Text By Wills Young With Brooke Sandahl & Jim Karn

History

The late Wolfgang Gullich installed the first “campus” board at a gym called The Campus Center (hence the name) in Nürnberg in 1988. His intent was to train specifically for his project, Action Directe, a route which required extreme finger power.  Using the board, he increased his one-fingered dynamics to previously unknown levels, culminating in his success on Action Directe in 1991, setting a new standard for hard free-climbing. 

Gullich’s route may still be one of the hardest in the world, but it is more important to note that, at the time, it was far harder than anything else Gullich had done, and he had to realize substantial gains in strength and power to achieve it.  For a climber who was already enormously strong, that’s an impressive accomplishment. We have the benefit of learning from his experience. 

Gullich dedicated much of his life to redpointing hard routes, eventually realizing that no matter how sustained a route was, if he could do all the individual moves, he could eventually do the route. In order to succeed on routes that were harder than anything else in the world, he would have to train himself to be capable of doing harder moves. 

Gullich designed his “campus” board to isolate his weaknesses and break through his redpoint plateau. Jerry Moffat, perhaps the world’s most successful climber at that time, worked out with him. “I trained on [the Campus board] stacks that winter and got dead strong. I went out and climbed 8b+ [5.14a] straight away. I was doing them in a couple of tries.” -- an almost unheard of level of performance at that time.  Moffat stressed the importance of training strength and power, even in a case where falling off at the top might point to a lack of stamina. The physiologists can explain this with technical details about muscle contraction and blood supply, but Moffat said it best, “If the hard moves at the bottom of a route start to feel easy, you're going to be less pumped by the time you reach the top.”

Warning All Training Board Users:  Training on a hang board carries risk of injury to fingers, arms, shoulders and the joints connecting them.  Take every precaution to avoid damage to yourself;  warm-up, stretch, don't over train and listen to your body.  Remember, even under the best of circumstances, injuries can occur.  In addition, however you mount your board, be sure that it cannot move in any direction.  There should be no possible way for the board to come down while training.