How To Climb Your Best: Pros and Cons of Rest Days

When I started climbing, I was at the gym every single day and loving every minute of it. That’s a pretty common phase for new climbers, and you might be doing the exact same thing right now. If you landed on this page, you’re probably wondering whether it’s okay to rock climb every day. This is the honest breakdown of the pros and cons of rest days and climbing every day, plus how often you should climb and the signs that tell you it’s time to take a break.

This article goes deep on the pros and cons of rest days and climbing every day, how often you should climb, and the signals that mean your body wants a day off.

The Pros and Cons of Rest Days and Climbing Every Day, in Short

For anyone who doesn’t feel like reading the whole thing, here’s the quick version:

Can you climb every day? Most professional climbers and coaches still recommend rest days to lower your injury risk, keep fatigue in check, and give your muscles time to recover.

Overall, the benefits of rest days outweigh the benefits of climbing every day, and the downsides of climbing every day heavily outweigh the downsides of taking rest days. 

If you just want the signs that you need a rest day, scroll to the bottom of this article.

One note: the benefits and downsides depend a lot on how hard you push yourself during each climbing session.

Pros of Climbing Every Day

There aren’t nearly as many pros for climbing every day as there are for taking rest days, but it’s worth laying them out so you can make your own call. 

The intensity of your sessions makes a big difference here. If you’re set on climbing every day, dial back the intensity and the length of each session. If you’d rather skip ahead to the signs you need a rest day, scroll to the bottom.

Improve Technique

Moving your body up the wall takes strength and technique, and the only way to actually apply that technique is to climb. That’s why one of the most common tips you’ll hear given to beginners is to climb as much as you can, so you learn and adapt to the strange, specific movement that climbing demands. 

It doesn’t matter how many videos you watch or books you read. Until you apply technique by actually getting on the wall, your technique isn’t going to improve. So climbing every day can help you improve without forgetting what you picked up last session, and it gives you as much time as possible to lock the movement in.

The other reason daily climbing can help your technique is that good movement doesn’t really lean on raw strength. It leans on coordination and mental clarity, so if you’re fatigued, clean technique gets a lot harder to hold onto. If you want a sense of how much volume actually helps, here’s a look at how many days you should climb per week.

Pros of Taking Rest/Break Days

Some people picture rest days as days you just don’t climb or sit on the couch, but there’s more to it than that. A good rest day means taking deliberate action to help your body recover and get ready for more climbing. 

That includes eating enough protein and vitamins, rolling out sore muscles, and getting enough sleep for both your physical and mental climbing game. If you want a full routine, here are 7 things climbers should do on rest days.

Here are the main pros of taking rest days: 

Improves performance: 

One thing most climbers have in common is the drive to improve and level up. Climbing is a very milestone driven sport, because you can easily see progress when you look at the grade you can climb today versus what you could climb last week or last month. That’s why performance sits at the top of this list. 

Giving your muscles, body, and mind a rest lets you recover, build muscle, and prepare for your next session. That recovery and prep make it easier to perform at your best and cut down on mistakes and fatigue.

Improves endurance:

When you take rest days, you’re able to train harder and longer on your climbing days, which builds your endurance if you train right. Endurance matters a lot in climbing, especially in sport climbing and other rope climbing, though it helps with bouldering too. 

By pushing harder and longer on climbing days, you teach your body to go further than it did in previous sessions, and that’s what builds endurance. 

There are specific training regimens you can use to build endurance, but none of them work if your body hasn’t recovered from your last session. That recovery comes from rest days.

Give muscles a chance to recover and grow: 

As you probably already know, your muscles need time to recover before they can get stronger. 

Just like lifting weights, climbing causes microscopic tears in your muscle tissue, so your body needs rest to repair it.

When that tissue heals, it also grows, and you end up with stronger muscles.

Prevent muscle fatigue: 

Every time you climb, your muscle glycogen depletes, which leads to soreness and fatigue. Without glycogen, your body can’t fire your muscles the way it needs to, so this is a big part of recovery. Rest days give your muscles a chance to refill those glycogen stores so you can actually use them to climb. (Who knew you needed working muscles to climb.) 

Give your skin a chance to recover: 

Unlike most exercise, climbing is unique in that it asks a lot of your skin. When you first start out, you’ll probably deal with soreness and sensitive skin on your hands. I remember feeling like I couldn’t use my hands for a couple of hours after climbing in my first few weeks, because the skin was so raw. As you get more time on the wall, the skin on your hands adapts and eventually takes as much of a beating as the rest of you. Until then, a rest day is important to help your skin heal. 

Prevent skin tears and wearing: 

Rest days are an important part of preventing skin tears. On top of giving your skin a chance to recover, they give you a window to groom and maintain healthy skin without climbing on it and roughing it up again. On rest days, use plenty of lotion and keep your hands moist and healthy so the skin stays pliable and usable. Sand down any callouses too. Callouses can catch on holds or rock and cause a flapper. Here are some recommendations on how to deal with flappers. Pro tip: avoid washing your hands in hot or cold water. Room temperature water is best for helping your skin recover.

Prevent tendon injuries: 

Tendon injuries are most often caused by overuse, and rest days help prevent that overuse. The most common tendon injuries are in your hands and fingers (blasted crimp holds). Even if you’re not on a rest day, if you feel any pain in your fingers or tendons (shoulders and elbows count too), then stop climbing. You can get back on once the pain is gone. Tendon injuries aren’t worth another send. 

Cons of Climbing Every Day

A lot of the cons for climbing every day are just the flip side of the pros for taking rest days, so some of this will feel familiar. Listing the cons out on their own still tends to make the point land harder, so here they are.

Increased risk of tendon injury: 

Tendon injuries can keep you off the wall for weeks at a time, so they’re serious and worth avoiding. The number one cause of tendon injuries in climbing is overuse, and if you climb at your limit every day without a rest day, you’re a lot more likely to get one. 

If you decide to climb every day anyway, listen to your body and stop climbing the moment you feel pain. Getting one more climb in during a session is never worth an injury that costs you weeks.

And if you’re recovering from a tendon injury and your doctor has cleared you to climb again, ask about the right way to tape each finger for extra support as needed.

Increased risk of skin tears and wearing:

If you climb every day, your skin doesn’t get the chance to recover properly, so you’re more likely to get flappers or other skin injuries. Most skin injuries just need taping and you can keep climbing, but they hurt and they’ll make you hesitate on big moves that need strong skin.

If you decide to climb every day despite the risk of flappers and tears, use a salve of some kind to help your skin stay strong and healthy. 

I made my own climbing salve, which was nice because I could add whatever oil I thought fit my needs. It wasn’t hard to make, but the ingredients only sell in big quantities where I live, so I made a batch of 25 plus salve bars and still have a ton of leftover ingredients I probably won’t touch for a couple of years. 

I’ve also used Climb On, which I didn’t love the smell of at first, but it’s grown on me and I like it now. Plus it comes with a nice container that keeps it cleaner than the plastic bag I carry my homemade salve in.

The inability of the muscle to build properly:

Every time you work out or climb, your muscles get microtears, which are necessary for building muscle. But those tears need recovery time to repair and grow. If you climb every day, it’s harder for your body to source the cells and chemicals it needs to build those muscles back up, so you end up short changing the growth. 

Rest days let your body build muscle properly. If you’re still going to climb every day, make sure you’re feeding it enough to help. 

Protein is a huge part of building muscle, so be diligent and get enough of it every day for the amount of climbing you’re doing.

Increase Chance of Central Nervous System (CNS) Fatigue:

Most of us have felt fatigue after a session, which can be a healthy sign that you trained hard and gave it your all. But if you consistently overtrain or overclimb, you risk getting to the point where that exhaustion leaves your brain chronically tired. 

Our speech, memory, movement, and general awareness all come from a properly functioning nervous system, which CNS fatigue can hit directly, so it’s worth avoiding.

If you’ve ever dealt with irritability or mood swings, sleep deprivation, food cravings, loss of appetite, a weaker immune system, sluggishness, or getting sick more than usual, you may have experienced CNS fatigue.

A lot of climbers recommend resting and changing up your exercise routine if you notice any of these symptoms. Meditation gets recommended a lot too, since it helps with mental strength.

Cons of Taking Rest/Break Days

There aren’t many cons to taking rest days, so you should probably work them into your climbing routine. Just in case you’re like me and like to see the pros and cons side by side, here you go. If you can think of more legit reasons, scroll to the very bottom of this page and leave a comment.

You may forget a technique or movement from a previous climbing session:

Forgetting how you got as far as you did last time on a project can be frustrating and make you feel like you’ve lost progress. Unfortunately, that sometimes happens when you take time away from the wall. 

This is a big reason a lot of climbers keep a climbing journal. A journal gives you a place to record whatever you want, like the beta and moves for your project, along with how you felt about the session. It’s useful to look back on for a specific project and to see how far you’ve come. Here’s what to write down and what you should record in a climbing journal.

Signs You Need A Rest Day

There are plenty of signs that you need a rest day, and sometimes you’ll just need one because you feel like it. If you’re not sure how to read the signals, here’s more on when you need a rest day. 

Keep in mind that climbing while sick isn’t a good idea, so if you’re sick, take a rest day. Especially if you climb in a gym. If you sneeze in a gym, everyone there is getting sick.

Sore muscles:

If your body has recovered from your last session, you won’t feel sore. Some climbers say they get sore after every single session, and if that’s you, take a look at your nutrition and see if you’re feeding your muscles enough. Otherwise, the only real fix is rest. If you’re wondering whether to push through it, here’s a look at whether bouldering when sore is bad.

Fatigue:

Fatigue is something we all feel after climbing. But feeling fatigued before you even start is a good sign you should take a rest day. Climbing while fatigued isn’t just dangerous, it’s also a symptom commonly noticed before CNS fatigue sets in, which can have lasting effects and mess with your day to day life.

Sleeping issues:

Exercise and climbing, up to a point, can help you sleep better. But if you over-climb or over-exercise, your body can overproduce adrenaline and throw off your sleep. If you’re having a hard time sleeping, it’s a good idea to take a rest day so your body can settle and get its chemistry back on track.

Reduced performance:

One of the least fun feelings in climbing is trying something you used to do easily, or noticing something is harder today than it was yesterday. If your performance drops off, it may be because you’re fatigued, mentally or physically, and you need a rest day.

Conclusion

Climbing every day is what a lot of climbers dream about (I literally dream about climbing most nights, which probably isn’t totally normal, but that’s not what I mean here). Still, based on the pros and cons above, it’s clear you should be building in rest days.

Climbing every day can cause problems with your climbing performance and with your day to day life, so it’s important to take rest days as needed.

Climbers on structured training programs usually plan specific rest days after specific blocks of training. For everyone who isn’t on a program, use your best judgment. 

If you listen to your body and do what it’s telling you, you’ll usually avoid injury and overwork and land on the right amount of rest.

Rest days are where a lot of your progress actually happens, but so is showing up consistently and doing a little focused work. If you want short, practical climbing drills you can fit into a busy week, I send them out free every week in the Send Edition newsletter. It’s about 15 minutes of climbing training, and it won’t wreck your recovery. And when you do want to train in a structured way on your climbing days, Grip & Grind is the app I use to keep it organized.

Frequently asked questions

Can you rock climb every day?

You can, but most professional climbers and coaches recommend rest days to lower your injury risk, keep fatigue in check, and let your muscles recover. If you’re going to climb every day, drop the intensity and the length of each session so your body can keep up.

How many rest days do climbers need?

It depends on how hard you push in each session, so there’s no single number. Climbers on structured programs usually plan rest days after specific training blocks. If you’re not on a program, use your best judgment and take a rest day when you notice signs like soreness, fatigue, poor sleep, or reduced performance.

What are the signs you need a rest day?

The main signs are sore muscles that haven’t recovered, feeling fatigued before you even start, trouble sleeping, and a drop in performance. Being sick is another one, so take the day off if you’re under the weather, especially if you climb in a gym.

Do rest days actually improve climbing performance?

Yes. Rest lets your muscles repair the microtears from climbing and grow back stronger, refills your glycogen stores, and gives you the recovery you need to train harder and build endurance on your climbing days. That recovery is what makes it easier to perform at your best.

What should you do on a rest day?

A good rest day is active recovery, not just sitting around. Eat enough protein and vitamins, roll out sore muscles, care for your skin by moisturizing and sanding down callouses, and get enough sleep for both your physical and mental game.

Sara Climbing Coach, Climbing Trainer, Writer

Sara is the founder of Send Edition, author of '77 Drills to Help You Climb Better,' the creator of 'Elevate Your Climbing: Training Planner and Tracker,' and climbing coach.

See Full Bio

Climbing Training