning, where you climb as often as you can and work new techniques and skills on low-intensity climbs
- Training, where you climb 3 to 5 days a week, taking skills you’ve already picked up and honing them on harder climbs until they feel almost automatic
- Performance, which has the most rest days so you can recover 100% before a competition. This one also fits climbers heading out on a trip who’ve got a short window to send their goal climb.
Most beginners spend the bulk of their time in the learning and training cycles. That said, plenty of beginners make the mistake of camping out in the training stage when they’d get more out of the learning cycle.
Learning Cycle Overview
- Climbing frequency: up to 7 days per week
- Session duration: 30 to 90 minutes
The learning cycle is when you bring a new concept into your climbing, like a new technique. During this stage you practice that concept on easier climbs until your body gets used to the movement, which makes it way easier to pull off on harder climbs later.
Beginners should spend most of their time here because it builds the automatic responses to the different sequences and situations you’ll run into on the wall.
The main move during the learning cycle is to find routes that fit the technique you’re trying to learn. Keep them relatively easy, because the point is to get through a bunch of routes in the session while working that one technique.
Training Cycle Overview
- Climbing frequency: 3 to 5 days per week
- Session duration: 60 to 120 minutes
The training cycle is when you take a technique you already know and put it to work on harder climbs. This is usually where climbers see the biggest jump in the grade they can send. It only works, though, once you’ve put in a solid learning cycle first.
Once you feel confident with a technique and you’ve drilled it on plenty of easier climbs, this cycle helps you get more proficient with it and start ticking off harder climbs.
Because the climbs are harder here (at or just below your redpoint grade), the sessions need more recovery time. That’s why 3 to 5 days a week is the sweet spot during this cycle if you want to keep making progress. If you’re itching to climb more without breaking down, we cover the recovery side in how to climb more often without getting injured.
The main move during the training cycle is to find routes that fit the technique you already know. Keep them moderate to difficult, and expect to only get through about 1 route per 10 minutes.
During this stage, repeating routes is a huge help. It gets you familiar with the movement and makes you more proficient with that technique or skill.
Performance Cycle Overview
- Climbing frequency: 4 days of rest before a performance
- Session duration: na
The performance cycle is mostly for pro climbers heading into a competition, or for anyone on a trip with a short window to send a goal climb. Because of that, it’s rare for beginners to spend any time in this part of the cycle.
The whole point of this cycle is getting to 100% recovery before a competition so you can climb at your very best. You’ll also likely need more time to recover afterward, since you tend to leave everything on the wall during a performance.
Since the rest days run longer here, a lot of climbers fill them with yoga or other easy workouts that keep the muscles warm and loose without getting sore or burning energy they can’t quickly get back.
Develop A Good Climbing Schedule
A lot of the time, when one climber asks another how often they climb, the answer you get back is their schedule and what they do on each day. One common one I’ve seen lately on platforms like Reddit looks something like this:
- Tuesdays: bouldering
- Thursdays: Top-Rope
- Saturdays: Lead
Schedules like this are great if you want to build up different disciplines of climbing (think folks training for the Olympics), but you probably won’t get gains as fast as you would if you segmented your training around your goals.
So the better bet is to segment your training around a specific focus, like technique or strength. Technique is usually the harder one to learn, so it makes sense to hit it early in a training cycle. Nail your technique first and you’ve got a foundation for the rest of your climbing year.
Climbing schedules usually run 1 to 3 months long, with either a monthly or quarterly evaluation depending on the goals and timeline you set for yourself.
Here’s a common schedule that coaches and trainers recommend:
| Tuesdays | Thursdays | Saturdays | |
| Month 1 | Technique | Strength/Flexibility | Technique |
| Month 2 | Strength/Flexibility | Technique | Strength/Flexibility |
| Month 3 | Technique | Strength/Flexibility | Projecting/Mental |
What to do on technique days
When you’re working technique, you can break your session into 10 to 15 minutes per technique you’re focused on that day. Spend part of that time putting the technique to work on relatively easy routes, then the rest of it on harder routes.
If you’re wondering which techniques to work on, check out this article on the top 22 most common techniques and skills in climbing and how to do them. Footwork is a great place to start too, and these 17 footwork drills for climbing give you plenty to chew on.
If you like the idea of short, focused technique work but don’t want to build the sessions yourself, that’s exactly what we set up inside Grip & Grind. It hands you structured drills so you can just show up and climb.
What to do on strength and flexibility days
Depending on your strengths and weaknesses, part of these days might go to grip training or upper body work. Ideally you’re only hitting 1 to 3 of the following per session:
- Core: In general, every climber should be putting time into core strength, since that’s the one thing that pretty much always helps your climbing.
- Flexibility: Some climbers set aside specific time for dynamic stretches or even work with a stretching coach, while others stretch as they climb by using high feet or wide shoulders.
- Grip Training: Most climbers benefit from grip training, but as a beginner it’s often safest to just climb routes with incuts or crimps to build that strength. When you do move into grip training, make sure you don’t make these mistakes.
- Endurance: This is one most climbers struggle with, especially boulderers. For me, weak endurance was making longer powerful routes brutal, so I started doing different endurance drills to help with it.
- Leg Strength: A commonly underrated strength in climbing is in the legs. It’s why a lot of pro climbers have “leg days” where they put in serious time on leg workouts.
- Shoulders/Upper Body: Since climbing is mostly a pulling exercise, being able to do pull-ups is a real asset. But if you don’t balance those muscles with pushing exercises, you’re at higher injury risk. Spend some time on your rotator cuffs too, since climbing strains them more than just about any other sport.
If you want on-the-wall strength training drills, check this video out:
What to do on projecting days
The heart of projecting is testing your limits on climbs above your current grade and getting to the point where you can send that route that felt almost impossible before. It’s a big part of expanding what you’re capable of, and it’s just as big for building confidence and seeing how far you’ve come.
Because of that, a lot of climbers like to sprinkle in projecting on non-projecting days too. That’s fine as long as it doesn’t eat into your training plan.
Training your mental game
One really important part of your training plan is building mental strength. Mental training matters for climbers maybe more than for any other athlete, because of the extra risk of injury we face every time we get on the wall. If you want to go deeper on it, we put together a whole guide on mental training for climbing.
With that in mind, a lot of pro climbers like Shauna Coxsey strongly recommend spending time on mental training. Pros often have sport psychologists they work with, so they’ve got a trainer dedicated to the mental side of climbing.
For the rest of us who don’t have that kind of access, there are plenty of books that give you insight into building mental strength.
I highly recommend Vertical Mind by Don McGrath and Jeff Elison. It gives you climbing-specific drills to help you get past fear and the other mental barriers that might be holding you back.
Want the short version of all this in your inbox? I send one climbing drill a week that takes about 15 minutes, and it’s free. You can grab the weekly drills here and keep chipping away at your climbing between sessions.
The Most Important Thing…
If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly putting real thought into how often you should climb and what your schedule should look like. That alone means you’re already well on your way to climbing better.
The most important thing is to get clear on what you want to accomplish, then use everything above to map out how you’ll get there. From there, take care of yourself and give your body room to recover so you can be the best climber you can be. Knowing when to back off matters too, so it’s worth learning when you need a rest day.
You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about skin recovery here. That’s definitely part of recovery too, especially for beginners. If you’re getting flappers or your skin is wrecked after climbing, check out this article.
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Frequently asked questions
How often should you climb to get gains?
For most climbers, 3 to 4 days per week is the sweet spot for gains while keeping tendon injury risk low. Once you go past 4 days a week, your injury risk climbs fast, and that ends up setting your progress back instead of speeding it up.
Can beginners climb every day?
In the learning cycle you can climb up to 7 days a week, because you’re working new techniques on easy, low-intensity climbs for 30 to 90 minutes. The key is keeping the intensity low. As soon as you move into harder training, you need more rest days to recover.
How hard should you climb to make progress?
It depends on your cycle. In the learning cycle you keep things easy so the movement sinks in. In the training cycle you push onto harder climbs at or just below your redpoint grade, 3 to 5 days a week, and that’s usually where the biggest gains show up.
How many rest days do you need?
The harder you train, the more rest you need. During a performance cycle, climbers often take around 4 rest days before a big send so they can recover 100%. The rest of the time, let your recovery match how hard your sessions have been.
What is a good weekly climbing schedule?
A common one runs Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, split across technique, strength and flexibility, and projecting or mental work. Schedules usually run 1 to 3 months with a monthly or quarterly check-in so you can adjust based on your goals.
Where this fits in your training
Frequency and intensity are two levers. Which one matters most depends on what is actually holding you back. The Climbing Training Hub shows how tracking, rest, drills, and strength fit together, and which one to fix first.
