Potential vs Track Record

What happens if you focus all your energy on getting strong and putting hours in at the climbing wall?

People say “Wow, that guy/girl has so much potential. They are so strong, they could do something really hard”

What happens if you balance your energy between training and fine tuning your performance tactics and risk losing training time by staying out there and finishing projects or trying new things?

People say “Wow that guy/girl has done so many hard routes, but they aren’t as strong as I expected them to be.”

If you are the guy with the awesome track record, it’s a psychologically difficult place to be. Everyone is constantly surprised by how much you’ve achieved on the strength you have. Why? Because the climbing world is full of wall rats who are super strong but too scared to put their neck on the line and risk failure by getting out there and actually trying a hard route. They will compare you to this norm and will never understand how you did it. So many strong climbers have achieved so little, because they are too scared, and like the easy position of being the guy with the potential.

Who do you want to be? The guy with potential, or the guy who does a lot of hard routes?

Energy - cycles

You may have noticed that the posting frequency on this blog has gone down recently. Sure, it's partly because I had some other work that needed to get done (I've had some major changes in my life to adjust to recently). But partly because I needed the time to think, and not write about my ideas for a wee while. I've made a bit of progress in this area, and you'll here more on this blog when I'm finished the procress.

This idea of cycles is pretty important in many areas of life - work, relationhips, art and, yes, training for sport. One of the main ways it shows it's face in climbing is that we are trying to perfrom at our best all the time - year round. Of course it doesn't work, but when it doesn't we get mad and try to pull harder and get even more riled. The reult is generally apathy, overtraining related injury, or both.

The filp side is that if we have a brief respite following one of these periods of reduced performance and frustration induced hard effort/training, there is often a major jump in performance. In sports sicence this process is called tapering.

Tapering is part of a theory of sport science called periodisation. The idea is that we focus on different training tasks is sequence to prevent fatique accumulating to injury and plateau inducing levels. Once have worked ourselves hard in each area, we reduce the training volume in all areas to give the body a chance to refresh itself completely. The result - a performance leap. Most people who apply the concept (and that includes most books on training for climbing) limit its use to the first part (varying the work during training) and ignore the second (using tapering to switch between training and performance modes, or even recognising the distinction at all!).

In summary

• Trying to perform all the time, and neglecting to give yourself time to prepare for the performance is a route to failure.
• Allow for the fact your body and mind work in cycles - don't worry when you feel stuck in a rut of training or atempting to understand a concept. Performance is inevitably depressed during training. Keep grappling with it to stimulate the body/mind to adapt. When the signs of overtraining appear, taper and reap the rewards of your efforts.

'OK Dave, I get that... next question: how do I distinguish between the healthy fatique and frustration of a good training period, and the downward spiral of overtraining and apathy, and hence decide the right moment to stop training and start performing, or switch training focus?'

Answer - It's not easy! years of experience or a coach can help. Sometimes, even asking a friend can help -anything to get a more objective reflection. There are many clues you can use yourself though - I'll be writing more about these soon.

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.

Eccentric training notes

Phil just emailed to ask:

“Dave,
I have been reading about DOMS and eccentric loading being a cause, which lead me to look up eccentric exercises (EE). Being a triathlete and climber I was mostly interested in exercises for the legs, but it got me thinking if there was a good case for climbers to find arm exercises. Clearly with down-climbing the muscles are being loaded eccentrically, but also I can envisage "normal" climbing and traversing will have an eccentric element too. Do you have some EEs that you do? Do you think that climbers could train eccentrically to reduce DOMS on trips, and to allow better control when their muscles are working in this way?”

DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) is indeed provoked more intensely with eccentric exercise than concentric. It’s other main cause is simply using the muscles at a level they haven’t been used to for a while. Which is a major bummer for those getting off the couch and starting to exercise or train – the first few sessions are pure hell!

Although the picture is not entirely clear and depends very much on the sport, training using a combination of eccentric and concentric contractions returns the biggest strength gains. Normal climbing has a reasonable eccentric component already (I’m speaking about the arms here). And those who have weak arms and need supplement their climbing with some weight training should do some eccentric work. Often this simply involves dropping back down in control after doing a pull-up! Of course any type of supplementary training with weights for the arms and body are just that – supplementary. Too many climbers get carried away here.

For me personally, I simply boulder for gaining body strength, supplemented by a very little bar training at certain times of year. The major issue in climbing is avoidance of overdevelopment of muscle, and also the importance of technique. Training body strength entirely ‘on the wall’ makes sense for most climbers because you are learning technique and neuromuscular coordination (an underrated component of muscle strength!!!) at the same time. Weights are an extremely blunt instrument which often have undesirable side effects for coordination, technique and over development of unnecessary muscle tissue. In some other sports not so dependent on body mass, such as sprint running, the overdevelopment of muscle might not be such a concern.

So in summary – normal climbing has an eccentric component anyway. For those few needing supplementary weight training, an eccentric component is certainly important. Just remember to reverse the contraction – drop down from pull-ups etc…

Dieting - eating more with less calories - how to manage it

Climbers who are trying to lower their weight to climb better are rightly always on the lookout or strategies that actually work to make the process any more achievable. The appetite is a powerful adversary against will to get to a low body fat percentage, and for most they’ll never win the battle. A lot of the weapons in the dieters armoury focus on the fat and carbohydrate composition of food and how best to manipulate total calorie intake.

Some new research in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month has underlined the fact that there is another dimension to winning over appetite; the calorie density of food. Basically, there are some foods that are more calorie dense, meaning that you end up eating a lot of calories before you feel full. Foods that have a high water content allow you to eat what feels and looks like a lot of volume, making you feel full with less calorie intake than ‘drier’ food. Fruit and vegetables are obvious foods with high water content. I’ll make up some more ideas for ‘calorie poor’ foods soon.

This study found that a group of volunteers eating foods higher in water and lower in calorie density lost more weight than another group eating normally, and that they ate 25 percent more food (by weight) at the same time as feeling less hungry.

In practice – you’d have to eat about 4 apples to get the equivalent calories of one Snickers bar. I know which would make me feel more full!

coachability

I was reading an interesting blog post by Seth about ‘coachability’. Now, most of you out there will never take that step and take formal advice from a climbing coach (bummer eh!) so you may think that this might not apply to you. But almost all of you are self –coaches of varying degrees of commitment (and hey you are reading this blog so you are coaching yourself right now). So it’s good to be aware of how coachable you are.

Seth: “A friend is wrestling with his ability to be coached. For the coachable, "Turn right at the light" is seen as a helpful suggestion for someone lost in a strange town... the advice goes in, is considered and then acted upon. For someone wrestling with coaching, though, it's like surgery. It's painful, it has side effects and it might lead to a bad reaction…”

I’ve met a lot of climbers who are very resistant to their own coaching. As Seth points out, the symptoms of un-coachability include challenging the credentials of the coach, reminding yourself of previous errors or flaws in the coach (substitute “coaching information” if you like), inventing reasons why the coaching does not apply to you or that you are being hard done by and even resisting the information just because of the source it came from.

It’s really hard to steer a course through the sea of crap advice out there by yourself. But the answer is not to put up walls to shut out questionable or unusual information. Unfortunately if you choose to be a self coach, you have to swallow whatever coaching comes your way and try your best to digest and analyse wherever possible. It’s a rocky road of constantly changing realities, practices and perspectives.

Such is life.

Finger injury treatment videocast

[UPDATE] The video I made about healing finger pulley injuries is a bit out of date now and the knowledge has moved on a bit. I have almost finished my climbing injuries book 'Rock 'til you drop'. In that I've written a very detailed discussion on everything to do with pulley injuries. It'll be out soonish.

This is my first ever videocast! In it I talk about the most effective treatment there is for speeding healing of finger pulley injuries; what to do, why it helps and how often to do it. Enjoy!

It’s a bit rough and ready cos it’s my first one and I shot it by ditting my digi camera on a table and did it in one take, but I hope it was OK? I’m going to do these regularly so post some comments with your requests on what you’d like me to talk about. Of course I'll post all my new videocasts on this blog but you can subscribe to my videocast feed here

Energie Conference Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weight loss - some numbers to educate the process

trying a project in October 2006

7 months later, 7 pounds lighter, project sent…

Over the summer I’ll be writing some essays on weight and climbing performance, but for now, here is a quick hit. The problem for many climbers is deciding whether it’s a good idea to lose weight at all. For sure it influences performance, but unless your technique is good, you might not even notice the difference if you lose a few pounds! The climbers who will benefit most from lowering their body weight are a) those who are well trained and have excellent technique but have a body fat percentage over 10% for men or more for women (who carry more gender specific fat), and b) any climbers who have are carrying some significant fat (i.e. a spare tyre).

But if you have already decided that losing a few pounds is a good idea an you are going for it. Here are a couple of handy points:

You can work out a very rough estimate of the amount of calories you need to function. Try working out the following equation. Note this applies only to adults.

Women:655 + (4.3 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)
Men:66 + (6.3 x weight in pounds) + (12.9 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)

Once you have done this, add 20% to the figure if you are sedentary, 30% if you do some light activity, 40% if you do some exercise most days, and 50% if you train pretty hard. This should give an estimate of how many calories you need to eat each day.

One pound of body fat is roughly equivalent to 3500 calories (kcal), so if you under-fuel by 500 calories per day, you should lose about a pound per week (with many assumptions about hormonal and other conditions!). Of course you can achieve the underfuelling either by using more calories, taking in less, or both.

Aggressive dieting is counterproductive, causing your metabolic system to start working against you by making you feel too tired to train hard and increasing appetite and adipose (fat) deposition at any opportunity.

Check out the photos above. I just lost some weight myself and it had a very positive effect on my climbing – but I have 13 years of hard technique training behind me to milk every drop of the power-weight ratio change.

Weight loss might be a red herring in certain situations for getting better at climbing in certain situations. In other situations in might be a killer advantage. Get a coach or a lot of education so you can make a good decision which it is for you. But if you decide it’s a good plan, it sometimes helps to put some numbers on things to get good data to work with.

Research digest - Sleep and risk decisions

A new study published in the journal ‘Sleep’ has demonstrated that we tend to take riskier options in decision making in conditions of sleep deprivation. This has obvious relevance to climbers in the area of trad climbing and mountaineering. In fact if the effect size of sleep deprivation on risk taking behaviour is large then it’s a wonder our best alpinists are still with us! But it also has strong relevance in avoiding injury too. Knowing when to let go or adjust position in a high risk body position or move is critical for avoiding injuries in climbing. It’s no accident that climbers with poor footwork or a sloppy ‘rushed’ approach always complain the most about tweaks and soft tissue injuries, or indeed have climbing accidents.

The study found that the part of the brain associated with anticipation of reward becomes selectively more active with lack of sleep, slewing our judgements towards more risky options and away from concern for possible negative consequences.

So we can add one more reason to the list of reasons to get plenty of sleep if you want to improve at climbing and avoid injury.

This news came from Science Daily