Most people, if they have any experience with the exercise of rope climbing, don’t have a positive view of it. And why should they? It just embarrassed and injured you in gym class.

My new article will teach you how how to climb ropes, techniques to make the climb easier, and supplementary exercises to build strength for climbing ropes:

In one of his Convict Conditioning books, Paul Wade semi-humorously posits that the pull-up, and the various other pulling motions that we are capable of doing, are the first exercise that humanity invented, as it would highly useful for our arboreal ancestors to be able to pull up their own bodyweight. Rope is believed to have been invented around 30,000 years ago,  when some early modern human figured out that braiding strands granted that compilation greater tensile strength than its individual components. And it can be presumed that the act of climbing said ropes started shortly thereafter.

The earliest fitness manuals that you can still find today, such as De Arte Gymnastica by Girolamo Mercuriale, or El Libro de Ejercicio Corporal by Cristobal Mendez, both praise the strength building qualities of climbing exercises such as rope and pole climbing. And for many years climbing exercises were seen as a necessity for the physical man until the decline of physical education that I have discussed in a previous article.

I feel there are two facets to the climbing of a rope: strength and technique. To put it simply, using certain techniques can make the climbing of a rope substantially easier than you think it is but you’re still going to need a large amount of hand, finger, and latissimus dorsi strength.

To begin with, let’s go over the various techniques you can use for climbing a rope:

You can read the article here