One common piece of advice to new boulderers is: don’t train, just climb for the first years. Some professional climbers — or example, Alex Megos — reportedly follow this principle. The idea is that as a beginner, you should focus on climbing itself — on building movement awareness, footwork, balance, coordination — rather than on specialized training.
Go climbing! And for the first five years or so don’t even bother with specific training.
Alex Megos, according to the book Beastmaker by Ned Feehaly.
Unpopular opinion of Tom Randall
On the other hand, experienced coaches such as Tom Randall (Lattice training) argue that this advice may be shortsighted. They recommend a more structured approach: climbing the right volume and intensity to build your body gradually, but also complementing climbing with off-the-wall conditioning work. This helps build overall body robustness, reduces injury risk, and supports long-term development.
In practice, for a beginner this might translate to spending roughly 80% of activity “on the wall” — climbing — while dedicating the remaining 20% to supportive exercises: mobility work, antagonistic muscle training, core stability, and flexibility.
Balancing Climbing and Body Preparation — What Works
- Climb regularly: Consistent climbing helps your body adapt naturally. Climbing problems within your level will progressively build your strength, movement skills and climbing-specific conditioning.
- Focus on technique first: Particularly early on, emphasize footwork, body positioning, balance, and efficient movement. Overemphasis on raw strength too early may hinder learning good movement habits, and possibly lead to injury.
- Complement climbing with supportive training — thoughtfully: Once you have developed a base through climbing itself, build core strength, antagonist muscles (for back, shoulders), flexibility and mobility. This helps stabilize joints, balances muscular development, and reduces risk from repetitive or strenuous moves.
- Warm up, rest and listen to your body: Proper warm-up — with light cardio, joint mobility exercises and easy climbing — reduces injury risk. Rest days and manageable training loads protect from overuse.
Additional suggested paragraph (for inclusion in the original article)
If you find yourself injured during these first years don’t simply push through by climbing harder. Instead, scale back climbing volume and give your body time to heal properly. At the same time, start doing targeted off-wall exercises to strengthen and stabilise the areas that are vulnerable. This targeted conditioning can help rebuild joint resilience, reduce the risk of re-injury, and provide a safer foundation before returning to climbing intensity. Such an approach not only supports recovery but also contributes to building a long, sustainable and injury-resilient climbing career.
So yes a beginner climbing should spend the vast majority of time (80%) on just climb to become better. But to build robustness and limit injuries add to that complementary work off the wall to improve performance.
Sources
https://youtu.be/74fSSco7wTU?feature=shared
Beastmaker – Ned Feehally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOIVpHvR0_8