You know that you should warm up before climbing, right? And no, not just by swinging your arms around a few times and pulling on a few crimps before you jump on your project, not that kind of warming up (if you can call it that). Warming up before climbing is important for your session. It can help reduce injuries, improve performance, and get your muscles firing to start pulling hard.
You may think that warming up is time-consuming. That it takes too long and gets in the way of your climbing session. But what would happen if you got injured because you didn’t warm up properly? Would you continue to skip your warmup after you healed? (Hopefully not.)
Look, we’re not saying you need to spend half your session warming up! We’re offering you a wonderful way to get your muscles firing and ready to start climbing harder in just 10 minutes. A way to help you stay injury-free that will be over before you know it.
Follow along to learn what mobility exercises, activation drills, and climbing-specific movements you can quickly do before your climbing session to get you climbing and ready to send your project.
Why Warming Up Matters for Climbers
We must first understand why you should warm up. If you regularly skip pre-climbing stretching, this is specifically for you! If you don’t care, scroll to the start of the routine!
As climbers, we should focus a lot of energy on our grip strength, shoulder stability, finger tendons, and core engagement because climbing demands it. Don’t worry, we’ll also focus on our overall fitness, but at the heart of your climbing are these four areas.
The risks of skipping warm-ups can be devastating. They can range from something simple like experiencing poor climbing performance to more serious muscle strains and tendon injuries, which are among the most debilitating issues.
We warm up because it increases the circulation of blood in our muscles and gets them ready for movement. Jumping off the couch and onto your project can leave you with stiff muscles prone to injury. But there’s more to warming up than getting your muscles ready! Preparing your mental focus and coordination is a huge part of the warm-up process. Warming up will help you send climbs with more focus and precision than if you didn’t.
Start With General Mobility
Climbing is a dynamic activity that requires dynamic stretching. (No, this doesn’t mean climbing requires you to dyno). Climbing is dynamic in the way that you do not hold the moves to get up the wall. Sure, you may move slowly or perform some lock-offs while climbing, but the idea is that you’re continually moving up the wall.
Key areas to focus your dynamic stretching is at your joints: shoulders, wrists, elbows, hips, and ankles.
Suggested exercises (1–2 minutes each, can overlap):
- Arm Circles and Shoulder Rolls: Perform forward and backward arm circles, then roll your shoulders in both directions.
These warm up the shoulders and upper back, increase blood flow, and loosen the joints that handle pulling, reaching, and dynamic moves on the wall. Strong, mobile shoulders reduce the risk of strains when climbing.
- Wrist Rotations and Finger Flexes: Rotate your wrists clockwise and counterclockwise, then open and close your hands, stretching and flexing each finger.
These prepare your wrists and fingers for gripping holds, hanging, and precise finger placement. It also improves circulation to small muscles that are prone to fatigue or injury!
- Hip Openers and Leg Swings: Swing your legs forward and backward, then side to side, while keeping your core engaged. To open the hips further, you can add lunges with gentle twists.
These activate your hips, legs, and core, which is essential for high steps, smearing, and dynamic movements. Flexible hips improve your foot placement and balance while on the wall.
Activate Key Climbing Muscles
Climbing relies heavily on certain key muscle groups! If there’s anything you’ve learned about climbing, it’s that you use a bunch of different muscles you don’t normally use in your daily life. Pick and choose which exercises you want to focus on and perform them lightly for one to two minutes.
Forearms and Grip: The workhorses of climbing. These control whether you stay on the wall.
Activating them with light finger curls, open-hand hangs, or stress-ball squeezes increases blood flow to the tendons and prepares them for sustained gripping.
Lats and Shoulders: The latissimus dorsi and surrounding shoulder muscles drive pulling movements and stabilize your upper body. Exercises like scapular pull-ups, shoulder blade squeezes, or banded rows wake up these muscles, improving your reach, control, and dynamic movement precision.
Core: A strong, engaged core stabilizes your body, maintains balance, and allows efficient weight transfer between holds. Activation drills like planks, hollow body holds, or bird-dogs prime your core for twisting, bridging, and high-step maneuvers.
By intentionally activating these climbing-specific muscles during your warm-up routine, you’re not only reducing the risk of strains and fatigue but also enhancing your overall climbing performance—making movements smoother, more controlled, and more efficient!
Don’t burn yourself out on your warm-up, though! Keep it light to avoid fatigue before climbing. You’ll find your sweet spot after a few warm-up sessions.
Incorporate Movement-Specific Drills
Next, move over to the wall. You’ll want to perform some climbing movements to prepare the nervous system for what’s to come when you start trying harder.
Do some easy traverses or slab boulders to warm up fingers and feet and get everything moving. To further move your lower body around, you can do some footwork drills like flags, smears, and controlled high steps.
These drills are connected to your actual climbing performance because they mentally prepare your body for more intense movement and engage your muscles in the way they will be used on the wall.
Mental Preparation and Breathing
The often overlooked side of climbing: the mental side. Just as it is important to warm up your fingers and forearms, it is equally important to warm up your mind.
Do this by visualizing yourself climbing through hard sequences on your project and through controlled breathing while warming up on the wall. Staying present before you even get into situations above your bolt, or in a strange position, or simply on something you really don’t want to fall on, will help when you’re in these places on the wall.
Mental preparation is key to your physical readiness. Without a strong mentality, it doesn’t matter how hard you can pull. You must be strong-willed to climb!
It’s Only 10 Minutes!
Okay, so the under-10-minute warm-up. What did we learn, and how can we enact it? Well, first, we spend one to two minutes doing dynamic stretching. Next, activate the key muscles you use for climbing, spending two to four minutes doing so. After that, move over to the wall and perform the last two drills, climbing movement and mental preparation/breathing drills, simultaneously for five minutes.
While it may take you a little longer than ten minutes for your first few warm-up sessions, you’ll find your flow and what works for you. Remember that warming up before each climbing session is directly related to helping with injury prevention and your climbing performance.
Do you already have a warm-up routine? If so, let us know how you do it differently or how this routine can help improve yours!