Ice Climbing calls on all sorts of skills and strengths, balance and lower leg strength, stand up power in thighs and glutes, every angle of core and back strength, upper body, and integrated movement. You need an aerobic base for endurance, both for climbing and approaches/descents, anaerobic power and efficiency for climbing. While you're building all of these strengths, you also need mobility to prevent injuries from repetitive motion and lingering tightness!
This plan gives you the full gamut of full body strength, climbing specific strength, mobility, endurance, and anaerobic efficiency! If you already have an existing fitness plan, you can take the components you want from this plan and leave the rest. If you're already a runner or a skier, you can skip the aerobic workouts but do the strength workouts, or you can integrate your existing cardio into this plan. If you have a weight lifting routine, you can do the ice-specific workouts, mobility, and cardio and skip the full body strength workouts. Use what you want, leave the rest.
Equipment Required: some of the strength workouts use bands and weights. Most of the exercises are bodyweight. You will need a pullup bar of some kind. If you don't have one in your home or gym, it's usually pretty easy to find an outdoor bar at a playground or park.
Level of fitness: This plan is suitable for all levels. The strength workouts are not easy, but beginners should be able to do the exercises and build up to the time, and there are lots of modification suggestions to make things easier or harder depending on your level. You do not need to be able to do a single pullup, there are extensive suggestions for building up to pullups, as well as instructions and modifications for those who can do lots of pullups.
This plan is organized into a month-long super strength buildup, then a during ice season maintenance plan. You can reorganize this however it fits for you! And you can continue doing whatever strength workouts you want supplementally for the rest of the season.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me anytime sarah.haubert@hotmail.com.
Train for adventure! Scree Factory specializes in the particular challenges of mountain and ultra running, including skiing, climbing, and alpinism. We're experts on elevation gain and altitude. Train for bigger, longer, wilder adventures. We'll help you do it with comprehensive injury, OTS, and burnout prevention, strength, mobility, and plyometric conditioning, yoga, and mindset training.