The following chapter is excerpted from Ice & Mixed Climbing, 2nd Edition by Will Gadd, with photography by John Price. Published by Mountaineers Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
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From Chapter 13: Training for Winter Climbing
By Will Gadd
Why train? Well, a fit climber will have a larger physical safety margin, climb faster and better, and generally have more fun than an unfit climber—reasons enough! Training, if done intelligently, also helps prevent injuries, both from falling off and just doing the sport. I think the massive increase in shoulder injuries among steep mixed climbers is primarily due to undertraining. If you aren’t strong in a sport-specific way, then injury or very slow days will be the result.
The best training for any sport is to do the sport. Runners run. Boaters boat. Climbers climb. The best climbers in the world put 99 percent of their training focus on, no surprise, climbing. For ice and mixed climbing, the best thing you can do is go ice or mixed climbing, followed by climbing with your tools in a way that mimics the climbing you want to succeed at. There are now so many drytooling-specific crags, garages with drytooling holds, backyard plywood ice (plice) boards, and even commercial gyms that allow ice tools; the options are way wider than they used to be—it’s great!
One season I was training in preparation to climb ice for twenty-four hours straight during the Ouray Ice Festival in Colorado, but the natural ice season in Canada was really slow to start. I had a new baby and a crazed work schedule and had to come up with a way to train for ice in my backyard. Inspired by Wolfgang Güllich’s campus board for rock climbers and the system boards I’d used to train for rock climbing, I built a plywood ice training board in my backyard and coined the word for it: “plice.” I ran thousands of laps on the thing and succeeded in Ouray. I then modified the plice by making it overhanging, or steep, and the steep plywood ice, or “splice,” was born.
The next step up from the plice is to build some sort of dedicated training “structure.” The biggest of these drytooling-specific structures are found in countries with a strong crew of competition climbers—Russia, Korea, and Iran—but they are hidden away in basements, garages, backyards, and patches of public park (I don’t recommend this last one, for safety reasons) all over the world. If you want to get really strong at overhanging drytooling, then you’ve got to do a lot of it.
Another option is to use specific training gear that’s gym-safe and can loop over protruding holds. Most gyms are cool with people bouldering with these, and it’s an effective training tool.
Probably the very simplest and cheapest but still really effective training tool is to buy a couple feet of 2-inch PVC pipe, cut it into two 1-foot pieces, cut holes in one end, put 6-millimeter cord through the holes to hang them from, and then wrap the pipe in athletic tape; you’ll have one hell of an effective training aid (Figure 13-2).
I bring my “ice tubes” with me in my carry-on bag when traveling, no problem. The looks you get are awesome when you hang your tubes in a globo gym in Miami or from a tree branch in Toronto and then bust out pull-ups, front levers, and figure fours—and sometimes an eager local or two will join in.
You can also just hang three or more old carabiners at the same level, but about 2 horizontal feet apart, from a tree branch with old rope and train moving back and forth from carabiner to carabiner (your tools will rip them up quite badly; don’t use these carabiners on ropes). I’ve done this in public parks all over the world. Just tape your tools up so the teeth don’t cut into anything and then hang off a pull-up bar or swing set or solid hotel room doorjamb. It all works great.
Falljökull, an outlet glacier of the Vatnajökull ice cap, Iceland. This image featured in the photo gallery, “Halcyon Days” by Thomas Monsorno in 𝘚𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘵 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 323.
Rock climbing, especially steep rock climbing at the cliff or in the climbing gym, is excellent training for the physical side of ice climbing. If you can hang onto a juggy 5.11, then hanging onto an ice tool will come very quickly once you’ve learned to hang off, not on, an ice tool. A lot of the climbing systems in ice climbing are the same as those in multipitch rock climbing; and when you rock climb, you’re also improving your ability to move well in the mountains, rope systems and efficiency skills, knowledge of what you need to eat and when, and all the other factors involved in being outside. This is huge. I know few good—and zero high-end—ice or mixed climbers who are also not solid rock climbers.
Rings are a great way to train for ice climbing as well. You can hang them anywhere, and if you’ve ever watched a gymnast do a ring routine, you understand the power of the rings. They produce stunning upper body fitness, no matter how you define it.
Finally, there is the weight room. An hour spent training on your tools or rock climbing is worth five in the weight room. That said, I visit the gym one or two times a week for most of the year. I travel a lot, and there is no drytooling gym in a lot of the towns I end up in. I bring my PVC pipes and rings, and get after it. I also like the weight room because gains are clear and easy to make. But being better in the weight room is not the same as being a better climber. Climb first; the weight room is the last option for building sport-specific function.
Specificity of training always beats “general fitness.” The trained specialist will destroy the trained generalist at specific activities. If you want to be stronger at climbing, you have to get stronger at climbing. Sure, any training is better than no training, but most of us only have a set number of hours per week to train. Use them wisely for what you want to do, whether that’s ice climbing or running a marathon or deadlifting 500 pounds.
That said, any form of movement or training is far better than none (as long as it doesn’t cause injury), and even short sessions are better than none. I work out in hotel gyms all over the world, hike steps in cities, go to the climbing gym, stretch in hotel rooms, and try to maintain my base commitment to being an athlete every single day, if only with twenty minutes of mobility training. I have won competitions in three different sports, not because I’m a better athlete, but because I train mentally to be tough and physically to be an athlete, and I do it regularly. You can do it too; you just have to want to.
A large part of training is mental; you have to find reasons to do the workouts and ways to find satisfaction within working out, or you’re likely to quit before the benefits are realized. Specific goals help (“I want to climb grade 6 ice this winter”), but the key ingredient to successful training is to enjoy the experience—to look forward to the workout, to be fully present during it so you learn all you can from each session, and to leave with the satisfaction that you worked out effectively and are making progress.
I train based on three broad principles: cycles, specific adaptation to imposed demand (SAID), and the idea that if I’m not having fun, then I won’t train.
Sample Routines
Three routines are described below for different styles of climbing. The ideas for sets and combinations are only ideas; you’ll have to play with what your body can handle and how much time you have. Notice that the workouts focus primarily on strength in the gym or weight room and endurance in the outdoors. I’ve always found climbing endurance is best developed through climbing; weight- room endurance does not broadly translate to climbing endurance. As you get stronger, you can add more sets, more exercises, and more repetitions. The main thing is to work out regularly and with focus.
1. Competent Ice (Preseason)
STRENGTH WORKOUT
First, warm up, then complete the following:
- One-arm pull-downs: Three sets of 20 repetitions, at whatever weight you can do. This may mean starting at one weight and then dropping the weight each set.
- Hammer swings: Four sets of 40-plus reps on each arm. Pick a weight that allows you to do this.
- Shoulders: Three sets of 20–30 each, lateral raises and external rotators.
- One-arm rows: Three sets of 10.
- Dips: Three sets of whatever you can do per set.
- Calf stands: As described in Weight Room Exercises, above.
- Levers: Choose whatever lever exercise you can do, and complete three sets of 5 reps.
- Jug lock-offs: This is harder, but try sets of 10–15 lock-offs. The idea is to primarily work your shoulders, not your hands, although they’ll get a good workout too.
- Ice tool hangs: Two sets of double-tool interval hangs (go until you’re failing in only a couple of seconds, rest for five minutes, repeat). Get a really good pump on!
CLIMBING TRAINING
Drytool exercises: Do them if you have access to the terrain; otherwise, go gym climbing or real climbing on steeper routes with good holds. Steep cracks are also excellent.
Splice: Set a goal that’s achievable in an hour (say, 20 laps), and then add 2 laps each workout.
2. W I6 (Late Fall)
Climb rock or in the gym at least one or two days a week, and splice at least a couple of hours a week.
STRENGTH WORKOUT
First, warm up, then complete the following:
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One-arm pull-downs: Two sets of 10 reps, two sets of 20 reps.
Or, pegboard: If you’re strong enough to do the pegboard workouts (and assuming you have access to one), this is the preferable exercise. Two to five sets of each pegboard exercise. - Hammer swings: Four sets of 40-plus reps on each arm. Pick a weight that allows you to do this.
- Shoulders: Four sets of 10 each, lateral raises and external rotators.
- One-arm rows: Two sets of 6, two sets of 15.
- Dips: Four sets of whatever you can do per set.
- Calf stands: As described in Weight Room Exercises, above.
- Levers: Choose whatever lever exercise you can do, and complete three sets of 5 reps.
- Jug lock-offs: Four sets of 15–20 lock-offs each side.
- Ice tool hangs: A few sets of single-handed hangs, then at least twenty minutes of double-handed hangs.
CLIMBING TRAINING
Drytool exercises: Do them if you have access to the terrain during the week.
Lap training day: Do at least 500–1000 feet of climbing on top-rope, playing with the different games.
3. Mixed Climbing (Late Fall)
I like to split my strength workouts into two workouts, one in the weight room and one in the climbing gym/garage.
STRENGTH WORKOUT ONE
First, warm up, then complete the following:
- Staggered pull-ups: Three sets of whatever takes you to failure.
- One-arm pull-downs: Four sets of 5–10 reps, done with two- to three-minute rests between sets.
- Hammer swings: Four sets of 40-plus reps on each arm. Pick a weight that allows you to do this.
- Shoulders: Four sets of 10 each, lateral raises and external rotators.
- One-arm rows: Two sets of 10, two sets of 15.
- Dips: Five sets of whatever you can do.
- Front lever training: Five sets of whatever style lever you can do 5 reps of.
STRENGTH WORKOUT TWO
- Pegboard: Two to five sets of each pegboard exercise.
- Levers: Five sets of 1–5 reps, starting with front levers and moving down to curl-ups as your strength fades.
- Jug lock-offs: Four sets of 15–20 lock-offs each side, or to failure.
- Shoulder rolls: Three to five sets of reps to failure.
- Anti-swing training: Hard to set a specific number of reps, but you’ll figure out your own limits quickly.
- Ice tool hangs: First try to bust into a one-handed figure four. If you can’t do this one-handed, do it two-handed to learn the motion. Then do a couple sets of single-handed hangs to failure.
CLIMBING TRAINING
Drytool laps: Three to five circuit sets to failure.
Will Gadd is an elite athlete in sport climbing, ice climbing, and paragliding. Over the past three decades, he has established climbing routes and set world records. Gadd regularly teaches, guides, writes, produces videos on mountain sports, and speaks on the value of risk-taking and risk management tactics. He lives in Canmore, Alberta.
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Feature Image: Benjamin Vedrines on the Cerces Massif, France. This image featured in Summit Journal 323, our Fall 2025 issue. / Photo: Alex F. Webb