Make or Break: Don’t let climbing injuries dictate your success

For the past 4 years or so, I have been working on a book about climbing injuries. It spells out in detail how to treat them once you have them, based on the evidence from high quality scientific research and practice. More importantly, it discusses all the things we do in our climbing routine that cause our future injuries and prolong those we have already caused.

I have titled the book ‘Make or Break’. This is because becoming an expert in understanding the causes and treatments of climbing injuries will be make or break for your climbing career. As Wolfgang Gullich said, “getting strong is easy, getting strong without getting injured is hard”. In my first book, 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes, I suggested that many aspects of training for climbing are not rocket science. Keep showing up, pulling on small holds, pushing the limits of your motivation and learning from others and you will get stronger fingers and get better at climbing.

It will be injuries that will get in the way of your progress, and if you let them, they will dictate how far you get in climbing. The research suggests that nearly all climbers get injured at some point. Finger injuries are most likely, followed by elbows and shoulders. Of course there are countless bits of our anatomy that can break if suitably mistreated. When you get one of these injuries, you need to be the expert, because unfortunately you cannot rely on anyone else to make sure you recover. This is not because doctors and therapists fail to do a good job (although they sometimes do). It is because there is no single source of advice on the vast array of things you must do to make sure you recover well and prevent future injuries. The climbing coaches, physiotherapists, otrhopaedic surgeons etc. that you will see will all give you pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but it is you who must put them together.

Claire MacLeod dispatching our pre-orders the other night.

During the process of writing the book, I have discovered many pieces of hard scientific information and subtle concepts I wish I’d known when I was 16. They would have saved me so much of the pain and psychological torment of injuries that climbers everywhere share at some point in their career. There are many strands of information in the book. It is a handbook on how to take care of yourself as a lifelong climbing athlete. In this blog post, I will briefly outline three messages that will give you a flavour of what you will find in the book:

1. Tendons don’t like rest, or change.

Surprisingly, sports medicine research still has a lot to learn about tendons and how they heal and respond to training. However, there have been several big steps forward in the research over the past decade or two. The only problem is, new knowledge in sports medicine takes years or even decades to filter through to the advice you receive. Consider the following quote: 

“In general, it takes approximately 17 years to get 14% of research findings adopted into practice. Moreover, only 30–50% of patients receive recommended care, 20–30% receive care that is not needed or that is potentially harmful and 96% may receive care with the absence of evidence of effectiveness.”

I was shocked too when I read that. I was aware through my own experience that the advice I’d been given to recover from my own climbing injuries was often at odds with research I’d read. But to discover the extent of the lag between research findings and advice given to sportspeople is depressing. We only have one life and we cannot afford to receive outdated advice. Unfortunately, the internet hasn’t made the task of unearthing reliable advice any easier. Scientific journals remain hidden to most behind a paywall, while the same poor quality, outdated and non-specific advice drowns out the few reliable sources.

One of the shifts in understanding from the past decade is that slow-onset tendon injuries such as golfer’s elbow do not respond well to complete rest. In fact, it often makes the condition worse. Moreover, many of the adjunct treatments often offered - stretching, massage, ibuprofen may do little to contribute to healing, and only affect pain. Instead, the most promising treatment has been large volumes of exercise of a specific mode (eccentric) and at a level which causes some pain. Much of this seems counterintuitive at first sight, which is why a detailed understanding of what happens in injured tendons is so important. 

Some practitioners in sports medicine are still working to a pre-1990s concept of tendon healing and will advise you to heal your injured tendons by resting them completely. In contrast, modern research has found that the best way to heal injured tendons is to use them, but only in a way that is specific to the nature of the injury. Tendons do not like rest or change. The successful formula is to provide constant stimulus to tendons to maintain their health. But if you want to change that stimulus, such as by training harder, you must do so very carefully, using all the cues from the body that you can listen to.

Section 1 of the book discusses in detail the limitations of the sports medicine industry and how to get the most out of it, and section 4 details the modern understanding of tendon injuries and how to successfully treat them.

2. Know pain, or no gain

Above I hinted at the difference between the pain level and the healing status of an injury - a crucial concept for any sportsperson to understand. Understanding of the nature of pain has been another area of science that has advanced hugely in sports medicine. It is not enough to be able to listen to your body. You need to be able to decode the messages and see the patterns in them. This is both a science and an art.

Climbers need to be able to differentiate between healthy soreness from training and activity, and damage that demands action. They need to be able to take understand how various treatments affect pain from their injuries and what this means for their daily decisions on how much activity to expose them to. They need to understand how many aspects of their environment and psychological state amplify or suppress pain sensations from their daily activities. Pain sensations are an essential measure for climbers to monitor, but without detailed knowledge of how it works, it is very easy to interpret those messages from pain wrongly.

Section 2 of the book is entirely devoted to understanding pain.

3. The luxury of doing sport badly will not last

A young body can withstand a surprising amount of abuse. But the relentlessness of sport and training amplifies the effect of small imbalances or errors, and it doesn’t take long before these accumulate to the point of injury. Balance is the key word here. One area of sports medicine that has come on a fair bit in recent years has been the recognition that athletes need to develop strength in a balanced way, taking care to strengthen muscles on both sides of joints. That is a good development, but it is not enough.

Balancing of the stress imposed by training for climbing needs to come in several other ways too. Matching increases in training intensity with improvements in the quality of rest is one way. Improving technique and the design of the training progression to spread that stress is another. 

Sections 1, 3 and 4 deal with these concepts and the specific details that climbers should be aware of which commonly result in climbing injuries.

Repeated forceful internal rotation of the arm (the right arm on this move) is a big part of climbing. So it is no surprise that the internal rotators of the arm at the shoulder become dominant. You may well get years out of a healthy young shoulder without feeling a thing. But the resulting impingement syndrome affects so many climbers. If you'd rather prevent it, it's not hard to do a little work to keep the shoulder joint working well. And if you are already suffering, you may be able to reverse it quite quickly, unless you've really tried to ignore it for too long!

Maintaining awareness of the foot during hand movements is a core skill in climbing injury awareness. Slipping feet are a important cause of many finger and shoulder injuries. Do your feet slip too often? Do you know what to do when they do slip? Correct your climbing technique and you can push your body a lot harder before it starts to complain.

Finally, there is the psychological challenge of injuries which is hugely underestimated by both climbers and their friends and families. In sections 1 and 5 of the book, I present the idea that we should see the injuries we suffer as a crucial message that something must change in our way of approaching climbing. By seeing the injury as an opportunity to go back to basics, to understand what must change and make that change, we can not only improve our climbing, but enjoy the process rather than endure it.

I hope the book will help many climbers prevent their future injuries or overcome existing ones. You'll find the book in our shop here, dispatching worldwide.

Engaging the brain during your climbing sessions

Every day I get emails from climbers who have had success in their climbing after reading 9 out of 10 climbers. Thanks to everyone who lets me know how they are getting on. It is great to know the book is helping climbers get more out of their sport. This morning, Franco emailed to tell me of his recent improvements since implementing some of the ideas in the book. But he picked up on the challenges of concentrating during your climbing sessions, so that some actual technique learning takes place.

In 9 out of 10, I discussed the fact that some climbers progress in their technical skills much faster than others due to how they approach their climbing sessions. Some are pretty passive, without much mental recording, review replay of the details of their movements. This is understandable. There are lots of things we get out of our climbing sessions; relaxation after a stressful day’s work is one of them. One of the ways we can relax is to completely clear the mind and just enjoy the movement over rock without consciously thinking about anything.

I’m not saying this is bad for technique. In fact, this type of approach is one ingredient of successful technique learning, in order to make already learned movement patterns quicker and more automatic.

But if we want to improve, we cannot ignore the hard part of learning new techniques which requires deliberate recording and reviewing of movements and a real conscious effort. If you are tired and in need of a de-stress, you can have the best designed training program ever, but no progress will be made while the mind is not fully engaged.

How can these apparently competing needs be squared together?

There are some suggestions in 9 out of 10 obviously. But I just want to reiterate the point that this is all much easier if the problem solving and movement experimentation mindset is part of the joy of your climbing sessions, rather than something that gets in the way of it. 

This issue of conscious review of movements feeling like a chore is less of an issue among climbers who boulder, since problem solving and repeated attempts are more centre stage in this discipline. So my first recommendation to those who mainly climb routes is to give bouldering a proper chance. Go to a good venue or boulder wall and climb with others who ‘get’ the activity. Sometimes it only takes one good session for the bouldering ‘lightbulb’ to go off in your head and suddenly you connect with the whole game of refining sequences and making subtle changes in position and force to achieve huge differences in how the move goes.

During your sessions, if you would like to have some switch off time to relax and shed the day’s stresses, there are plenty of strategies. Just be inventive and do what suits you best. For some that might be allocating particular sessions to technique training and others to purely mileage and relaxation. Being realistic about what you can achieve might help you organise your sessions better and get more from them. For others, splitting your sessions up and allocating your ‘best’ hour after a long, chilled out warm-up, to a short but effective session where you put in some real mental effort. Or perhaps you can get the required relaxation in other ways. I often sit for 30 minutes and just drink tea at the climbing wall before starting, just to forget the other stuff buzzing around my head, and allow myself to get into rock climbing mode.

However you choose arrange your climbing so that you are ready to put in some serious effort to recording, reviewing and practicing your climbing movements, don’t ignore it. Getting this right will make inordinate difference to your progress compared to worrying about whether you should have more or less rest days or what angle you should climb on etc.

Technique training: When to think and when to just ‘do’

This blog post makes quite a basic but often overlooked point about technique habits. Over the past 5 years, the awareness of climbers in general of the importance of improving their movement technique has risen dramatically. More climbers, are thinking about their own movements, trying to analyse why the movements are working or not working. This is really good.

However, it brings a potential problem. Conscious thinking is very slow and clunky. The aim is for movements to progress from conscious to automatic. Doing specific technique drills, warming up and working moves for a redpoint are all great times to indulge in conscious self-analysis in real time as you actually move. 

Yet, time has to be made for those movements to work themselves into your subconscious movement repertoire. Thus, there has to be time when you focus simply on climbing the route, without keeping your minds eye on how you are moving between the holds. Can you see the difference? There is more about the timing of self-analysis of movements in ‘9 out of 10’ too.

Some climbers become ‘stuck’ in the mode of thinking about their movements and forget how to just climb. In other words, they fail to learn how to switch from training into performance mode. Just a point to keep in mind. (It goes without saying that plenty of others have the opposite problem - never actually doing any worthwhile self-analysis of their movement).

In a normal climbing wall session, you might switch between training and performance mode many times. Next time you step off the ground, decide which mode you wish to be in for this attempt.

Old school drills - foot off bouldering

I guess foot off bouldering was what folk did before campus boarding got so popular. It’s now pretty out of fashion as a strength training tool - campusing is cooler. But is it better?

In some ways it might be (since noones ever tested it properly, noone can tell you either way). It’s more basic which might mean you end up pulling harder. It’s on nice skin friendly rungs which might mean you get more high quality sets done. However, it’s main problem is probably that such a large proportion of climbers doing regular campusing lose all the gains and more by getting injured on it.

Although it’s currently uncool, foot off bouldering might be at least as effective for gaining strength since it’s varied, could be a little safer if you do it right and might be slightly less bad for your technique that campusing. The irony is of course that although foot off bouldering is out of fashion, some indoor boulderers footwork repertoire is so bad that their normal climbing isn’t that far off being foot off anyway.

Now, This post isn’t actually about getting stronger, I just wanted to get the above paragraph out of the way. It’s actually about technique. Foot off bouldering can be a useful technique drill for those who are seriously unaccustomed to movement on steep rock.

There still exists a cadre of climbers who do not like to move dynamically. There are different reasons why they got this way. Some are scared to fall off, so won’t slap for anything. Some are used to balancy, slabby trad climbing, or were brought up on outdoor vertical cliffs such as granite walls. Some simply haven’t done enough of the steeper stuff.

Without a coach, these climbers might never break their static habit on overhanging terrain. It’s just too engrained. Even if they try, they’ll still initiate the move by pulling up and locking off, rather than dropping down to leave room to accelerate. They’ll hesitate, hang on for too long, get pumped and come down. All of this reinforces the feeling that steep climbing is beyond them.

If there is no coach to break this habit down bit by bit, a drill is needed to force it. Moving statically is all but impossible with the feet off, so long as the holds are the correct size. Foot off bouldering on steep bouldering walls (45 degrees is good but anything between around 35 -horizontal will work) can forcefully break the habit of trying to find a static way, and start to build understanding of the balance required to move dynamically on steep ground.

This balance is hard to describe without showing you. But here is an example. When you start move dynamically on a 45 degree overhanging wall to a distant hand hold, your upper body feels like it is falling backwards. It feels unnatural. Your subconscious naturally wants to hang your ass down, making your trunk more vertical. But this takes weight off the feet. However, if you pull the ass in and try to reach the hold without the ‘falling backwards’ feeling, you have to stay too low to be able to reach the hold. If you watch relative novices climbing steep ground in climbing walls, you see this movement confusion happening constantly.

In a sense, bouldering foot off, breaks part of this unnatural feeling. It forces familiarity with dynamic motion between every hold. It no longer ‘feels wrong’. Second, it gets you used to the feeling of jumping backwards across the overhang, and help you realise that balance is restored when you grab the next hold.

Once you have mastered this, you can deal with the fact that keeping your feet on means your body stays more horizontal and the falling backwards feeling is even more pronounced. Steep climbing is a learned skill which is counter intuitive. For novices, it’s ok that it feels wrong at first, even if you are an expert climber on vertical terrain. Once you become expert, the feeling of staying more horizontal as you make the move that felt so wrong gradually becomes the part that feels right; it means you will have body tension to keep your feet on when you get the next hold.

A few carefully chosen foot off problems towards the end of your session might be all that is necessary. If jugs are all that you can move on, that’s fine. But as soon as you can, move onto good holds but slightly smaller than jugs. It’s probably better to do small moves on smaller holds than bigger moves on buckets. If you are climbing on set problems at the wall, you might need to tweak them by adding the odd different coloured hold because some moves just wont work foot off.

Rules of thumb:

- If you do this so much that it becomes your party piece, you are doing too much and doing more will become detraining.

- The idea is to move dynamically, but with control. Try to learn how to accelerate in the preparation for the move, make a controlled lunge for the next hold, and decelerate using both the arms and your swinging legs to absorb the swing.

- Violent thrashy moves are a fine way to get injured and throw away all your gains.

- Start small. It doesn’t matter if this is a single move to a hold 2 inches above. Progress from here.

What to do at the crux…

...And what not to do.

Movement technique, within a given climber, is not a fixed quality. It changes depending on  the constraints the climber operates under, and how they respond to those constraints. Generally speaking, your technique is probably at it’s best when you are warming up or fully warmed up, relaxed, in familiar surroundings and feeling confident. It gets worse when we are nervous, scared, over aroused or distracted. But this post is more about how it changes during fatigue.

If you watch climbers at the crag on an onsight or redpoint effort, a common finding is that technique starts off well and errors creep in progressively as fatigue progresses. This is not consistent though. Some climbers’ technique deteriorates so markedly that their movements are completely different as the pump sets in. Foothold choice and accuracy goes down, fluid dynamic movement slows and becomes erratic, pacing becomes either rushed or hesitant. On the flip side, the best climbers can try hard, right on their limit of physical effort, with good technique maintained right to the moment of failure, even on dangerous trad routes.

This quality starts off as a simple choice not to let technique change in the fatigued state. When made over and over, it becomes a habit and eventually set in stone and resistant to the most stressful and rapidly changing situations in climbing.

Obviously, getting off the starting blocks with making that choice to keep the technical standard high right to the point of failure is easier said than done. For a start, climbers themselves don’t necessarily know what their good and bad technical habits are, or may not even be aware that they change. So it starts with an ambitious self-assessment at least. More likely a good coach will be necessary to get it right. Videoing your own climbing efforts is not just an exercise in entertainment or ego trip. It can provide a window to really understanding why you fell off (it might not just be because you weren’t strong enough).

Providing you can find out what negative changes are really going on as you get to the crux, you can make the choice to keep your technique ‘clean’ when it matters most.

Good technique, bad technique and not enough techniques

Over the winter I got more involved in bouldering again and thought a lot about what’s changing among boulderers. There are a lot of great new indoor bouldering facilities all over the place and the identity of bouldering as a sport gets stronger all the time. It really struck me climbing at TCA how the way climbers move on these walls has changed fast. I guess it’s because in this type of centre there is a lot of opportunity to watch and be influenced by others climbing on the same problems.

Naturally enough, the changes I’m thinking of are generally positive on the whole. But there are some negatives to watch out for depending on your training goals. It’s hard to describe these subtle changes properly without demonstrating it as I would when coaching, but generally there are a lot of ‘front on’ moves, a lot of cutting loose, many moves with the foot on one foothold for part or all of the move and probably a lower ratio of foot:hand movements than outdoors.

It’s very hard to consistently set indoor boulder problems that have footwork that is outdoor like. The blobbyness of bolt on holds and limitations of panels is one thing. The bigger problem is of course that it’s just hard to match the creativity of real rock!

So folk training ultimately for outdoor rock but relying heavily on indoor centres (especially when it’s one centre in particular) end up getting really good at the techniques for indoor bouldering, but still fail to get their outdoor grade to match or exceed their indoor grade.

It’s important to understand what is going on clearly. The climber can move really well. In other words you could say they have excellent technique. They read the moves well and execute them with precision and few errors. And yet technique is the reason for failure to reach their outdoor potential.

It’s not that there is bad technique, just not enough techniques being learned through the training diet. A simple point when you say it out loud, but often missed.

What to do about it depends on your resources. If you can climb more outdoors, do it. If you really can’t (are you sure it can’t and not just less convenient?) then at least an awareness of the problem will help you stay focused on finding a better sequence rather than just blaming weakness all the time. You are training yourself to spot better sequences, by trying to do just that, all the time. A good mindset is that you are never just trying to do the move, but always trying to find the easiest possible way to do it.

There are social influences too. If your ‘beast’ training partner does the move one way, and you just can’t, don’t be put off straight away. Keep experimenting to see if there is a tweak in the foot sequence, or a way to take the holds that removes the need for power usage. 

Learning errors? come back fresh

The story behind this new problem from yesterday is on my main blog here. But I wanted to share a couple of lessons I learned from a few sessions trying this rather technical eliminate:

First, while trying it after a summer of trad when I was weak I went backwards on it. I couldn’t understand why at first. I had an awful session when I couldn’t even do the swing move at all. My raw finger strength was still there - I could feel it in how hard I could pull on the holds. But the move wasn’t working. I later learned that lack of recent bouldering mean’t I’d forgotten (relatively speaking of course) how to maintain maximal body tension through a sequence of very sustained moves. In the process of trying it over and over out of frustration, I accidentally learned many errors in the moves. I started taking the holds in a less efficient way, timing the movement wrongly and getting less weight through my feet.

It happened because I was ‘over thinking’ the movement rather than letting my subconscious mind do at least some of the work. Because I was previously able to do the moves easily, I concluded there must be a movement error I was making, and If I just experimentally tried subtle tweaks in the move I’d figure out the mistake. But there was no mistake, I just wasn’t quite strong enough and in the process of looking so hard at one move I learned some new errors and lost confidence.

How to avoid this problem if you are in the habit of redpointing? On the whole I’d still say it’s fine to try one move that you can’t yet do over and over for tens or even hundreds of times. But recognise that within the session you sometimes lose confidence, strength, positivity and make more errors, even if this effect remains largely subconscious. You’ll sometimes find that you come back next session with a fresh body and mind and do it straight off. The correct way to do the move will just happen spontaneously.

Take a break, try something else for a session and come back to it.

One other thing: The first move of the problem required pulling in super hard on a small heelhook on a spike. Wearing slippers (I took my tightest pair that I can’t even get on my feet unless it’s cold!) or even lace-ups if you pull really hard your boot might start to slide off and you’ll lose tension. A good solution in the pic below is to wear a sock for extra boot tightness and run finger tape through the pull-loops around your ankle. Point your toes downwards while you stick the tape down. It works a treat.

Through the whole move

I’ve just spent the week staying with family in Glasgow and visiting the fantastic new TCA bouldering centre as often as muscles allow. It’s obviously a bit different from most bouldering facilities, being the biggest in the UK, and this brings many new benefits for training, as well as some new ptifalls. Some observations on these:

The first observation I made which was very heartening, was the notable absence of people complaining about being too short, or the moves being too reachy. Obviously, part of this is down to an underlying assumption that by it’s very nature, the bouldering game involves more big dynamic moves that route climbing tends to. For those who find themselves often blaming failure to climb on height or reachy setting - have a few sessions in a bouldering centre like this. Take time to look around you at the short folks slapping and jumping for the holds. You can’t change your height, but you can learn to move your feet into the right position and then go for that hold!

Someone asked me about how training purely in a bouldering wall, even for route climbing stamina might affect their technique. It’s a worthy concern - constantly bouldering teaches you how to to deliver maximum force and tension from start to finish. It’s often very easy to tell that a climber mainly boulders, just by looking at them climb for a few moves. For someone very experienced who is still climbing a lot of routes for a large part of the year, it’s not such a problem. But if a large proportion of your yearly climbing is on a boulder wall and you are ultimately training for routes, it’s still worth putting a harness on and clipping a rope on a real route whenever you can so you don’t lose the ability to climb with minimal force on the steady parts of routes. In the boulder wall, circuits are still ‘the business’ but make sure and mix them up often and include some you don’t have dialled, so you remember how to use your brain while pumped and make it up as you go along if you mess your feet up or forget where the next hold is.

Someone else asked me about high steps. They are a real weakness for me, as they are for a lot of guys. I’ve improved mine a good bit with some work but I’ve got plenty more to do and I’m determined to sort it out this year. My passive hip flexibility is fairly poor but I get away with it to a certain extent by having very good active flexibility. A lot of folk don’t know about the difference. Passive flexibility is the range of motion (ROM) you have when you pull the limb as far as it will go with an external force (such as your hands pulling your leg into a high step position). Active flexibility is the ROM that the limb can achieve under it’s own steam (i.e. Your highest high step in a real climbing situation!). Obviously, if the antagonist muscle group is very short, passive flexibility will ultimately limit how far you can pull the limb. But in reality, active ROM is often limited by the agonist muscles ability to pull hard in the inner range of it’s ROM. I’ve seen lots and lots of climbers with pretty or even exceptional hip flexibility who still struggle with high steps because they are not strong enough at the extreme joint angles to pull the leg really high under it’s own steam. Why? Like everything, it comes down to the basic rule of training - what you do, you become. They spent lots of time sat on the ground stretching by pulling the leg with an external force, and not enough doing desperate tensiony high steps.

Properly inflexible guys like myself have to do a lot of both passive and active flexibility training - a LOT and for a long time - to see real improvements. So if you really want to high step, work on it every time you climb. If you have your own board, make sure you set problems with very few footholds available and in very unhelpful places. Try to set them so that moving the feet is the crux of the problem. Train yourself to stay tight and strong on the lower foothold and two handholds while you forcefully open your hips and pull the leg right up into a high step at the limit of your ROM. I find it helps to visualise my body as a rigid board stretched between my toes to my fingers while I move the other leg. You can also stretch by pulling the leg up with your arms to stretch your gluts and then let go and try to hold the position unassisted to train your inner range holding.

Training at big boulder walls with big dynamic moves requires a lot of body tension. I’ve often seen the term ‘body tension’ referred to in magazine articles as a strength aspect. It’s  not just that. Strength is needed to be able to apply body tension, but it’s your technique that actually does the applying! It’s perfectly possible to be a front lever monster with rubbish body tension on the rock because you fail to apply that strength. A big part of body tension technique is remembering to apply tension through one or both feet through the whole move as you dynamically lunge to the next handhold. I found myself recently completing a lot of problems during training by consciously thinking about this as I executed the move. Really claw down into the key foothold with the big toe until the last possible moment. This buys you the maximum amount of time to take the next hold a little slower and more accurately and generate enough grip to hold onto it. I often remind myself by saying ‘through the whole move’ inwardly as I set up for a big move, so I don’t lose tension too early and end up with an impossible swing to try and hold. It works!

Technique learning - noticing things

When coaching climbers I’m constantly trying to encourage them to set up a routine both in themselves and as a group of peers climbing together of recording the details of their climbing movement and tactics and discussing the feedback and experimenting with different ways of doing everything.

Examples of this might be: how does the move change if you lunge a bit harder, or pull more with the right toe, or use that other foothold instead? The criteria for for success on a move isn’t just if you can climb it or not. It’s whether you found the most efficient way. So even if you flashed the problem at the boulder wall, do it again and find out if the move was easier if you used that other foothold or sequence.

If you climb with others and you have a good routine of passing movement feedback and ideas back and forth between you on the climbs you try - that’s great. But it’s only the first level. The next level is to be able to do this by yourself.

You don’t have an observant friend to say “You threw your left hip inwards more that time and that looked closer to the move”. So you have to notice it yourself while you are actually climbing, and that’s not easy until you train yourself to do it.

The easiest way to learn is when bouldering, trying a problem that is taking you a few tries to complete. When you are working the moves, don’t give all of your mental focus to delivery of power. Instead, keep a little part of your concentration reserved for noticing how your body and limbs feel as you move through the sequence. Look for things that feel ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, where wrong means it’s more likely to make you fall off. If your right foot is very stretched or is about to slip, what options do you have to solve that problem? 

Once you are close to success and you feel it might happen next try, you can switch to full on redpoint mode and focus completely on just getting the next hold and completing the problem.

Note: The above is moderately advanced. Many less experienced climbers wouldn't even be able to tell you which hands when on which holds immediately after trying the climb, never mind recording the amount and direction of force at each limb and the path of the body during a move. If that’s you, practice noticing just the hand sequence you used, even if it’s just for the first few moves. It’s an essential skill for more advanced climbing and it takes time to learn. There are lots of ways to help you memorise it. But deliberately looking at the wall and each hold and then taking a mental snapshot of how the hold feels in your left or right hand works well.

The importance of being not normal

Following on from my last post about learning technique, another thought following my recent travels. I was speaking about risk and decision making in bold climbing at the SAFOS seminar at EICA Ratho. One of the other speakers was Mark Williams who gave an excellent lecture summarising some of the fascinating research on skill learning in sport right now.

Mark talked a lot about practice, it’s importance, just how much is necessary to reach your potential (a LOT) and crucially, what good practice consisted of. A key characteristic of good athletes in any sport is that they look for patterns in the vast amounts of basic data we absorb in our day to day practice and play. They don’t just take in the data, they strive to understand it, make sense of it. There’s a big difference. Understanding it means re-running it, either in the imagination (day dreaming, or in scientific terminology, visualisation) or by trying it again and tinkering with some aspect of it in order to understand it better.

In climbing terms this means trying the crux with the right foot on all the plausible options, then coming back next time and trying again, until something in your mind tells you you have ‘understood’ the move. Quite apart from the physical effort of practice, which has the side effect of getting you strong, it takes a huge amount of mental effort and focus.

After his talk I was very eager to ask Mark what, if anything, climbers could do to improve the quality of the practice since in climbing it is difficult to amass thousands and thousands of hours since our little forearms get tired and our skin wears out. 

He told me that a big part of it comes down to this striving to ‘understand’ the movements. He reminded us that truly great athletes stand out because they are by definition ‘not normal’. They verge on an obsessive, compulsive need to go back and analyse every detail.

So is this trainable. Well, much as an obsessive compulsive driven athlete would find it nearly impossible to simply drop this deeply held personality trait on demand, it’s similarly hard to start acting like this if it’s just not you.

However, just by recognising that this sort of time consuming, repetitive practice and reflection is what is necessary, we can at the very least remove some inhibitions that might hold us back from this sort of approach.

In my mind, modern life demands of us the need to preform a heck of a lot of repetitive yet skilled tasks with a great deal of concentration and effort in our working lives, that are lot more boring than training for climbing. I know we are ultimately climbing for fun, but if we are serious enough even to use the word ‘training’ to describe some of our climbing sessions, then surely we can apply a hardcore work ethic and up the ante a little. It's worth noting that one of Mark's points was that even the experts who absolutely love training often feel that the best practice sessions simply have to be so systematic and repetitive that they cannot be enjoyed. 

But the results of those sessions certainly are enjoyed!

Coaching observations

I’m just back from various coaching sessions around the UK. After a little break from coaching over the summer, I’ve come to it with fresh eyes after digesting a lot of variety in watching and doing climbs of many different types. It’s amazing how your perspective widens.

There are always some patterns to observe. Older climbers who have been going 10-20 years don’t go for the holds with nearly the same determination as the young angry lads. The young angry lads are too busy going for the (hand) holds and being angry to move their feet onto better footholds and actually use them.

Some more detail - 

Older chilled climbers: Experiment by role playing the 16 year old young angry men! Climb like you really really want to hold onto the next hold and nothing in the world is going to stop you. Grimace like you’re going to bite your bottom lip off. Don’t let go, even if you think you have no chance. The reality is that you only have no chance if you jump off the boulder wall instead of lay one on! The other point is that the learning, and training happens in the zone between success and failure.

Young angry men: Time that anger. Climbing has two stages; preparing to move and execution of the move. If your mind is fuzzing with anger while preparing to move, you don’t see the foot sequence, you don’t feel the shift of body weight that makes the difference. Learn to detach from that anger for a moment and take in the available move choices. If climbing was just about how hard you could pull or how angry you can get, the top climbers would be very different.

Both groups: Learn to be curious about finding the ‘right’ way to do moves. Whether you succeed on the problem/route, try it again using that other possibility you spotted for the move. And that one, and that one too. See which was actually the easiest. Systematic experimentation with moves makes you learn what works. Just because you got to the top doesn’t mean you did it the best way or actually learned anything about how to climb. Just because the climb is too hard for you doesn’t mean you can’t use it to learn something about movement. Even if you just watch someone else manage it. Be curious, watch others on the move, then try again yourself. Compare options, learn. This experimentation is what makes up the bulk of your bouldering sessions.

The limiting factor - setting

The limiting factor in your rate of improvement can sometimes be something that never changes throughout your climbing career. That’s not to say they are inescapable, just that folk simply never take the bull by the horns and change them. ‘Permanent’ limiting factors are things like only climbing a couple of times a week, avoiding overhangs, never learning how to try hard or focus, or being scared of falling.

Other limiting factors are more often important for part of your career. Things such as having an old floppy pair of rockshoes you never bothered to replace, putting on a stone over christmas, getting a new job and not climbing much for 6 months. That kind of thing. 

While giving some coaching clinics recently I met quite a few good climbers who struck me as being limited by their ability to set their own problems. I’d hazard a guess and say that most climbers who regularly boulder to train and have climbed for more than 10 years know how to go a bouldering wall and set themselves problems to fill the training session. It often seems surprising to climbers that I think it’s a critical skill to have.

But think about it, if you can’t set your own problems, you are dependent on either a bouldering wall with a steady supply of well set, numerous and regularly changed problems, or climbing with a bunch of mates who can set good problems and are willing to show you theirs all the time. That’s fine if you have that, but move house, lose a regular climbing partner who moves away, or get a lazy route setter at your local wall and all of a sudden your training drops a couple of gears to say the least. You aren’t in control of your own improvement basically. 

Even if your local wall does have excellent problems, there are some pitfalls. The biggest of these is local hero syndrome. You have the problems wired, you do them a lot and feel strong. But even though there are quite a few of them and they are on different angles, they are not varied enough. Your technique suffers. Your standard outside of the wall is not nearly as high. If you have any sway with your climbing wall management, persuade them to invite a rotation of different setters as often as possible. Some modern dedicated bouldering walls are now showing the way in this respect. Hopefully the dinosaurs will catch up. But even in boulder walls which have a steady flow of good problems, it’s a good idea to set your own of make variations on the set ones rather than just lap them all the time. This is about setting a nice ratio of hours spent climbing on moves you know well vs moves that are new to you. Too much of either extreme has consequences for technique.

If you have a wall which doesn’t have set problems, or set ones which are never changed. Setting your own problems is essential. Get into a good routine of setting the problem at the right standard for this part of the session (warm up, in a few tries, or whole session to climb the problem). Tweak moves that don’t work well. When you have the hold choice right, stick with it and refine the movement until you do it. If you can do it with others helping to choose the holds, even better. It adds variety and saves you from playing to your body size advantages (tall or short!).

All this means that when you have the inevitable sessions when noone else is around and the set problems are crap, you still can do some meaningful training and not end up bored, demotivated or just not any stronger than before.

Base training detail

I was just talking on my main blog about my own training over the past few weeks, building a base of strength and addressing various fitness/physiological issues at the start of the new year. Various folk have asked I elaborate a bit on this.

The normal progression of a new macrocycle is generally to begin with high volume, low amplitude work (with oscillations within smaller cycles) and gradually progress to higher intensity work with more rest as you get closer to when you need the fitness for your goal routes.

If you live in the northern UK then the dark months of Nov-Jan of are a good time to mark one training season’s end and begin again with a new period of foundation training. The tricky thing for most is resisting the temptation to rest and have a mini ‘peak’ because something (like Gritstone) happens to be also in condition right now. The decisions about the trade off between short term ‘peaks’ and long term progress are totally down to you. But the detail of that is another blog post…

If you have a ‘dead’ month or two and want to do a base training phase then usually keeping the intensity low and progressively increasing volume to a high level is the thing to do. The idea is to get your body used to a high training load. But increasing volume rather than intensity is less injurious than racking up intensity early on. It’s also a great (essential if you are advanced) time to address any strength deficits, niggling causes of recurrent injury or technical flaws you might have. For girls this might be a little weights or pull-ups to strengthen comparatively weak shoulders and arms. For guys this is likely to be rotator-cuff exercises and stretches to realign gorilla shoulders (I’m doing this 90 mins per day right now).

High volume means doing something every day, even at an intermediate level. But because intensity is low, rather than feeling wasted, you’ll probably feel really good. Certainly this phase for me leaves me feeling fit, refreshed and highly motivated for the training that follows in February and beyond.

Some typical components for a base phase:

-Bouldering with short rests on problems/angles you know you’re bad at. No getting addicted to one problem and repeatedly thrashing at it.
-Static or CRAC stretching of the muscles around the hip joint. For men especially hamstrings and hip adductors.
-Full stretching and exercise workout to correct shoulder instabilities/postural faults.
-Repeated drills of particular moves you are bad at e.g. Foot swaps.
-Fall training on lead, LOTS of it.
-Weights to address muscle weakness or injuries.

Thoughts from technique classes

Some themes that commonly emerge when coaching movement technique with climbers. Thanks to Rick Marland for the pics from Big Rock at the weekend.

The nature of climbing walls - look at the layout of the holds on modern climbing walls. In the main, setters tend to space the holds fairly evenly leading to the sort of position I’m in here, with limbs all at different levels. This makes quite pleasant continuous movement. But keep in mind that a lot of rock types have more patterned arrangements of holds; holds together in breaks with long reaches between and sometimes on good handholds but miniscule dinks for feet or vice versa. If you are training for this, watch out that your regular diet of climbing contains at least some movement like this.

Note also the three finger ‘pocket’ grip on the left hand. Climbers in their early twenties or younger don’t use it much, relying on the crimp much more. They haven’t had the pulley injuries yet - but they will! When we go to the campus board they can’t even hang on it openhanded. Older climbers use openhanded much more through necessity - too many pulley injuries. The serendipitous discovery is that once you get over the initial weakness, openhanded is a much stronger and less tiring grip on more than 50% of holds.

I’m pointing at the left foot in this picture. It needs to be pressed hard against the wall to complete the preparation to move the right hand. Although it doesn’t have a foothold to go to, it’s doing one of the most important jobs of all the limbs here. By pressing directly into (not downwards) the wall, it holds the upper body upright, preventing it falling outwards as the right hand reaches. 

Beginners miss this, experienced climbers do it intuitively but rarely with enough force or often enough and often the foot is systematically placed in the wrong spot. In my classes I show how the flagging foot should be placed various different types of move.

About to pull in hard with the left foot to get in position for the hand move. Climbers are generally too passive with the lower body. It’s natural to focus your aggression on the tiny handholds, because pulling really hard with our fingers is not a natural activity. It grabs our attention. Pulling hard with the feet in rock climbing is a learned skill. You have to force yourself to do at first.

Comparing rockshoes. The move in the second picture was impossible for some because they couldn’t get any weight on the foot on a small foothold. The reason was purely that the shoes were poorly fitting or worn out so the sole had no stiffness left. It’s easy in your normal climbing to convince yourself that this isn’t happening or it’s importance is small. But when we all try the same move and all the chaps who are not as strong can to the move easily it is an illuminating experience and climbers start talking about choosing a good pair of new shoes.

Basic technique - saving energy on trad

I’ve not posted on basic technique for a while, so here is something that my own summer of trad has been reminding me of recently. In trad climbing, the actual climbing bout is not just a little bit longer than sport or bouldering, it’s WAY longer. 20, 30 60 minutes instead of seconds up to a few minutes on many sport climbs.

The implications of this are very important. Most of us train for trad on short steep sport routes in climbing walls - this is fine - we need the endurance for the crux sprints even during long routes. But the movement is very different on trad.

The amount of time searching for handholds, footholds or gear, or resting takes up the vast majority of the total climbing time. Actually making moves is quite fleeting between long periods on the same holds. If you’ve ever edited a piece of video of a climber doing a long trad route you’ll readily appreciate this!

Let’s go through the pictures (BTW these are from our Triple 5 trip to St Kilda - nice route eh?):

A rare moment of actually making a move. Note bent arms, trunk close to the wall and shoulders pulled back in tension. On a climbing wall route, you move almost continously by comparison and your body tends to adopt this sort of position a lot - like maybe 60% plus of the time.

So what? You get into the habit of staying in this position. If you can’t find the hold or need to clip gear, you just freeze in this position and sort it out before continuing seconds later. Because the climbing bout is short, it doesn’t matter too much. In fact, the moves are probably hard enough that it’s actually more efficient not to set up a full resting position, just to go back to ‘progress’ mode a few seconds later. Next photo >>

In trad, not only will you have to make these stops between moves many times more than on a short climbing wall route, but they might be of much longer duration. So the climbing style has to change. You can always tell a very experienced trad climber when the adopt the position in the picture 2 almost immediately when they have to stop on a pitch. The hips are in, back arched and leaning back on straight arms. The maximum amount of weight is on the feet, but you can lean back a bit to scan the rock ahead more effectively. Next picture >>

The other common position in trad is when searching for footholds. In this case, the shoulders are in, drooping from straight arms and the bum is out to give a clear view of the  footholds.

If you haven’t been tradding for a while, you often have to remind yourself to take these resting positions immediately by conscious reminder and accentuating them, so you fall back into the habit. If you haven’t developed the technique at all, long steep trad pitches will feel a lot harder than they should. But even a delay of a few seconds in assuming these positions will really add up as you might use them 100s of times in a single long pitch.

The middle way of rock movement

Cubby throws in another drop knee, Glen Etive

A session with Mr Cuthbertson got me thinking of changes in movement fashions in climbing since I started. Where Cubby dotted his feet around miniscule smears on blankness, I tended to swing and heelhook. Cubby was obviously leading world trad climbing in the early 80’s, often on routes that were hard because they were completely suicidal. When he got into sport climbing at it’s birth at venues like Malham in the mid eighties, the fashion was for precision. Climbing like a gymnasitc performance, with effortless grace. I have this idea that even grimacing and grunting was not really ‘in’.

Fast forward, and watch a modern climbing film like Progression. Quite a difference - Ondra is racing up the rock before you can blink. The American boulderers are leaping with feet off and one hand as you reach the for the remote control to turn down all the yelling.

The popularity of bouldering and the influence of famous climbers has tended to make climbers move faster and more aggressively, with less foot moves per hand move. What does this mean? It adds efficiency because you get through the moves quicker and more momentum is used and more aggression is good for realising the maximum force you can produce. But it loses efficiency by getting less weight on your feet throughout the whole move or sequence and adding a lot of swings into disadvantageous positions that must be countered with muscle power.

You might have guessed the punchline already - somewhere in between is best. Race up the rock or leap wildy for holds if your technique is quick enough or you have shoulders like Daniel Woods. But if you are more average in your build, background and climbing ability, someone like Fred Nicole or the female climbers in the world cup competitions would be better movement role models.

One other thing… One positive trend in modern rock climbing is that crimping everything is much less in fashion than it used to be. Thats definitely a good thing for all out tendons.

Try harder?

Climbers I’ve coached are sometimes quite dramatically split on their ability to try hard. A lot of them can move well on the rock, have fingers of steel, but just can’t grit their teeth and fight their way through a crux.

A lot are at the opposite end of the scale, they take a deep breath every single time they step on the rock and get themselves ready to give everything all the way to the top/bitter end.

This has some good effects, acute and long term. The long term effects are that the delivery of a high level of muscular effort provides a stimulus to get strong. The acute effects are you sometimes hit a slap for a hold you otherwise wouldn't. But it’s not all good. 

Climbing isn’t sprinting. A continuous output of maximum workrate through the whole bout is the thing to do on the 100m track. In climbing, this causes as many problems as benefits. Application of force (effort) can only be done if your foot or hand is on the exact right spot of the right hold. And to get it there accurately you need to be quite calm.

So climbing hard is tough challenge of switching instantly between a mental state of calm decision making and feedback from the hands, feet and body position, and the explosive delivery of force during execution of the hard move.

Try hard, but only at the right moment.