In last week’s post, Warm Up, I wrote about the different routines (sequences) that I run through on the hangboard to simulate routes, which makes a normally boring workout mentally engaging, even fun.

Eventually I started to wonder how many different hold sequences are possible in a hangboard session. So I did some math.

Most hangboards have a similar variety of holds—edges, slopers, jugs, two-finger pockets, three-finger pockets, monos, pinches—and a few depths of each.

For the sake of ease, let’s say most boards have about 20 different holds or variations of holds. I needed a refresher on permutations, which is the mathematical formula used to figure out this gigantic number. There is a great tutorial on permutations if you’re interested in the nitty gritty of the math.

To solve this permutation, we take the number of holds (in this case 20) and multiply the series in descending order: 20 x 19 x 18 x 17…, which simplifies to the notation 20!.

So how many warm up sequences are possible with 20 holds? It came out to 2.43E+18. Said simply that is 2.43 Quintillion, which looks like this: 2,430,000,000,000,000,000. That’s big.

(And this is if you never repeat a hold within a sequence. If you want to keep going back to the sloper or jug, the number of possible sequences gets much, much higher.)

This number is so large that I don’t think we can really understand or appreciate it fully. So let’s drill down a little further.

Let’s suppose:

• You warm up for 20 minutes on your hangboard every workout.
• And you want to cycle through all the possible sequences.
• You hang on each hold for 5 seconds.
• Once you’re done with a sequence, you never do it again.
• You do 30 hangboard workouts per year, for 60 years.

After 60 years of hangboarding, you would only do 21,600 warm up sequences!

Pause for a moment and marvel that something so apparently simple can have so much complexity hiding behind it.

Complexity, variety, interest, creativity—it’s all up to you. Complexity can be found in the most basic tasks. If you know where to look, you can make life more exciting, entertaining, and interesting with the unlimited opportunities to increase complexity. And even hangboarding never has to be the same workout twice.