Icing - for tendon strains and other injuries

A lot of climbers get in touch asking about using Lewis reaction icing on other injuries besides finger pullies. The goal of the treatment is to increase blood flow, which if done well it seems to do very effectively. I’ve written recently about using it on elbows with the aid of a nearby bathroom wash basin. But what about tendon strains?

It seems nearly all tendon strains in climbers happen in the ring finger when using an openhanded three or two finger pocket grip with the little finger not used. The pain is a highly unpleasant twang that runs variously through the finger, palm and forearm right back to the flexor muscle belly. Can you assist healing this whole structure with Lewis reaction icing? The short answer is I don’t know. I’ve not seen reports from other climbers of it’s successful use. The last time I had a flexor unit strain myself was about 9 years ago and I was doing Lewis icing on the same hand at the time for a separate pulley injury. I couldn’t really say how much the icing helped. Possibly not that much, evidenced by lack of responsiveness of the pain level to adhering or skipping the treatment and the fact that the pulley had healed in around three months and the flexor unit strain took over a year to heal.

The tendon seemed to respond more to frequent stretching and long gentle warm-ups. And it didn’t slow my climbing down to much by strict adherence to using four fingers only on holds, either crimping, or with four finger openhanded grip. I’m researching this in detail right now for my book and will hopefully have more on this soon.

Fingerboarding -timings

Several climbers have picked up on routines floating about the web advocating very short rest periods between sets on the fingerboard - like 6-10 seconds hanging with 3 seconds rest. They have compared it to notes in my book talking about 5-8 second hangs with more like a minute’s rest. Confused?

The regimens are very different because they are training completely different things. The former is an anaerobic endurance protocol. It replicates roughly what happens when climbing a route - hanging for some seconds on each move with only a few seconds rest as the hand reaches for the next hold. The rationale for using a fingerboard to do this type of endurance training is two-fold:

Because you can’t get to a real route or bouldering circuit to do this training more effectively. Or…

You already train a ton and need something that bit more intense to keep the body responsive.

Clearly both are a very specific and fairly rare set of circumstances. Most people can get to some real climbing, and they should do that instead because they need the technique element of the training every bit as much as the fitness. And very few are doing enough training to have squeezed everything out of the technique element and need a really intense stimulus to keep the body responding. If you do fit those above special cases, using the fingerboard in this way could be useful as a very intense way to build anaerobic endurance.

The majority of fingerboarders are doing it to gain strength. Gaining strength needs a high force stimulus - pulling at your maximum. If the rests are short, it’s not possible to sustain this - you get pumped and can’t pull your hardest. So that’s why you rest fully between sets and the sets are 90% plus of your maximum force.

What ‘body tension’ means

Since the explosion of bouldering, especially indoors, many climbers ask these days about how they should improve their body tension. However, the discussion is often limited because of a basic problem in actually defining what this performance quality is, and this leads climbers on the wrong path for training it.

Climbers frequently refer to body tension as a strength component. Most would agree on the objective - to be able to keep the feet on the holds more and to apply more force through the feet. The problem comes when you see this purely as down to body strength, which it’s not.

Body tension is the product largely of technique, but also of strength through the body. Some important (and trainable) parts of it are:

Climbing rhythm. That is not getting too extended with both arms high before moving the feet.

Aggression in the lower body. Many climbers are far too passive with the lower body, and aren’t using the strength they already have.

Placement of the foot - The big toe must be in a position to apply the strength, and it’s often not possible because the toes are not engaged and the heel is dropped low.

Turning of the trunk - Helps bring the tensioned hip close to the wall during a stretch and be more ‘over’ the foothold.

Momentum use. Momentum is essential to apply body tension from awkward positions where it’s hard to apply foot force. For example throwing the hips into a plane in which the foot can apply force during execution of a move.

You could go to a gym and train body strength for a decade and it would make little difference to your body tension in climbing if the above factors are not working for you already. The flip side is that many climbers have enough strength already to get a lot more body tension just by working on the technical elements.

How to go about this? Boulder voraciously on steep ground with limited footholds, in the presence of climbers who can show you the techniques involved in applying body tension. You’ll know you are making progress with the technique when you feel calves, hamstrings and core stabilisers in your trunk complaining from effort from single moves in steep bouldering. And if you’ve got this far, you’ll be training strength in these areas in a far more efficient way than you would achieve in a gym or elsewhere.

All that said, those who do some other whole body work such as Yoga or other activities that break up the imbalances that climbing demands on the body will be protective from injury by maintaining posture and strength across joints.

Potential problems with blobby climbing

Recent days coaching in big bouldering walls reminded me of a potential specificity problem of using these for training for outdoor hard problems and routes. I think a good proportion of those training indoors with a view to climbing harder outdoors get that grabbing big rounded sloper blobs the whole time creates a problem with missing out on gains on the fingery holds you find outdoors. But I’m finding that even the small holds that are about right now, tend to be quite big! I don’t mean big in the sense that they are easy to hold onto. I mean that even the really poor holds have quite a pronounced profile and are fairly pinchable. 

There are even more effects at play when it comes to the feet. Indoor holds are often very rounded and sloping on top. Using them develops a good skill for maintaining contact with the feet, using continuous and carefully directed force application to the foothold. But the technique required to use tiny but positive footholds (like you commonly find outdoors) is subtly different in the way strength is applied using the lower body, foot and toes. The pattern of foot movements outdoors is different too, and habitual indoor climbers often lack ability in foot swaps, matches etc..

All of this means that if you are using big modern climbing centres to train for outdoor climbing, make sure you get enough diet of positive but really quite small fingery holds by seeking them out diligently at the wall.

Rehab for Golfers elbow for climbers

Loads of you have been asking for more info on the rehab work I’ve been doing on my elbows of late. I’ve been really impressed and heartened by how effective it’s been. The first thing to say is that rehab only works inside the bigger picture of treating an injury, i.e. correcting the cause and taking other steps to lower the overall stress on the affected area. The other steps are changing many different things in your lifestyle and routine outside of the climbing, but also some of the tactics within the sport routine.

To handle all of this is much more than a blogpost obviously. Hence I’m back to working on what was meant to be my first book - about the whole picture of preventing and treating climbing injuries. In this post I’m sticking to just the headlines of the rehab work:

First off I’ve been doing hot/cold water immersion to increase blood flow. In the past I’ve used just cold on my hands which seem to handle this better and evoke the Lewis reaction faster. The elbows seem to respond slightly better to hot and cold alternately. I’m presuming for now this is because they are not body extremities by comparison and not geared up for profound and rapid vasodilation but have yet to investigate this. This is just my experience though, I’ve not yet trawled through more sources of evidence, and there seem to be individual differences at work too. So try both and follow what has the best effect. I’ve been doing it daily, twice a day when I have time, and for as long as I can manage. Really the more you do, the more the effect. But 30 minutes of 5 minutes alternating hot and cold water seems to have an excellent effect.

Next, the tendon strengthening work. I’ve been doing eccentric wrist curls which stimulate the tendon more strongly than the muscle tissue to grow. I started off using quite a heavy dumbell arrangement, but have since found it easier and more practical to simply use force from my other hand!

I’ve also been massaging the tendon and flexing it under no resistance. Finally, I stretch it probably 30 times or more during a rock climbing session (i.e practically between every route/circuit/problem).

I’m finding that the combined attack on the injury seems to be creating a strong enough reminder to kick it’s lazy ass into making a bit of progress. It’s still reluctant as hell though, and a week off due to illness has been enough for the elbow to let me know it’s missing the TLC during training!

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.

The book is here

Stock of my book has arrived with us and we are dispatching it now. Hope you enjoy the read and it helps get you to the next level in your climbing!

Some of you commented on my last post asking how long copies take to arrive in the US. We dispatch by Royal Mail (via airmail if it’s outside the UK). Their estimations for delivery times are here. They quote within 3 working days for Europe and within 5 for the US. It’s always an estimation of course. We are dispatching same day right up to Christmas.

9 out of 10 climbers is here soon

Our stock of my book 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes is printed and currently being shipped to us. We've just put it up for pre-order in the shop now. With any luck the DHL man might be at our door with a pallet as early as tomorrow and we can start dispatching. Thanks to all of you who pre-ordered already! I know some of you are after a copy in time for Christmas and so it should be in plenty of time. We are dispatching around 11.30am every day until Christmas, worldwide.

I’m very happy to see it out and I’m pleased with it as a representation of much of what I’ve learned in 16 years of study in climbing improvement. It’s always been a big satisfaction in my climbing life to take what I’ve learned from sport science and half my life observing, experimenting, and measuring every last thing that makes climbers climb better. I’m expecting that the ideas in it will polarise a few readers. It does attack some of the fashions in the sport of climbing, and the wider world of sport and improvement that are working in the wrong direction for improvement. Engrained habits die hard and folk don’t let go of them easily. So I’m quite direct. Expect some further discussion of the details of the book over on my climbing coach blog as the reactions come in.

Some more info on what’s contained in it is on it’s page in the shop and you can get an order in here now if you are keen to read it. For now though, here is the list of contents so you can get a feel for the information thats in it.

9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes: navigation through the maze of advice for the self-coached climber

Contents:

9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes

Barking up the wrong tree

Part 1 - Creatures of habit

Stuck on the basics

The first thing to understand

The first thing to change

Fail, and prepare to succeed

If only I knew now what I knew then

Too embarrassed to climb?

Is this grade a success or mediocre?

The first generation was the freest

Starting from scratch

The truth about famous climbers

Know your enemy - your tastes

Don’t get stuck

Creatures of habit

Part 2 - The big four: movement technique, finger strength, endurance, body mass

The biggest lesson from sport science

You cannot break the laws

How to learn technique

Record, replay, review

No one does drills, right?

The structure of climbing technique

The need for momentum

Types of momentum

The issue of height

Don’t just push with your feet!

Counterintuitive aspects of climbing technique

Precision really matters

Trying to make the hold bigger

Don’t overrate strength

Bouldering is number one

But I don’t like bouldering!

How to boulder to show off, or get strong

Board heads

A good bouldering session

Fingerboard rules

To crimp or not to crimp

Making sense of Haston and Oddo

Making sense of Ondra and Sharma shapes

How light do I need to be?

How to get light without pain?

Steps for losing and maintaining a lower weight for climbing

Who needs to pump iron to climb hard?

To the wiry

To the beefcake

To the tall

To the lucky little ones

When you really can blame your tools

Campus boards hurt almost everyone

Climbing is not a cardiovascular sport

Where is climbing endurance?

Endurance activities

Understanding fatigue symptoms

Endurance rules

Part 3 - Fear of falling: the real problem, probably…

The only way

Falling technique

Practice indoors

Practice on sport climbs

Building falls into your daily climbing diet

Practice on trad

When you just can’t fall off

Part 4 - The other big four: attitude, lifestyle, circumstances, tactics

I’m young, spoon-feed me!

Why mid-teens drop off the radar

“I can’t do that” he said, mistakenly

Too old to improve?

To find time, make your time work harder for you

Do you really want to be an athlete?

Tactics often trump training

What the warmup does

Tuning in and out

Managing the ‘psyche’ level

Do you really want it to be easy?

Be thick skinned at all times

Does flexibility really matter?

Part 5 - What’s next coach? Planning your improvement

Think curves, not lines

So jump off that plateau, if you can bear it

Regimes - how much can you handle?

Over-resting or under-recovering? 

A kid’s regime

A student’s regime

A family/career hustler

The wannabe pro

The confused and disillusioned

Same old routine, same old results

Cracking bad habits is tough

Rules of the training day

Rules of the training season

Annual rest and recuperation time

Summing up

Various commenters on my main blog have been curious for me to elaborate a little on some of the section titles that sparked their interest which I've done here.

Being injured

Those of you who read this blog will know I've been complaining about an elbow injury for about a year now. IÕve still got it (in fact it's recently got worse) after this long because I haven't worked hard enough to get rid of it. Until the past three weeks it's really been no problem. Being careful with how I take care of myself has meant it's not affected my climbing hardly at all. In fact it's been rather good for my climbing as injuries often are (by improving my technique and tactics for recovery). My climbing this year has been in a long phase of development, a mix of trying extremely hard projects at around the 9a+ (or equivalent) level and doing easier routes quickly such as Present Tense (E9). Sadly though, my hope that the injury would eventually see itself off hasn't materialised. And now that the rest of my body is ready to step up my level of training again, I'm finding the injured tendon is not.

So It's time to step up the rehab and get serious. I'm fed up with this thing in the background all the time. The first time I got a finger injury at age 16, I was terrified of it. I was terrified to do anything to it in case I made it worse and permanently damaged it. This was a good thing because it forced me to put the hours into educating myself about what to do with it. After four months of experimentation, I was no longer scared of the injured tendon. So I worked it harder and harder (with rehab) and recovered.

Right now, I have the same situation with my elbow problem. I don't have direct experience of applying an aggressive rehab schedule to the tissue, so it's kind of scary. I don't want to get it wrong. Natural I suppose. It always seems to take being forced into action to overcome this. So here I am on a climbing trip, feeling strong but injured too. So I simply need to get over it. The last few days of doing this and jumping into a dedicated program of activities has been superb. I've lost my fear of this tendon and It's really responding to the work much faster than I expected it to. Great!

It's hard to swallow, but return from injury is often the best period for athletes in general. Long spells of training uninterrupted by injury often result in staleness and plateau. But injury forces you to either fail, or respond by looking deep into the technique and training to tease out errors and to understand that the body needs exceptional care if it is to sustain exceptional performance.

Lessons so far:

My previous regime of training by bouldering outdoors almost exclusively had it's limitations for pure strength, but really protected me from injury through it's variety of rock angles. I've gone too much the other way with repetitive steep bouldering on flat overhanging panels. This is still what I need to get stronger still, but mixed up with other things more than I have been.

My body might be better suited to 9a+ or harder if it was a bit lighter. Whether that brings other problems of it's own is another matter.

To absorb more training than now, I'll need to pay better attention to the quality of recovery - 70+ average hours per week working and resultant poor quality sleep has proved to have a cost.

Some other manual work will have to be done with more care so it doesn't contribute to the overall training load on particular parts of the body.

My own board- notes after 6 months

Many of you have emailed or commented asking me to talk a bit more about my board and  the structure of my sessions. The short version is that I have been using it most evenings after work and I’ve made really good strength gains in the past 5 months or so. I’ve also been almost constant on the edge of getting injured - climbing in there is pretty damn intense. I’m used to training for several hours at a climbing wall, so I’m conditioned to keep going. But 1 hour on my board equals about 2 in a climbing wall and 4 outdoors. I just completed a couple of projects on it I’d been trying for about 4 months which are in the wee youtube above.

It’s really kept me going since I’ve been writing the book. Btw progress with that is going great guns with 12 hours a day working on it. Right now it’s mid way through being edited. I’ll keep you posted how it goes...

I use the board as much as my body allows. At times I can get away with two 90-minute sessions on it a day for about a week. But the next week I might only manage day on, day off. I do bouldering, endurance circuits and dry tooling on it. The main difference I’ve found to past training is that it’s much more intense on my board and I can do less hours training before I feel exhausted or develop injury niggles. On a climbing wall 45 degree board I’d normally expect to boulder for 2.5-3 hours straight with rests only about a minute between trying moves or a couple of minutes if trying a longer link. But on my board I can only manage 1.5 hours before power fades. The main reason is training alone so rests are shorter; 30 secs for working moves or maybe 90 secs between link attempts. The 4-6 move problems seem to be excellent for building strength and I tend to make them totally sustained which really tests body tension to link between successive hard moves.

The main problem I’m having right now is that I’m developing a lot of injury niggles after nearly a month of using it most days. I can see it’s going to be essential to break it up regularly with other venues to avoid getting injured.

The best things I found that really helped the board be more effective were:

Painting the board and generally making the room a little less of a dingy, grim place to spend time - I look forward to the session much more! (NB: the flowery wallpaper was put up by the previous owner of the house!)

Very carefully choosing fingery but skin friendly holds. My favourite holds are Dream Holds Dumby edges and pinches (review on the way), Entreprises Big Bangs, Old school bendcrete selection, my own wood edges and pinches and Dream Holds Torridonian Sandstones.

Not putting too many footholds on the first metre of the board, just an adequate selection, and all tiny.

A fan for keeping the temperature right and cooling down soft fingertips.