Scaling for the Fingerboard

Before I get started, if your interested check out the charts of my fingerboard workouts by clicking above.

The last post was about the fingerboard workouts I do at the moment.  These have developed over the last several years.  I believe the workout can be done by only scaling size of hold and weight added down to a level of about V6 or mid 5.12 climbing.  If you take out the front 2 and back 2 hangs and replace them with front 3 hangs I think it scales down to V4 and low end 5.12.  Any climbing level below that and the fingerboard probably is not the best use of climbing time.

Its also worth noting that each workout has a totally different perceived difficulty.  The repeaters are by far the most painful of the three.  Because of all of the rest built into the single hang workout it feels like your not doing much work at all.  The maximum repeaters fall somewhere in between.

I do one workout of each every week.  This gives me one hard, one medium, and one easy day of fingerboarding each week.  Of course this can be scaled to your need.  Another good choice would be a three week cycle.  On the first week 2 days of repeaters, in the second week 2 days of maximum repeaters, and in the third week 2 days of single hangs.  This could be worked up to a 6 week or 12 week cycle as needed.  During the climbing season one day of maximum repeaters are probably sufficient to maintain finger strength.

The fingerboard may be less important for others than it is for me.  Whenever I'm on climbing trips I get progressively weaker throughout the trip.  I think some of this is due to missing training, but this will be the subject of an upcoming post.