Influences - It can go either way actually

In my recent coachwise articles published in Scottish Mountaineer (and online here) I’ve talked a lot about the power of influences on your training, in terms of training choices, discipline, goal setting and level of effort.

My message here in a nutshell was that if you are surrounded by the psyched, the skilled and the hard working, you are more likely to be those things too.

Just listening to a section in Evan’s podcast about business (it’s episode 28th May if you want to download it from the Bottom Line site) reminded me not only of the strength of this effect, but also a good decision of the flip side - bad influences.

Evan’s guests were discussing positivity of attitude in general. The perspectives were generally that positivity is really good as an attribute and an influence. But problems raised were firstly that positivity must be bound by realism, and secondly that disappointments from failures can be hard to cope with sometimes.

Taking the realism thing first - This is where positivity coming from both inside yourself, and from outside sources is crucial to work within the bounds of reality. The kind of positivity that you see in talented youngsters spurred on by positive influences with a bias (friends and especially parents) often get ahead of themselves and later suffer big motivational setbacks following failures.

Positive outside influences with no bias are like gold dust. These sources tend to be encouraging by example, not just by positive reinforcement of you. They also solve the second problem of learning that it’s ok to fail, again and again, that it’s part of sporting or any success, and it’s possible to shrug it off and respond in the right way.

But talking of realism, I think it’s fair enough to say that negative influences will almost always outnumber positive for most people, in most communities. Of course the battle is to  hold the negative at arms length where possible, and soak up as much of the positive as you can. But sometimes it can actually seem like an advantage to operate in relative isolation.

I have noticed, living away from a substantial city-based climbing scene for a couple of years, and absorbing most of my media through highly customizable (web based) sources, that I have more power to reach positive (if distant) influences in my climbing, while being insulated from the many negative influences out there. I think it’s been good for my climbing.

Evan’s guests talked about a major advantage for young business people was sometimes ignorance of all the hurdles ahead. There is some truth in this.

There is much to this subject - the influences we have from other people, our ability to exercise self control, our exposure and sensitivity to feedback of different kinds as we train for our sport. All are important and affect our ability to get the most out of ourselves.

Just a thought as I listed to Evan’s (excellent) podcast while painting some doors late at night...

New series of climbing improvement articles

I have been working on a series of introductory articles for the Mountaineering Council of Scotland’s magazine and site. They deal with general concepts of improvement in climbing so hopefully they will be thought provoking for beginners and those who’ve been climbing for many years. I’ve just finished the second one, with more on the way soon. The articles are here.

Brendan raised an interesting point after reading the section ‘The truth about famous climbers’. In this I’m talking about the dynamics of the returns you get from effort put in. It turns out, it’s not as simple as you might think. This is his point:

Hi Dave,

cheers for writing those excellent MCoS training articles, I wish they'd be available a few years ago when I started climbing, would have saved me loads of wasted effort.

 

I have a query - you say in the last section about top climbers that they go the extra move/problem/route each time.

However, I've heard a lot of people at the wall recently say you should 'finish strong', I suppose so that you shouldn't keep going after you're too tired to give your all as it will take longer to recover for the next session.

How does this resolve with your advice in your article? I suppose it depends on how soon your next session is going to be?

It’s a good point! And it doesn’t have a totally simple answer.

What I’m trying to put across in my article is that a little extra effort can often yield a lot of extra return by taking you over the threshold between enough to maintain the same level and stimulating the body to improve. This is an issue of training volume. The objective is to achieve the highest possible training volume that is sustainable over time (i.e. You can recover mostly from, in time for the next session).

Most climbers shouldn’t concern themselves with ‘stopping strong’ because they weren’t trying hard enough in the first place, or they have days of rest in between sessions. 

Another smaller proportion of climbers might have problems with being fresh enough for the next session, but the problem is not with training too hard, it’s with not recovering hard enough! i.e. They are too stressed, don’t eat well, sleep enough or add more things to recover from like a night on the sauce.

An even smaller proportion of climbers will need to take care not to overdo it on each session because they are really going for it with both their effort level and volume and taking care over their recovery as well as training. What should they do?

It’s a fine balance to tread between injury and improvement. Stopping strong will mean different things to different climbers. In general you should train as hard as you can and feel worked after your sessions. There is a subtle but perfectly tangible line turning point in the session when quality attempts on climbs becomes a rapidly declining thrashing session. When the elbows come out on the first moves and your hands melt off jugs that were easy to hang an hour ago, time to go home, eat a nice meal and sleep well. Come back tomorrow with the pedal on the floor again.

side note: the physiology of this is about using up the 'fuel tank' of muscle glycogen. It happens that recovery of the glycogen store takes much longer if the store is completely exhausted. You know this has happened when you are slapping your way up F6a gasping, when you were fine on F7b an hour before. So overall training load is higher if you stop just before you drain the tank altogether.

New research published on finger endurance

My undergraduate research project investigating determinants of finger endurance in trained climbers was recently published in the Journal of Sport Sciences. You can see the details here or access the full paper if you have access to the scientific journals through an academic or other institution. A huge thanks to Stan Grant for encouraging me to keep going with the log preparation of the manuscript for submission and to everyone that worked with me on the paper and volunteered for the research itself.

We observed that climbers were not dramatically better at tolerating occlusive isometric contractions of the finger flexors (as you get in difficult climbing), but were surprisingly good at sustaining long periods of intermittent high force isometric contractions compared to untrained people. This could be down to an ability to perfuse the muscles very rapidly and recover from the contractions while reaching for the next hold. Not surprisingly, we also observed yet another confirmation that pure finger strength, and especially finger strength to weight ratio was a strong predictor of climbing level.

The intermittent isometric muscle contractions of our fingers in climbing are not that common in strength and endurance dependent sports, and there is still much to be learned about the exact causes of failure to maintain force output and sequence of chemical events that happen deep in the exercising muscle during fatigue. 

Big up to anyone out there willing to take up this mantle and help us to learn more about the physiological limitations in climbing. The continued dramatic rises in the level of ability of the worlds top climbers really shows that we are nowhere yet, either with our understanding, or what could be done with it.

Davemacleod.com new stuff

Some of you will know that I recently wrote an e-book called ‘How to Climb Hard Trad’. I spent a long time on it trying to explain clearly the mental, physical and practical tactics you can employ to climb harder trad routes, whatever your level. Its got detailed sections on how to be bold, how to climb safely, even when really close to your limit on trad climbs and how to tip the scales much further in your favour than most climbers know they can.

Initially I was giving copies away with the Committed DVD. But I’ve just extended the offer to include the e-book free with any DVD or book purchases from my webshop. I’ve just added King Lines and Psyche DVDs and the new Stone Play book to the shop so there are more titles to choose from. Enjoy.

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.

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.

Elbow injury - lessons from tennis

Here is an interesting wee link to some summary data about rehab of Tennis Elbow on the Sports Physiotherapy For All website. Tennis elbow in climbers is pretty rare (I think, but there is no data on it!), but does sometimes happen. Where it does happen I suspect its most likely caused by a discrete event such as a sudden tear, or due to a very unusual climbing technique. The main reason I posted about the link was to draw attention to the comments about late stage rehab of this type of injury. In climbers this will more likely be medial epicondylitis or problems with brachioradialis, although it applies to any sports injury. The article stresses the importance of good technique and relying less on strength and making more fluid and efficient movements. This is most often the underlying cause of overuse injury in the first place, and the reason why certain people are plagued with repeated injury of the same type. In climbing, key risk factors for finger and eblow injuries are probably poor footwork, a 'rushed' climbing pace and a habit of locking off and pulling up to initiate moves rather than initiating movements with your feet. Of course, there are risk factors in the areas of training practice, nutrition and lifestyle and genetics as well, but these may be less significant that movement technique.

So, the message is clear - to prevent injury occuring or recurring, look at your movement technique.

OCC updates

As you can see I've rearranged the OCC site a little. I've added article categories so you can find the articles you are looking for more easily.

Blogger have just launched the new version and I switched over so I could arrange the site better. It's still in beta so please let me know of any bugs or missing things you find (and of course any feedback would be great). You can contact me here

speedlinking Sept 6th - pro-tips videos

Freakclimbing has three interesting pro-tips videos with Jared Roth, Lauren Lee and Malcolm Smith.

The first two are not hugely in depth from a training point of view but still interesting watching. Lauren Lee talks about how body strength was a limitation she's worked on. We see her doing some basic core exercises and talking about targeting steep and burly bouldering, rather than avoiding it like many do! This type of strength will inevitably be a limitation for female climbers, unless you do something about it. It's nice to see her putting her money where her mouth is by grunting through some V9 roofs on the clip.

Malcolm is talking about the benefit of working front-on body positions and big moves to the side during training. I emphasize the during training part. This is not a formula for technique, where twisting and Egyptians are essential to get the most from the feet. What I think Malcolm is saying is that its worth working on front-on moves in training (he demonstrates some system style board problems in the clip) so that when you do come across a move outside where there is no option but twist, that strength is there.

This is always the danger with spending a large proportion of your time training on boards - you can start to see all climbing through the lens of what you do on your training board and a broad range of techniques (especially clever footwork) gets neglected and you forget to use it. A balance between the two extremes is needed.

The clips are here.

davemacleod.com updates - coaching services

I've updated the coaching section of my main site to give you more details about whats included in my climbing coaching services and the different levels on offer. Please let me know if there are any questions left unanswered when you look through these! You can find all the details here.

I've also added a shop page where you can find lists of books on training for climbing by Amazon and buy climbing DVD's, including pre-orders for the E11 film (coming out late October).

Training for climbing books

Amazon have just set up a feature for folk who run websites to make up a page in Amazon with books relevant to their readers. I've set one up here with books about training for climbing (theres a link on the sidebar too). So I hope you find it useful to see whats out there - there are a lot of titles to choose from these days! Talking of which I'm going to try to post reviews of as many of them as I can in the coming weeks to help you choose one. The difference in quality between the best and worst is huge! My favourite is still the old school Goddard and Neumann book, even though a couple of parts are slightly dated from a sport science point of view. The Amazon Astore feature is still in beta at the moment and they need to improve it a bit, but hopefully soon they'll allow us to customise the book catergories better and populate lists better so the service is more useful for you.

Climbing training web crawl

I've just spent way too long in front of the screen crawling the web for the best online sources of information of training for climbing. So the link list is looking a little better now and has enough for anyone to get started learning about training techniques for climbing. My experience of searching the web for these resources showed me that there are a few excellent resources (such as Eric Horst's sites) but that is set amongst much poor writing and questionable advice. What you see on the links list is probably only 20% of what is out there as much of it doesn't really come up to scientific standard. My aim with this blog is to keep an extremely high standard of information, so links I include are preferably written by authors with a background in contributing to science in the field or top level climbing. So as I build up the links over time it will be a 'one stop' resource of trustworthy and carefully edited links.

I also ran many searches and identified many gaps in written guidance on the web, especially in our specialisms here in the UK; trad and winter climbing. So they will be my priorities over the coming weeks as I add more articles to davemacleod.com articles page. I'll also be doing some much needed interviews with well known coaches and climbers and hopefully learning some of their secrets.

If you know of any good links, or want to comment or request specific links or information, email me (my email is the first link). This is your service - use it to get better at climbing.

Tactics - 'Free' improvement

Tactics are too often forgotten in our quest to get good at our climbing. A climber once asked me if he should train to lock off on one arm for several minutes to prepare for placing gear on a steep grade IX in the Cairngorms. That would be one way, sure (taking several years of effort no doubt). But another would be to learn to place the gear in 30 seconds rather than 5 minutes. Tactics.

Its good to be focused on getting strong an fit, but not good to focus on it at the expense of methods to sidestep the need to get strong and fit. I'll be adding many sources of advice on tactics over the coming weeks to the links section. To Kick off, check out Andy Kirkpatrick's site

www.psychovertical.com

Andy is a walking encyclopedia of clever tactics and trick to get the most out of your gear and systems while climbing. Many of these come from alpinism, but can be applied to any type of climbing.

davemacleod.com now running

www.davemacleod.com

davemacleod.com is up and running now. Apart from information and images of my own climbing, you can find articles about training for climbing, preventing and dealing with injury, details of my climbing coaching services and upcoming lectures.

Introducing the Online Climbing Coach blog

My name is Dave MacLeod, I am a sport scientist, climbing coach and pro climber based in Glasgow, Scotland. You can find out more about me at my website. I decided to start this blog to share all the information and experience I carry around in my head and read about all the time, providing a good resource of advice about training for climbing. I'll be dissecting the latest research, analysing and reporting news and other people's work on the subject and providing links to good sources of information elsewhere.

I originally studied sport science to help me coach myself and take my climbing as far as it could go. My study helped me so much and I wan't to make it easier for others climbers to access the same knowledge and apply it.

I'm sure I'm going to enjoy this blog. I hope you do to and it helps you climb better and harder!

Dave Macleod