Getting Started With Crimpd

A guide to getting started with the premier climbing training app

Crimpd has been designed to improve the training resources available to climbers by bringing the latest and most effective training methods directly to the everyday climber in gyms around the world. Crimpd features over 200 workouts, that can be followed in the climbing gym, home, or outdoors. Crimpd’s workouts are designed by the world-class climbers and coaches Tom Randall and Ollie Torr, with workouts tailored to help climbers improve Endurance, Power Endurance, Strength & Power, and Conditioning.

What are you going to gain from using Crimpd?

It can be easy to lose motivation when heading to the climbing gym alone. Adding structure to your sessions means you can train more effectively, seeing consistent gains throughout the season. Crimpd provides you with all your workouts, all powered through your smartphone and at no cost to you! Whether you’re training for your Moonboard project, or a long 30m technical sport route, Crimpd features an array of sessions to suit your goals. If you’ve never trained for climbing before, Crimpd is the ideal way to get started; suitable for every level of climber, with each session being adjustable to your own grade. Here’s how it works...

1 Download

Crimpd is a free download from either the App Store or Google Play!

2 Sign Up

In order to log sessions and keep track of your progress., you will need to create an account. This provides you with a comprehensive history of your workouts and analytics on your workload in a series of graphs and charts. All you need to sign up is an email address and to create a password. You can then add personal details in your Climber Profile, such as gender, age, body weight and height, and adjust your Climbing Settings which ask for your max sport grade and max boulder grade, as well as what grading system you use for both. Once you’ve done all that, you’re ready to start training!

3 What do you want to train today?

This is the question everyone asks! There are more than 50 workouts for you to choose from on the app, either by searching by keyword or by browsing through each category. The four main categories are endurance, power endurance, strength & power, and conditioning.

To understand what you want to train in each session, you need to know what each session is achieving and why you may want to pursue that aim. Below, we’ve broken down the four categories of training in Crimpd and also given you some hints on what the outcomes of training each one will be.

Workout Categories

Endurance


The ability to climb constantly at a low-to-moderate level for durations over 1 minute and often extending beyond 10 minutes. Improvements in this area will help control the level of pump you feel and aid short term recovery mid route.

Power Endurance


The ability for the muscle to exert submaximal forces for an extended period of time where aerobic and anaerobic work is contributing. Gains in power endurance will significantly impact sport grade and longer boulder problems of more than 8-10 moves.

Strength & Power


The ability to exert force against resistance (whether that’s your own bodyweight or against an object) and in the simplest sense, it should be considered the maximal force applied in a single contraction. Improvements in strength will impact your bouldering grade, power endurance and endurance - there are many reasons to train it!

Conditioning


Any strength and conditioning work that compliments the bodies ability to perform, train and recover more efficiently. By making gains in conditioning you will help improve your climbing grades, decrease your chances of injury and promote general athletic health.

Within these four categories, the training is broken down further into sub-categories so that you have variety and choice depending on your training facilities and motivation. For example, if you’re looking to train endurance, you can choose from aerobic capacity or regeneration. Or, if you want to do some conditioning, there are workouts for antagonistic muscles, core, flexibility or upper body. All of these subcategories are explained by clicking the info icon next to the title.

4 Completing a workout

So, now you might have more of an idea of what you need to do to train for your goals. Within each of the categories and subcategories of training, there are a number of specific workouts for you to choose from; ranging from fingerboard sessions, interval bouldering, and targeted core sessions. There are also four assessment sessions to test your upper body, finger strength, and power endurance. Each of the workouts has been designed by the world-class coachs Tom Randall and Ollie Torr, who prescribe these sessions for their training plans.

The thumbnail for each workout (before clicking on it for more information) shows you some essential information; how long the workout takes, a basic summary of its content, and the you can do for the workout (i.e. fingerboarding, lead-climbing, bouldering). There is also the opportunity for you to favorite workouts that you can then see separately at the bottom of the homepage.

Now, let’s take a closer look at one of Crimpd’s workouts...

The 1 On 1 Off session comes under the category of Endurance → Aerobic Capacity so we know it’s a good session for someone training for route climbing or bouldering competitions, when a quick recovery rate is essential. Before even clicking on the workout for its full description, you can see a brief summary of the session: Moderate/pumpy climbing - 1 min on 1 min rest x 10 - so you already get an idea of the session it will be. You can also see three small symbols that let you know that the workout is suitable for bouldering, lead-climbing and auto-belay, as well as the time of the session being 20 minutes. When you click on the workout to explore further, you can see the exercises in the session:

Climbing
1 set x 10 reps x 01:00 per rep
Target grade: 2 grades below onsight
Rest 01:00 between reps

If that’s not enough information for you, read on for a more detailed written description that tells you exactly what the goal of the workout is, what you should do, how you should feel during the session (“an increasing pump throughout the session.”), and finally the different ways to complete the workout on an auto-belay or rope, as opposed to bouldering or on a circuit board.

If you decide to try the workout, you simply click Start Workout and are taken to a screen that allows you to track your session with a customised timer that keeps track of each rep, rest and set. The timer feature means that you don’t have to worry about forgetting how many reps or sets you’ve done, or constantly be checking your watch. The timer can be used with sound; with a three beep countdown to start, and a louder beep that signals the beginning and end of each repetition.

Log Workout

At the end of the session, you are invited to log your workout by filling in some key information. The amount of detail you provide when logging your workout is entirely up to you. Whether you’re someone who likes making extensive and detailed training notes, or you’re just having a go at a few sessions on the app to give your training structure, there’s space for any amount of detail and information.

Date

The date is automatically filled in for you and means you can keep track of your workouts chronologically in the History screen. We’ll go into this feature in more detail shortly.


What percentage of the workout did you complete?

Did you complete the whole workout with ease? Or did you fail on the last few sets? You can log whether you completed 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of your session so as to compare with future or past sessions. This will help you determine whether you chose a grade that may have been too hard or too easy, or whether this exercise is just something you need to keep working on.


How hard was the workout?

You can choose whether your workout was easy, moderate, hard, very hard or a max effort. If the workout was logged as ‘easy’, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Compare this to the workout and how it states you should have been feeling. Alternatively, it could also mean that you need to try a harder/easier grade, or prioritise a particular training.


What was the average grade climbed?

Choose what grade you climbed so you can compare to future and past sessions.


Additional notes and comments

This is an area where you can write more detail about how you felt during the training, the difficulty of the session, and whether there were any external factors that altered your session that you would like to note. This is a great place to note overall fatigue levels or any niggling tweaks or injuries you might be monitoring.

History

If you have logged a workout before, it will appear in the History tab when viewing the workout. This allows you to see your previous training log so as to easily compare each session. Workouts are displayed chronologically and show a summarised log of the training history for each workout; percentage completion, difficulty, grade and any other additional notes.

5 Using Your Training History

The Training History page on Crimpd allows you to track your training day by day. In the diary view, you are shown a chronological list of the workouts you have completed in the past three months (the time can be customised). Each entry shows the date completed, name of workout, what percentage was completed, the level of difficulty, and any notes you may have written at the time. Each workout is also colour coded by type of training. This is a great way to track your training and rest days, and monitor your progression and improvements.

6 How To Use Crimpd Analytics

On this screen, you will find detailed charts and graphs on your workouts to help track, analyse and optimise your training. You can choose to view your analytics by either workouts or workload, i.e. how many workout sessions you have completed, or how many minutes of training you have completed (workload) for each type of training. More on the specifics of how workloads are used can be found here. The types of training are colour coded for; endurance, power endurance, strength and power, conditioning & mobility and open climbing.

As well as that, you can also see a graph of your workouts/workload completed each week, so you can analyse your training load by category. This chart and graph are both simple to understand yet detailed in their content. They provide the perfect balance of data and analytics without overloading you with information you don’t need. These analytics can allow you to track your training and build upon certain aspects that need further improvement for your specific goals and projects.

Finally, you can also see a detailed 3 month summary of all your training by type, viewed both by the number of workouts and by workload.

The best way to get to know Crimpd is to download it and give it a go yourself. The wide variety of workouts, simple breakdown in categories, customised timer and detailed analytics make it an essential tool for anyone psyched about training for climbing. If you’re a total beginner, there are some basic conditioning and bouldering sessions for you to train. Or, if you’re a more experienced climber, you can find testing sessions and detailed workouts designed by expert coaches that you can structure into your schedule based on your climbing goals.

Give your climbing sessions more structure, optimise your training, and join the thousands of other users from around the world who are logging their daily training on Crimpd! With over 1 million workouts logged on the app; why not add yours today?!

Important Note: In the occurance of injury

Services offered by Crimpd Ltd. involve a risk of injury. It is important that you are aware of what to do upon the onset of a potential injury or injury. In order to uphold the terms of use of any service offered by Crimpd Ltd. you must follow the procedures below. On the onset of injury or potential injury cease all activities associated with the services or products of Crimpd Ltd.

  • Seek medical advice
  • Do not continue to complete any activities associated with the services or products of Crimpd Ltd.