Review: Stonesmith holds

Some new shapes ready to go on my wall ahead of my first masterclasses at my place last week!

I am seriously obsessive about holds, as any route-setter should be. Although you end up setting with a lot of holds you either don’t like that much or equivocal about, it’s always a pleasure both to set and to climb on holds you do. As I gradually gather holds for my own wall, it is slowly becoming a collection of rather fine holds I’ve seen in other walls or tried out.

On the whole, climbing holds have improved massively and the industry is full of innovation. Despite this, I’m often still a fan of some old hold designs, especially when training for real rock - where an old school approach of fingery moves yields good results from training, at least for weaklings like myself.

Which brings me to Stonesmith holds. I already have many of their holds on my wall at home and are some of my favourite shapes. As well as the nu-school innovative shapes, their training range also includes some very carefully designed shapes more designed for training which I love. It’s really an ideal mix - nice texture, a careful design that is nice to train on for long hours, but also nice and fingery.

The differences between different manufacturers holds are obviously tricky to describe in words - they sit on a continuum of niceness to climb and set with and ideal texture. Stonesmith holds sit as far at one end (the good end!) as any I’ve tried. I’m glad to hear I’ll have the chance to set with more of them in the new Three Wise Monkeys climbing centre in Fort William next month.

If you’ve got a wall, get some. I'm actually just off to order a set of their suspension training balls from their site just now. I've been meaning to get these for my poor weak thumbs for ages and wring this has galvanised me!

Make or Break reviews coming through

Many of you have emailed to let me know that you found Make or Break to be very useful for dealing with your climbing injuries. Thanks for sending those, it’s good to know the effort of writing it was worth it.

There are now a couple of reviews of the book around and below are a few comments from those and links to the full reviews. As ever, you can get the book in our shop here.

Neil Gresham, writing in Climb Magazine:

“...a modern bible for avoiding injuries...anyone who owns a pair of rock shoes owes it to themselves to get a copy...at last,there’s no longer an excuse for doing climbing and training wrong and getting hurt, now that this fantastic book exists.”

“No stone has been left unturned and advice is given on everything from supportive nutritional strategies to sleep positions, non-sporting injury contributors and so on. I particularly like the chapter on managing injuries from a psychological perspective. Again, this is delivered with empathy from someone who clearly understands how demoralising it can be to have your climbing goals dashed on the rocks. But the most revealing section is surely the one on proprioception and correction of technique. I can’t think of many climbers who won’t need to take a rain check after reading this.”

The full review was in Climb Magazine issue 122 (May 2015)

Duncan Critchley, Physiotherapist, lecturer and pain researcher, Kings College London, writing for UKbouldering.com

“This is the best book on climbing injuries by a large margin. The section on tendon injuries is one of the best I've read anywhere, clearly presenting what we know and don't know. It suggests specific treatment ideas but is happy to acknowledge when we don't know the best treatments or why treatments work. Many medical practitioners would benefit from adopting this humility. Make or Break is well designed and attractively produced. It even has an index. At £30 it is exceptionally good value for a medical text-book.”

“Pain specialists know tissue damage is one factor of many contributing to pain and how we deal with pain. Mood, beliefs about pain and injury, health behaviours and social circumstances are important in determining who gets injured, which bit hurts and how much, and speed and extent of recovery. It is great to see the 'Know Pain' chapter start to acknowledge this, explaining how to interpret pain, and why pain is rarely an honest witness of damage. This is common knowledge in pain management but unusual to see it recognised so clearly in the world of sports and sports injuries.”

The full review is on UKB here.

There is also a review by Steve Crowe on Climbonline.co.uk here.

Four reviews

Every so often I write the odd gear review for this blog, mainly of gear that I already like and want to share, and occasionally I’m asked to write. Here are 4 things I’ve seen over the year that I have tried and liked.

Boot Bananas

I was given a pair of Boot Bananas at the Outdoors show in London and they have lived in various pairs of my shoes and rockshoes ever since. Like a majority of folk, my shoes are boufing (Glasgow slang, in case you didn’t know) and I’ve tried quite a few things to make them less anti-social. Deodorising spray is the closest I’d come to a solution. But the effects on the smell seemed pretty short lived and it was a faff to keep a bottle of it handy. Boot bananas are simple shoved into the offending shoes and a mixture of various deodorisers (including charcoal and baking soda) do an excellent job of killing the odour. I found them to be more effective than spray or anything else I’ve tried. Their practicality was even better though - you just shove them in your street shoes while you put your rockshoes on, and vice versa at the end of your session. Well worth £13 to put an end to offending your own nose and more importantly your family and fellow climbers.

YY Belay Glasses

YY sent me a pair of their new belay glasses to try out which are very well made, with attention to detail and crucially a robust and secure carry case for throwing in your sack for a day at the crag. Not being a serial sport climber, it was a while until I got to use them and it's the first time I've used a pair of belay glasses. Perhaps it’s because I’m not always sport climbing and generally train on a bouldering wall that when I do it, the ‘belayers neck’ is that much worse. As expected from just looking at their good construction, they did the job perfectly and are now flung in my sport climbing kit along with my Gri Gri and quick draws. If I was going to buy a pair of belay glasses, I'd definitely get these ones.

Bouldering Essentials

David Flanagan’s new book Bouldering Essentials is aimed at those just starting out in bouldering. It makes sense that there is a reference there for the large numbers of boulderers coming into climbing by introduction at the large bouldering centres in most cities. The does a good job of listing those basics you need to know from types of hold to how to fall and various other things you’d otherwise have to pick up in a peicemeal manner through experience. However, I’m not too sure it’s something I’d have read as a beginner. I found myself reading through wishing the information had been written by some of the famous names in bouldering, with some anecdotes that would have brought those lessons and tactics alive and made them easier to relate to. But if you are the type of person who likes the facts and techniques listed in a direct way, then you’ll find them here and you'll love it. It was nice to see a section on bouldering destinations which will no doubt start the imagination for some boulderers just starting out in their local bouldering centre.

Transgression

Eva Lopez is one of the famous names in the world of training for climbing, and someone who has demonstrated the value of her own wisdom, climbing 8c+ at the age of 42. The Transgression is her own brainchild and a beast of a fingerboard. But it’s a bit more than that. The concept isn’t hard to understand. It’s a resin fingerboard with progressively smaller rungs, going from big and positive right down to a very thin 6mm. It comes with a well thought through recommended program to follow and several climbers at various levels right up to the top grades report good strength gains having followed this. The question of course, is can you not get the same gains from some of the more famous wooden fingerboards on the market. Especially since these might be both kinder on the skin and considerably cheaper. I’d say that is debatable. I must admit that although I’ve experimented a bit with the Transgression, I simply preferred training on wood. Only time and dedicated experimentation by numerous climbers would give a clearer idea if the concept of the small incremental increases in difficulty afforded by the board’s design yielded noticeably better results. It wouldn’t surprise me if either it did yield better results due to the steady progression of intensity. It also wouldn’t surprise me if there was no difference. Noone can confidently say I don’t think. However, if you can afford the price, I certainly don't think you will find a much more useful fingerboard available.

4 new titles in the shop

We’ve just added four great new books and DVDs to the shop. The first three books are all major contributions to the literature on improving at climbing and I’d recommend getting hold of all three. Well done to the authors of all of them who have made a great contribution here and no doubt these books will be the first step to many hard ascents and goals realised in the future.

Gimme Kraft: The Cafe Kraft gym (Kraft = strength btw) in Nurnberg, Germany has gained a great reputation for coaching a string of fantastic climbing talents over the past few years, most notably, Alex Megos who became the first climber to onsight 9a. Their coaches have put together a new book and DVD detailing the principles and exercises they have used to help their talented young climbers become super strong and fit beasts.

So the book is very focused on physical strength and endurance training, both on and off the climbing wall. It provides a great and easy to follow manual for sharpening up weak areas in your strength. This is particularly useful since it can be hard to choose or adapt core strength routines from other sports for climbing.

Both the book and DVD show clearly how to do the basic strength and endurance exercises and the DVD contains many interesting interviews with climbing legends about training and climbing performance. 

Training for the new Alpinism: Steve House and Scott Johnston’s new book on training for alpinism is a much awaited and weighty addition to the available literature on training for climbing. It is the first book to focus solely on alpinism and brings the field right up to date. It is very much training focused (as opposed to skills focused), which is both it’s greatest strength and weakness.

It contains clear and extensive sections on the basic principles of sports physiology, but with the discussion relating directly to climbing in an alpine setting. So you no longer have to learn and then adapt the principles used in other endurance sports to effectively plan your training regime. It also has great and focused sections on strength, mental skills, nutrition, altitude, schedule planning and choosing your training goals. It also contains some fantastic contributions from other world class alpinists, sharing what they have learned about the most effective ways yo improve your alpine climbing.

Its focus on physical rather than technical skills training means there should probably be more than just this book in your training library. However, it joins a collection of titles that are essential reading for climbers who are serious about improving.

The Trad Climber’s Bible: The skills for trad climbing are about as broad as in any sport. This is especially true if you wish to climb in many different settings - hard, technical single pitch climbs, big walls and and alpine faces. The Trad Climber’s Bible comes at the challenge of passing on these skills from a different angle from most instructional manuals.

I jumped at the chance to order it in for the davemacleod.com shop simply because it was authored by the American trad legends John Long and Peter Croft. I was fascinated by how they had approached the challenge of writing about trad skills. They have written the book in a narrative style, with many stories and anecdotes from their combined 70 year experience of pushing their limits on trad all over the world.

Some of the sections, such as those on ‘fiddling’ and ‘embracing the weird’ made me smile as they highlighted the sheer range of unusual skills that are nonetheless essential to be a successful trad climber. It’s a big, thorough, entertaining and inspiring book which will provide much food for thought and arm you with many more skills to throw at your next big lead. Excellent photography throughout and great value for what has clearly been a huge project for the authors.

Wideboyz II: The Wideboyz, Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker, have decided to turn their hand to finger cracks, with the goal of repeating the hardest and most famous of all finger cracks - Cobra Crack (8c) in Squamish. In their own Wideboyz style, they convert their offwidth training den into a finger sqaushing setup and proceed to train, hard. Still, Cobra Crack put up a good fight! Entertaining as ever, and a reminder that focusing and trying damn hard goes a long, long way.

Review: Scarpa Instinct VS

I’ve a bit of backlog list of things to review on this and my main blog, but lets start with what will always be right up there in any rock climbers list of choices to get right - rockshoes. Scarpa have brought out a string of pretty awesome shoes over the past year, not just in rockshoes. The Rapids are amazing for running and general wear, and look pretty damn good. Since I live in an ever so slightly wet country and spend my life in the outdoors, I still spend half my life with my feet in Baltoros (replacing the old ZG65s which were also ace) for walking around boggy mountains. 

When the new Instinct VSs came out I was obviously champing at the bit to see what tweaks Scarpa had made to the balance of attributes that make up a good rockshoe. As always before reviewing shoes, I need to explain my perspective a little first. I’m 34, and a life of jumping around on mountains and falling from great heights has given me some quality battle scars. I’ve badly broken both ankles, have Hallux Valgus and sesamoiditis in both feet. Oh, and a touch of equinus. Sound bad? It is. I can barely walk for the first 30 seconds when I get out of bed in the morning. The last time I had my feet X-rayed, the doctor failed to spot my dislocated sesamoid because the bones of my feet were so out of alignment they all looked dislocated. All she could offer was a horified “your feet look weird!”.

The lesson? Get rock shoes that fit your feet well. Dont persist with a painful, ill fitting buying error. Don’t hit the ground from a great height and take your rockshoes off when you don’t need them on. 

So you’ll understand if I have high expectations for the fit of rockshoes. Scarpa shoes generally fit my feet extremely well, the care put into the design and manufacture is obvious. However, everyones feet are different. The original Instinct slippers I found great on steep ground but just not supportive enough for me. That’s probably down to the physiological tale of woe I just described. I know from climbing with Tim Emmett that he felt they were perfect for him on long trad pitches or whatever else. I know a lot of folk are going for softer shoes these days, probably because of the proportion of time spent climbing indoors, but I still like the support. In this area nothing has yet surpassed the design of the Stix, which I still wish Scarpa would revive.

However, the new Instict VS does seem to have a little more support and I found them great on long sport onsights on vertical terrain. On 45 degree, tensiony climbing where grabbing small edges with the toes is the critical attribute, they are second to none. Other shoes in the Scarpa range such as the Boostic are also unbelievably good at this though. The biggest performance development with the Instict VS is probably the heel, which has been completely redesigned. It’s compact, supportive and extremely powerful. I used to set aside a special pair of heelhooking boots for different types of heelhook on really hard projects. Magos for grabbing rough spikes or ripples, Spectros for raw power and stiffness on bigger more positive edges and a very small pair of Stix for rounded stuff. Now, the Instict VS does all of this at least as good as any other shoe I’ve tried. The story is exactly the same with toehooking - the VSs are as good as anything I’ve tried, and I toehook a LOT. 

The proof of the pudding is how much they get chosen for different types of terrain. I’ve been using them about 80% of the time on steep sport routes, any type of bouldering or indoor training. My first route in them was an 8c on the Costa Blanca in January. There was a heelhook rest just before the crux. I had two other pairs of shoes with me but kept finding my heel was sliding out of the thin, polished heelhook so I couldn’t really relax on the shake out. My VSs were quite small and were a bit tight for a Scotsman adjusting to the Spanish heat straight after shivering on Ben Nevis. But when I put them on, I could get much more bite on the heelhook and did the route soon afterwards.

Fit wise, they are prefect for me, barring two points. First, the toe hooking rubber running right down to the toes feels a little cramped and doesn’t quite give my toes room to expand. So they do need to come off quite regularly for comfort. Second, as with the Instincts, when standing on slabby terrain, big footholds or on the ground, there is too much weight centered over the sesamoids. However, those youngsters yet to grind their unsuspecting sesamoids to dust will wonder what the hell I’m on about.

The single velcro cinch works perfectly and doesn’t get in the way of any moves, especially toe hooking, which is the achilles heel for the Boostics which have a the second velcro tab set quite far down the shoe. Sizing wise, they seem to me consistent with the rest of the Scarpa range of rockshoes. I'm 41 in street shoes and use a 40 in VSs for training and also have a 39.5 for hard redpoints only. If I wanted to wear them all day on multipitch trad I might go for 40.5.

So I’d say they come with a full recommendation from me for any time of climbing. I think you’ll be very impressed. They’ll even be great on trad terrain unless your feet are as much of a mess as mine are.

A final more general note on rock shoes. I still hear from climbers in coaching clinics that they worry that shoes like the VSs and other ‘performance’ shoes that appear to have an aggressive turn down on the toe are not for them because they ‘look uncomfortable’. This is a misunderstanding. It’s true that turned down shoes can feel a little strange before they are worn in. But providing the fit hugs your foot evenly with no painful pressure points, they should be comfortable to wear once they break in. And when that happens they will no longer feel weird when standing on the ground, but retain the body tension power on steep ground. I’ve always felt that it would be nice if retailers had pre-worn pairs (not so much that they are minging though!) for people to try on so they can get over the initial novelty of how good rockshoes feel on the feet for the first time. Hence why if you ever have a boot demo at your local climbing wall - take advantage of it. You might just find that model that was designed just for your feet and will make rock climbing genuinely more pleasurable.

Review: Liquidgrip

Recently I spotted a new liquid chalk product called Liquidgrip on the market. I’m always keen to try new things out so asked them for a bottle to try and and review for this blog. It particularly piqued my interested since they make the following claims in their marketing:

“Liquidgrip is the only gripping agent in the world which works by binding to the fatty acids in your skin. This means a single application at the start of your session will last for hours without reapplying. Unlike regular chalk and liquid chalk, Liquidgrip leaves NO marks at all on clothing or equipment and is even anti-bacterial for improved hygiene. The harder you work, the harder Liquid grip works. It even works in the rain and isn’t affected by sweat.”

All this sounds pretty interesting. On trying it, it does indeed seem a little different to standard liquid chalk, with more longevity and less obvious deposit on the holds. Crucially, the grip itself feels different. On your skin it feels sticky. So far so good. On the rock, I had variable results. I tried it outdoors at first and initially rather liked it. Later I felt that it worked well on some types of holds and not any better than normal chalk at other times. Indoors, I didn’t get on so well and found it ‘rolled’ off my finger skin and didn’t improve the friction. However, I have really sweaty hands, so I’m a tough customer to please in that environment.

Overall, it wasn’t for me. I felt it filled the fingerprint ‘tread’ too much. The stickiness was good but although the product stays on your skin reasonably well, the stickiness doesn’t seem to last all that well. I was obviously keen to find out more about where that stickiness comes from. I asked the UK distributors but they couldn’t tell me. The ingredients list on the bottle is exactly the same as standard liquid chalk (chalk, alcohol, thickener). However, on the american liquidgrip site it mentions having rosin in it. Rosin is commonly used by weightlifters for grip. Presumably the sticky feeling comes from the rosin? I doubt that in this form it would leave any residue on the rock, but who knows?

[UPDATE] Liquidgrip clarified that there is a small amount of Rosin (less than 5%) in the product and they reassure that there is no transference to surfaces although didn't say how this was tested.

Some people might like it for climbing more than I did. Although I didn’t personally prefer it to standard chalk for climbing, I probably would use it in a weights gym, where you wouldn’t get away with using loose chalk. I’d also use it if I had a fingerboard in a room at home I didn’t want to cover in chalk dust.

[SECOND UPDATE] Here is a nice review of the product by Spenser who tested it systematically and found evidence of some residue left on the rock compared to normal chalk. It's not something I often think about here in Scotland since almost all my routes are first ascents and some of them go over a decade without a repeat. However, in popular areas this review is a reminder that we need to be very careful how we use the natural resource - it can get trashed within the space of a few short years. It's seriously not good and it's unnecessary.

Redpoint - a whole book on tactics finally!

Finally we’ve got hold of some stock of Hague and Hunter’s new book ‘Redpoint’ in the shop (right here). The authors are most famous for their superb book The Self-Coached Climber which is justifiably one of our better selling climbing improvement texts. Like I’m sure most experienced coaches know, tactics are becoming an increasingly important area that forms the difference between progress and stagnation among modern climbers. So they have written a whole book dedicated to perfecting all the tactical tricks and advantages for both onsight and redpoint climbing.

It’s a worthy addition to the knowledge base and I’d say there are very few climbers around who are not aware of, or milking all the tactical advantages offered in the book. Whether you read it as a beginner or intermediate level climber to open up a whole new world of tactical awareness and advantage, or as an expert climber reminding yourself of all the tricks you could be using to get that crucial extra edge for your current goal, I’d recommend it.

It’s a substantial subject and a substantial book too. There’s even a 30 minute DVD that comes with it to see the tactics in action. They have included some assessment forms and checklists in each section to help you get a clearer idea of where you stand with your use and prowess of different tactics or skills. This sort of thing maybe doesn’t appeal to everyone. But if writing things down isn’t your style, you can just skip them and simply read the advice. Just as with The Self-Coached Climber, the book is thoughtfully laid out, well illustrated with colour photos and thorough without being a mind-number.

As a coach visiting ever improving climbing walls with stronger and fitter climbers, I’ve appreciated that tactics are the big deal for climbers these days. More and more often, climbers have the strength and fitness from many hours in the climbing wall. But without even knowing it, lack of tactical awareness has placed the glass ceiling above their head much lower than it ought to be. It’s a shame when that happens.

You can get hold of a copy from our shop here.

Review: Racing Weight

Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald is the first dedicated book for athletes on maintaining an optimal body composition. I first heard about it a few months ago and raced to get hold of a copy. As soon as I read it I bought a stack of them for my shop (right here) as I felt this is a must have book for any climber investing time and effort into manipulating their weight for climbing. I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while to explain why.

First off, climbers will notice that this is a book aimed at endurance athletes like cyclists and runners. Why is that important? Because their training is totally different to ours. Aerobic athletes need to burn larger volumes of calories for more hours than climbers do. But despite this, much of the book is relevant to us and even the bits that aren’t help to inform what us climbers should be doing in our nutritional regime.

Fitzgerald has all the credentials to write this book - a successful athlete (triathlon), nutritionalist, coach and professional writer. Although he references the scientific literature throughout, the text is still easy to read if you aren’t a sports scientist and is both well laid out and clear in its messages.

The discussion early on comparing the sizes, shapes and demands of many different sports was very illuminating. We are totally not alone in our challenging nutritional and physiological needs as climbers. While endurance athletes have one killer advantage in the weight loss game (that their sports use up a ton of calories), they also struggle because any caloric deficit interferes seriously with training intensity. If they don’t eat really well at all times, they get unfit.

Fitzgerald outlines in excellent and convincing detail how many angles we can come at these problems using the content, volume, timing and quality of our diet. I learned a great deal about all of these different components, as well as reinforcing a lot of what I had previously learnt in my own study of this subject.

I’d also read a lot of research in recent years about the tactics of appetite management, perhaps the ultimate nemesis for those permanently adrift of their fighting weight. It was fascinating to see an up to date review of all of this in one place. An excellent chapter and surely useful to just about anyone never mind just athletes.

The only place I’d like to have seen an extended discussion was that of intermittent fasting - an increasingly popular protocol in several non-cardiovascular sports that depend on low body fat percentage. Fitzgerald essentially dismisses it as unsuitable for endurance athletes due to the inability to fuel daily training sessions. This totally makes sense. But given that a lot of the book seems to be written with a wider audience of athletes or the general public in mind, I was surprised that more space wasn’t given to it. I suspect that lack of solid research on it’s effects on sport performance was the main reason. It does however leave an opening for someone else to discuss this aspect (or better still research it!) further with a greater range of sports and applications in mind. 

As a coach myself I observe climbers constantly applying bits and pieces of nutritional tactics from all kinds of sources; pseudo-scientific diet books aimed at the mass market, knowledge adapted haphazardly from other sports, out of date knowledge or simple unconscious habits. In my view, every climber who cares about training or knows their body composition could be better should read this text.

It’s in the shop here.

Review: Vapour Velcros and how to use rockshoes

A couple of months ago I reviewed the Instinct slipper which I’ve since been wearing for all my indoor bouldering. Next up on Scarpa’s new rockshoe range is the Vapour Velcro. These are aimed as a more all-round use boot and are hence less aggressively turned down than the Instinct. As is usual for my reviews, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent to talk about how to choose and use rockshoes generally...

Turned down shoes (if you don’t know what the term means it’s basically that the toe box is curled slightly downwards) are the cause of much debate and polarisation among climbers. Some think their only useful for steep climbing, or if you climb hard. Others cannot understand them at all! The first big problem that a lot of people have is that turned down shoes feel downright weird when you first try them on in the shop. 

Book publishers know that no matter how much we hear the old adage about not judging books by their covers, we all do and will always do. Likewise for rockshoes. We can’t help but judge them by how they feel standing on a flat shop floor without being broken in, despite the fact they will probably feel completely different after a session of climbing and standing on actual footholds. If you want to get more performance from your rockshoe, you’ll have to get beyond how they feel in the shop. Most will never heed this advice, which is too bad…

The other problem is that turned down shoes require an actual technique of their own, distinct from traditional flatter soles. Watch some youtubes of leading and bouldering world cup comps. Watch in particular the climbers moving up vertical ground. Watch carefully how they place their feet. See how as they pad their toes downwards onto the foothold, they continue to drop their whole foot down by an inch or so after the toe has made contact. As they do this, watch the downturn of the boot bend back to a normal position. Once in the normal anatomical position, the foot can produce both power and control, but the elastic energy of the downturned rockshoe being stretched has added to the support. A flatter shoe has to provide that support by being stiffer, and that stiffness can come at the expense of sensitivity.

A case in point - Recently I climbed the famous death defying slab route Indian Face. My ascent was just before the Vapour Velcros came out, and I wore a pair of Scarpa Stix. Some climbers asked me why I would wear an apparently turned down boot on a smeary slab climb? The implication is that turned down boots wouldn’t smear well because they don’t bend back enough to make full contact with the smear. But they do! You just have to let them. This is a limitation of climbing technique, not the versatility of the boot. 

So what should one do about this problem of choosing shoes. Well, manufacturers tend to run boot demos around the country from time to time. They aren’t so popular these days as people are turned off by being marketed to during their climbing time. Of course the events are designed to get you hooked on the shoes, but they also save you from making expensive mistakes in buying shoes that don’t work well for you. My advice? Make an effort to keep track of boot demos near you and use them. 

Anyway, back to the review. When I got my new Vapour Velcros through from Scarpa I was all set to get them moving on some trad terrain straight away. But the wettest Scottish July in a decade made sure I tested them out on my board first. Out of the box, they feel very comfortable and indeed not so aggressively turned down. But support on small edges and tensiony steep ground still felt good on my standard tests on my board’s hardest problems. 

On my first outing in them on trad I filled one of them with enough blood I had to pour it out after this injury in preparation for the climb. Thankfully I was able to wear them for the first ascent of the Usual Suspects - a 5 pitch E9 7a first ascent was a good trad test I reckon. And they felt great. Precise and powerful on a 7a drop-knee crux at 50 degrees overhanging, and then supportive on tiny slippy quartz dinks on the pitches above. The heel felt not to hard on my achilles even after 6 hours of hard continuous climbing, but the velcro cinch was good enough to keep in snug for pulling hard on heelhooks. Not as good as the Stix for bat hangs but then there aren’t too many routes that require this! They have softened up a bit since and feel great on granite smears.

All round climbers will love these and they’ll be perfect for sensitivity on indoor routes and problems. With the luxury of having a few pairs, I’m still wearing my Instinct slippers for long board training sessions for the combination of 100% tension grab and soft comfort on the toes. I’m wearing Vapour Vs for indoor and most outdoor routes for comfort and that little bit more support on long pitches. Enjoy..

Scarpa Instincts review

My sponsors Scarpa have several major new rockshoe models coming through this year. First up of these is the instinct slipper. Trying them on at the trade show in Germany, I thought Wow! They are super comfortable. In fact, excellent comfort is one of the biggest things I have to say about the slippers. The fit seems well designed with no nasty pressure points and my toes feel exceptionally comfortable yet still held firmly enough for good performance. Like the Stix before them please don’t be put off by the toe downturn which feels normal as soon as the boot starts to break in after an hour or so bouldering.

Performance - The shoes have an all new rubber which seems to perform well and the grab is excellent on steep ground. In fact, I’d say they were the best shoes I’ve climbed in for training on steep ground or indoor walls and have now become my staple climbing shoe for all training, indoor climbing or coaching. 

The only downside for me is the softness. My Scarpa colleague Andy Earl loves them for this very reason, and I guess it’s a matter of taste, but for long trad pitches or sport routes which aren’t so steep I do like 4mm rubber rather than the Instinct’s 2mm. 

So like most people now I wear my Instincts for all training/indoor for it’s grab on steep rock, sensitivity and unbeatable comfort. But for trad or big sport pitches I’ll still be in my beloved Stix until I get my hands on the first 4mm Vapour slippers when the stock arrives.

For indoor use I’d rate the Instincts 9/10. Lovers of stiff shoes might think 8/10 and lovers of soft shoes might think they are the best on the market. For trad/easier angled use it’s a 6/10 from me but then my feet seem to need that 4mm rubber or they get tired!

youtube of them in action on my board below:

Dream Holds Dumbarton basalt review

Scott from Dream holds lent me some of his new range of Dumbarton Basalt holds to try out a while ago. If you remember my previous review of Dream Holds initial ranges, they make the holds from lumps of the real rock they imitate, the texture of the rock being an amazingly close match as well. In general the holds really do feel like climbing on the rock types they imitate and this has an effect on the way you move (good for training for real rock obviously). The Dumby range is the latest rock type to get the Dream Holds treatment.

Out of the range, about 6 or 7 of the holds were brilliant - really like the actual experience of pulling on the real Dumbarton basalt and make excellent problems. It’s nice that some of them are big (area wise) so matching is common just like on real rock. Indoor climbing is  normally much more laddery and therefore boring without really good problem setters. The only problem for me was, the rest of the Dumbarton range were not so nice shapes and I found myself struggling to make nice problems with them. Like the rest of the dream holds, I think part of this comes down to where they are best suited: My board is 48 degrees overhanging and very intense bouldering. The Dumby holds that do suit this (the big flat pinches are best) are superb, but the rest would be interesting and most suited to low-mid grade climbing wall routes rather than bouldering. In my opinion they’d make infinitely more fun and mentally challenging F5-7b routes than your average boring blog ladder that was just like the last.

I must say the Dream Holds team has done an impressive job getting the texture right. It’s really is just like Dumbarton! - slick and unforgiving of unchalked hands, skin friendly where it’s not sharp edged (I filed some of them down) but with a nice friction too.

The range still has the feel of a first generation product (understandably, because it is!). I still feel the main prize out there - when they figure out a viable way to mould artificial holds from real holds on famous routes/problems. Not only would the shapes be nicer, but it seems to me they would be much more marketable as well! I’d certainly part with cash to train on replica holds from famous routes around the world. 

If you want to see the Dumby range, it’s here.

Review: Climbing-Training for Peak Performance by Clyde Soles

I was interested to pick up a copy of this American climbing training manual. Out of the training for climbing manuals I’ve reviewed on this site so far (most of them), none have managed to serve as a single complete reference, and the variations in quality were pretty dramatic.

I was a little confused as to what I’d be reading after seeing the cover image of some snow plodding, and flicking through and seeing more images of snow, skiing, cycling and a lot of weight training. Was this a fitness book for alpinists or what?

The book is actually aimed at the broad spectrum of climbers from boulderers right through to snowy mountaineers. Its real purpose is hidden in the first chapter – it is intended as a supplement to the other books on training for climbing, focusing on ‘conditioning’ where the other books focus on ‘coaching’, according to soles. The problem here is that conditioning for climbers should involve mostly climbing related activites, which this book doesn’t deal with in detail (but the others do!). The bulk of it deals with supplementary weight training for climbers, with sections on general fitness, nutrition, flexibility and planning your training program.

I my opinion, and those of many other climbing coaches, weight training is of very limited usefulness for the vast bulk of climbers out there. It’s value for climbers lies when there is no access to any climbing (like if you work on a oil rig), if you have a muscle imbalance that needs specifically targeting to eliminate injury, or where the climbing you have access to has insufficient variety to work the prime movers hard.

Almost all climbers will be in one of the above situations at some point in their careers, and they will find the content of this book useful. But I found the opening section of the resistance training section where soles extorts the value of resistance training for climbers more than a little cringeworthy and misleading. Apart from this, there is useful information about the use of weights and other resistance devices for climbers and the practical issues surrounding it. But far more detail was needed in the sections on two of the most important basic resistance devices for climbers – the fingerboard and campus board.

The central opportunity with this title is to inform climbers exactly when and how much they should use resistance training. Soles attacks this task in the section on planning training programs for different climbing goals. But in my opinion he has advocated far too much resistance training and the detail on the climbing activities is sketchy to say the least. The result of following one of these programs, I think, would be good weight lifter, but not as good a climber as one could be on a more sport specific program.

Thankfully, the book isn’t all about weights. It real value comes in the nutrition section, which is well written, practical and informative and this is where it earns it’s place on a committed climber’s bookshelf. Good advice on shopping and meal strategies, body mass and composition, supplementation and dietary pitfalls. It would be good to see a committed nutrition for climbers title from Soles maybe? I might disagree a little with the minimum body mass figures for performance climbing given, in fact I’ve proven them wrong myself. But no one has any empirical data to go on here yet.

There are a lot of useful facts generally and Soles writing style is easier to read that some other books out there. If you are already convinced you need to be doing some weights for some specific reason, this book will help you make the best progress, but I would be wary of using this book solely to plan your training, or you will be spending way too much time pumping iron and not enough learning to climb. I think this book will help a great deal of climbers get a better handle on good nutrition specific to climbing situations, as well as some other useful training related facts. If you already own four or more of the climbing-training titles out there, get this one too. If not, stick to something that is aimed more at what’s important for climbers.

Footnote: I mentioned above that I found the opening section on the value of resistance training a bit scary – what specifically?

It’s the notion that if you don’t do weight training to supplement your climbing you are putting yourself at risk of injury. This is not at all necessarily true. Sure, unbalanced climbing that has insufficient variety in one aspect such as hold type, angle move type or movement style often sets up the conditions for dangerous muscle imbalance or overuse syndromes. But varied and sensible climbing need not create these conditions at all. In fact, climbing movement is so varied that it can actually protect against imbalances rather than cause them. I would suggest that self-coached weight training is far more likely to result in imbalance problems that just going climbing.

Poor technique and variety in climbing are the problem, not climbing per se. But Soles opening section gives a different message. Soles also tells us not to listen to “the number one myth about weight training is that you will get too big. Since climbing is a sport where strength-to-mass ratio plays a significant role in performance, this fear is understandable, if misguided”. But then no satisfactory argument is provided for it being misguided. I do not think it is misguided, generally speaking.

I feel that following the programs of weights based resistance training advocated by Soles would indeed lead to some excess muscle mass for climbing as well as a missed opportunity to use this training time for more specific training activities that contributed much better overall to climbing performance.

New research review - Audry Morrison interview

Audry Morrison and Volker Shoffl have just published a review of the available research relevant to young climbers in the British Journal of Sport Medicine As well as collating some interesting data on studies carried out within climbing, it also draws on other useful sources of information to give us a better picture of the effect of climbing and training on the young body. Not everyone has access to the scientific research press or can digest the information it offers; so I asked Audry if she would answer a couple of questions for this blog.

Young climbers are always asking (and if they don’t they should be!) “how much should I train at my age?” and “what harm can training at a young age do?” The review underlines the need for young climbers and their parents to educate themselves as to what activities and intensities are safe at given ages, and what can be done to minimise risks of permanent alteration or injury to the developing tissue.

Audry Morrison

Non-climbers are always noticing my hands and commenting that they look very different to 'normal' hands. What changes should climbers who train regularly expect in their hands and are there any negative consequences to consider?

Audry: Climbing is certainly a ‘load-bearing’ sport, with the fingers supporting a lot of this ‘load’. Those bones that are most involved with this ‘load-bearing’ or ‘resistance’ exercise are constantly remodelling themselves in response to this type of exercise. Bones are not static. So in a veteran adult climber’s fingers there is up to a 50% increase in the tendon width size (a few years to achieve), a thickening of the collateral ligaments here too, the bones in the fingers physically remodel themselves to become wider/thicker to better accommodate this loading (especially at joints, notably the middle joints), and the fingers just tend to be thicker. How much the finger bones thicken is in direct relationship to the number of years climbing, hours spent training, and climbing ability level. Repeated over training can create micro traumas that collectively can result in stress fractures, ganglions, pulley strains/rupture, tendon nodules, finger nerve irritation, arthritis, etc.


Negative consequences to consider
Good bone remodelling to create strong bones also relies on the assumption that good nutrition is also in place…. like not drinking a lot of soft drinks. An American study found females around age 20 had osteoporosis (brittle bone) similar to that of a 70-year-old because of the volume of soft drinks they drink. These drinks act to limit the amount of calcium your bones can absorb when they remodel themselves. Also, if calcium intake poor, the body will ‘steal’ calcium from other bones to use when remodelling the bones that are getting most of the resistance workout.

A lot of climbers quite rightly have concerns about their fingers and hands. We ask a lot of fingers when climbing, especially at a high ability level.

This is probably obvious, but high ability climbers generally experience more injuries, especially to the fingers, because of the greater mechanical stresses and weight-bearing loads to the fingers. ‘Crimp’ position exerts the greatest compressive force to a finger joint cartilage, compared to the ‘open hand’ position that is more protective and also allows you to climb for longer. Over gripping holds will limit climbing performance because of the direct knock on effect of increasing blood pressure and heart rate, increasing stress hormone levels etc that in turn influence and change metabolites in the forearm so you get pumped quicker.

Climbers should continually assess the full range of motion in all 3 joints of each finger. Can you place your hand palm down so that it is flat on a table surface? If any of the fingers can’t go flat, it may suggest Dupuytren’s disease. This used to be confined to those aged 40-60 who worked manually that created micro traumas to the fingers, though there is also a North European genetic predisposition to it. Unfortunately even young climbers have various stages of Dupuytren’s, that if severe, requires an operation to straighten the finger. But some NHS hospitals a while back refused to perform this surgery any more along with some others as a cost cutting exercise.

In one good study examining osteoarthritis in 65 veteran adult climbers (average age=37.5, climb experience=19.8 years, grade=5.12c) compared to non-climbing age-matched controls, there were five specific joint areas in the climber’s fingers that scored significantly higher than the controls. But having said this, the overall osteoarthritis scores between both groups were similar.

What do you think are the main things young climbers should keep in mind to progress quickly and safely to the upper levels in climbing?

Audry: Below the age of around 12 (pre-pubertal), no youngster has the ability to adapt to either aerobic or anaerobic exercise as would happen in an adult. There are many adaptations in their body that prevent this from happening. But they can learn movement well, and they most definitely should be participating in sport (all sorts). It’s not known when specialisation in climbing should take place. They must be encouraged to learn very good technique because they don’t have the strength, have immature pain barriers, etc. In younger children, actually demonstrate what they are doing wrong.

Elite young climbers will also have thickened finger bones. What’s critical for young climbers is that their finger bones grow to their full length around age 16.5, and that this is not interrupted by finger training too intensively. Damage (temporary or permanent damage) can occur when young climbers undertake extensive finger strengthening exercises. This is especially so when they try to compensate for their increased weight when they have their final growth spurt around age 14-15. Some 20% of adult height is achieved in this final growth spurt where skeletal mass increases twofold and a lot of muscle can be packed on. Ligaments and tendons have not yet adapted to these increases in bone length and load, and increasing levels of certain hormones can also weaken the joints. The training focus must be on ensuring good technique/efficiency (always!) and on volume & diversity of route, rather than doing any finger strength training those elite adults do.

Also check for any curvature of spine, tight shoulders that have a rolled hunched look. If so, much more stretching needs to be carried out, possibly physiotherapy or medical intervention if severe.

Check feet too. See if there is any pain or deformities, or loss of nerve sensation. If any of these is the case, the shoes are too restrictive. Feet grow in a linear manner length and width from ages 3-12 (in females) and to age 15 in males. Height is highly correlated to foot growth to the age of 18.

Thanks for answering those questions Audry and well done on the research. Its quite a striking figure that tendon width increases so much – when you consider the effects on the cross sectional area of a doubling of tendon width it seems even more impressive. But we ask so much of our fingers in climbing and muscles work at such a mechanical disadvantage that I suppose it’s not so much of a surprise that the adaptations are so striking. I’ve certainly noticed a marked thickening of my PIP joints over the past two years and more aches and pains in them than before.

I think the key takeaway from all this is to read and educate yourself before you launch into the training, rather than once you start having problems. At the same time, all these consequences to getting training wrong as a youngster doesn’t mean you cant push yourself until you are adult. It just means that there are trade-offs between going hard when you are still growing and accepting and managing some consequences from it. But most of the negative consequences should be avoidable with healthy respect for the body. Just look at climbers like Fred Nicole who was climbing F8b+ at 16 and has been bouldering at the cutting edge right through to his late thirties with seemingly no breaks – inspiring.

You can see the abstract for Audry’s paper here. You can view the full text if you have an ATHENS password.

Energie Conference Review

Today I was lecturing at an interesting conference on physical activity and health in Glasgow – it was quite a day! The conference was aimed at professionals mostly involved in promoting physical activity, sport and exercise in one form or another. Below are some quick hits from the speakers that I found quite interesting as someone heavily involved in a ‘niche’ sport and having spent 6 years studying sport science. After I finished my masters in 2004 I actually thought about doing a PhD in this area – it’s one of the few areas in sport science with any support for post grad research. But in the end I decided I’d had enough study for the time being and fancied climbing E11 instead. Hopefully I’ll go back and do it sometime…

It was most amusing to see full on research lectures with screens of data as you would expect at a science conference, interspersed with audience participation sessions of the latest in step aerobics! 150 people jumping up and down in their civvies to banging techno in a conference room at 2pm is and strange sight. My talk was last and ended up being about E9 for fear factor as the tech guy messed up and crashed the AV system, so my nice slides of climbing and clips from E11 disappeared and I had to ad-lib my lecture with no slides. Scary. Everyone still clapped at the end, so I guess I got through it. But it’s not something I want to repeat in a hurry. As I was saying to the audience about risk sports – bold climbers don’t like surprises and like to know in great detail the tasks they face in advance.

The main part of my talk was to try and relate why I turned from an inactive kid who despised school sports to a pro athlete. I told them that I was fairly low confidence as a kid because I’m not a very outgoing and extrovert person, so the competitive and win/lose situations of sport (amplified by the cut throat world of pecking orders among kids) was always a negative experience for me. I felt that a lot of other kids also weren’t ready for this sink or swim world and therefore turned away from sport. When I discovered climbing, it washed all that away because it could be whatever I wanted it to be – individual, team, competitive or not, explorative or light-hearted. So I could move from a gentle break in to maximum commitment as and when I was ready. I told them that I climbed a world class route on the same crag I started climbing on as a timid kid – how cool is that – normally elite level sport takes you far away from the experience of the first steps, not necessarily so in climbing. I also told them I thought they should borrow some ideas from the world of business and internet to help appeal to a broader range of youngsters. Web 2.0 is a remarkable real time worldwide study in behavioural techniques and engaging user attention and motivation. I am certain there is stuff to be learned from that. I also think sport/health promoters need to look at the Long Tail idea that is buzzing in the business world and recognize the power of it’s ideas in reaching diverse groups with their own codes and vales such as teenagers.

Anyhow, here is a quick zap through the field of exercise promotion as it stands right now:

Matthew Lowther, who is the Scottish exec. policy coordinator on physical activity showed us data that suggested that the Scots have one of the best designed strategic plans in the world (!) for motivating and facilitating the public to get off the couch and exercise to stay alive. I guess that shows just how deep the problem of an inactive society runs in Scotland. Depressing really. I liked his slide showing what things should be like with pictures of parks with a sign “MORE BALL GAMES” instead of “no ball games”. When he was talking about creating new environments for sport to take place I couldn’t help but feel a touch of frustration that not enough folks, especially kids know about the great massive (and free) playground out there called the Highlands – plus all the places closer to home like the Dumbarton’s and the Auchinstarrys.

Dalia Malkova was talking in her nice Russian accent about sports nutrition myths, especially good practice in carbohydrate loading for endurance sport. It’s quite a complicated picture but the main things were again reinforcing the importance of rapid munching of high GI carbs after you train (must be inside 2 hours post workout for hormonal reasons). Eating high GI carbs before training can help give you a higher glycogen load going into the exercise, but it seems to subsequently drop off more rapidly during the exercise compared to eating low GI. I’m going to write up something in detail about carbs for climbers soon.

“Motivator to the Hollywood stars” Ali Campbell gave a good talk, which was typically a little high on cheese content as much motivational content can be. But it was still very good. He classified people’s deeper life motivation as either “moving away from pain” or “moving towards pleasure”, the latter being the better but more difficult strategy to adopt. I recognised what he said in climbers I’ve seen and coached and suggest that there are climbers who are in the sport to move towards pleasure but their regular regime of climbing activity and thought is centred around moving away from pain. I’ve thought a lot about this lately for my climbing coaching and feel I am learning a lot right now – with much more to discover yet I think.

John MacLean the medical director at the Hampden sports medicine centre (THE place to go in Scotland if you have a sports injury needing treatment) gave an excellent run through of sports medicine today. His ‘gore’ slides of breaking legs, arms etc were awesome and after the talk I asked him about the rationale behind using ice on acute sports injuries to reduce inflammation and pain. My question arises because the body has evolved for many an age to fine tune its inflammatory response – so why should we start interfering with it? I asked the same question to my sports med lecturer back at uni and got a fudgy answer. This time, John clarified rather better. It turns out there are still two camps of opinion, one feeling that the natural course of the body’s response should be left to run its course, and the other feeling that part of that evolved response is to prevent the injured athlete weight bearing/using too early and causing more damage. Anti inflammatory treatment of acute injuries combined with careful re-introduction of appropriate rehab is essentially ‘more intelligent’ and prevents the rapid loss of muscle tissue that goes with immobilisation of an injured limb.

The afternoon sessions saw several experts on obesity putting their cases for the best ways to get children off play stations and away from a path to being round adults. Lyndel Costain shone a cold scientific beam on the popular ‘celeb’ diets and reflected what we all knew deep down anyway; they only work where they tip the energy balance negatively. The sad fact is that most people (2 thirds I think she said) who lose weight fail to keep it off in the long term. So the emerging picture is that the only way to cure the worldwide obesity epidemic is to prevent people from getting obese in the first place. A big ask. But at least we know where to direct our efforts.

Books...

It's funny how despite just about everything can be found on the internet these days but it still seems to take bloody ages any time you want to actually find it. The websites I run (davemacleod.com, Online Climbing Coach and this blog) are information sites these days as well as just 'stuff about my climbing'. So I've been trying to find ways to help folk find easier ways to get to the type of information they are after when visiting my sites. The main thing I think people use my sites for is to find information about:

My climbing and routes
Scottish climbing
Improving at climbing, including coaching
Information about climbing injuries and recovering from them

If you can think of any others then please comment on this post and let me know!!!

I will have more time over the summer to work on my websites and want to improve all aspects of them. One of the main things will be to get a much more comprehensive information bank about climbing injuries since I get emails from injured climbers almost every day now. One of the things I’ve been doing is using an Amazon feature to create my own ‘bookstore’ to help you find good books related to climbing quickly. I’ve set up three stores:

Online Climbing Coach store: A complete catalogue of all the decent books on training for climbing ever written!

Scottish Climbing Guidebook Store: A definitive list of all the guidebooks you need to climb anywhere in Scotland in any climbing discipline.

My Favourite books! Just a fun list of the favourite books on my shelf that inspired or informed me and my climbing.

Click on them to have a look. In the future you can find the OCC store in the sidebar of this blog, and the rest on the Shop page of my main site. I’ll keep them regularly updated and try to get reviews up of new books that come on-stream. It an Amazon based thing, so you can buy any books straight from the shops if you like them. I thought it might be handy as it saves you searching through reams of pages and wondering which books are most up to date or highest quality.

Enjoy.