Campus Board, Training #2, Exercises

So for those of you that have looked at my post about building your own campus rungs and how I assembled the board itself. Here is something that I prepared for the gym to hang near the board to educate users on different exercises to do on the apparatus. 

Campus Board Training Ideas

PURPOSE

Campusing trains recruitment in the forearm.

To train recruitment you should be failing in a minimal number of moves and always starting out fresh, LOTS of rest.

For campus training you want to fail because you can’t catch the next rung, not due to upper body fatigue or the inability to pull far enough.

EASIEST

-Ladders matching and leading with the same hand: Both hands on #1, R #2, L #2, R #3, L #3, R #4 etc.: repeat for Left

-Ladders matching alternating lead hand: Both hands on #1, R #2, L #2, L#3, R #3, R #4 etc.: repeat for Left

-True Ladders: Both hands on #1, R #2, L #3, R #4, L #5 etc.: repeat for Left

-Any of the previous exercise skipping a rung or rungs

-Bumps: Start both hands on #1, R #2, R #3, R #4, R #5, to failure: repeat for Left

-The biggest move you can do: Both hands on #1, R #7: repeat for Left

GETTING HARDER

These are harder versions of the previous , not necessarily using the biggest move but one a little smaller

:Start R #1, L #2 then R #8: repeat for Left

:Start R #1, L #3 then R #9: repeat for Left

:etc

:Start both hands #1, R #7, L #13: repeat for Left

-Doubles: Start both hands on #1, both hands #2, both hands #3 etc.

-Doubles skipping a rung or rungs

QUITE DIFFICULT

Note: All of the following exercises involve negative movement (starting from a higher rung and working down the board). Doing this is the fastest way to get stronger and the easiest way to get injured. This is because when you ask your body to pull harder than what it thinks it can do safely your brain will make you let go, shock loading negatives lets you short circuit this response and pull harder and potentially too hard.

-Negatives: Start both hands as high as possible #5, R #3, L #3: repeat for Left

:Start both hands #5, R #1, L #1: repeat for Left

-Negative doubles: Start both hands as high as possible, #5, both hands #4, #3, etc

:Negative doubles skipping rungs

-Double, Up, Down: Both hands #1, up to #4, down to #2, up to #5, down to #3, up to #6 etc. 

Ultimately the goal is to force yourself to contract extremely hard to latch the next rung in the chosen sequence. This means that if you can hang one handed for more than a second or so it should be easy to hold the next rung if you can reach it as long as your timing is on. In this case you will only really fail when you can't get to the next rung which is more of a pull up exercise and a failure in the strength of your lats, which is not really what my goal is. Because of this I end up doing mostly negatives and some of the largest move I can since the further your hands get spread the less the lower hand help in taking weight. Another thing to consider is that ladders with lots of space between the hold is probably the most similar to what you might end up doing climbing.