Color Ladder: A Progressive Easy-to-Medium Warm-Up

A climbing-specific warm-up where each student moves up through color-coded difficulty levels without skipping any. It teaches climbers to warm their fingers up gradually before trying hard problems.

How to play

1. General shoulder and wrist mobility plus 30 s of opening and closing the hands (2 min).
2. Green level: two short, relaxed traverses with any rungs for hands and feet (3 min).
3. Blue level: two problems with hands limited to marked rungs, feet anywhere (3 min).
4. Yellow level: one problem with marked hands and feet; if fingers feel tight, repeat blue (3 min).
5. Each student writes down on their card which color felt ready, on a 1-5 scale (1 min).

Rules

• Don't move up a color until you finish the one before.
• Rest at least as long as you spent on the wall.
• Feet under 1 m off the floor during the warm-up.
• Finger discomfort: drop a color, don't squeeze harder.

Variations

Adaptations

• Students with visual impairments: replace colors with tape textures (smooth, rough, double).
• Finger injury: climb open-handed and avoid narrow rungs.
• Nervous students: can stay on green the whole warm-up, no questions asked.

Learning goals

• Warm up the fingers gradually.
• Recognize when your body is ready for more load.
• Rate your own feeling on a scale.

Equipment for a class of 25

• wall bars: 10
• gym mats: 8
• colored tape: 3

Teacher tip

Mark the problems the day before; masking tape colored with markers works if you have no colored tape. Three problems per color are enough for 28 students rotating by section.

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