Art of Prevention
Our mission is to decrease the prevalence of preventable injuries and athletes therein optimizing performance by decreasing the time that our athletes spend benched due to injury. We are going to distill information and practices from experts in the field of injury prevention. High level coaches and top performing athletes. We believe this information should be accessible to everyone so that we can reduce the rates of preventable injuries.
Art of Prevention
Climbing Stronger: Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement with Tyler Nelson
Can proper training truly prevent climbing injuries and boost your performance? Join us for an enlightening discussion with Tyler Nelson, a leading expert in climbing performance and injury prevention, who shares his fascinating journey from wrestling and football to becoming a central figure in the climbing community. Tyler's unique blend of personal climbing experiences and his academic background in chiropractic and sports science offers a wealth of knowledge. We explore how his passion for rock climbing and a significant finger injury sparked innovative approaches to training and rehabilitation.
Discover why climbers often face unique challenges compared to other athletes and learn how to avoid common training mistakes that lead to injuries. Tyler breaks down the essentials of finger strength training, emphasizing the need for precise dosing to prevent overexertion. He introduces the concept of the "Goldilocks zone" to highlight the importance of balanced training intensity. You'll also hear about advanced tools like strain gauges and digital readouts that can revolutionize your training regime, providing accurate measurements of force and endurance.
We also delve into practical strategies for effective pocket and hand training, the benefits of Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) training, and the significance of balanced nutrition and recovery. Tyler’s expertise shines through as he shares programming strategies for post-injury rehabilitation and comprehensive strength training routines that can help climbers of all levels. Whether you're recovering from an injury or looking to enhance your climbing performance, this episode is packed with actionable insights and expert guidance to help you climb stronger and safer.
You can find Tyler on Instagram @C4hp
as well as on his website: https://www.camp4humanperformance.com/
and on patreon:
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Hello everyone and welcome to yet another episode of the Art of Prevention podcast, and again I have a very special, amazing guest. Today, my guest is Tyler Nelson. So Tyler has been on a ton of different podcasts talking about climbing performance, climbing training, as well as climbing injuries.
Speaker 1:You've got a background, tyler, as a climber for a really long time, although you were a football player for a little bit of time as well. If I'm not mistaken, your education includes a doctoral degree in chiropractic and then also a master's degree in sports science and rehabilitation. You were also a faculty professor at a school teaching physiology or anatomy and physiology, and then, since then, you've worked with literally thousands of climbers around the world rehabbing, climbing specific injuries, and that's really not hyperbole. I mean, you've tracked your data and stuff and it's literally over. Like thousands of climbers, you also are teaching a ton, so you teach a variety of courses, both in person as well as remote, and you have a bunch of recorded lectures, which are also really good, and these include courses to climbers, coaches and clinicians. So, tyler, thank you so much for sitting down with me today, and my first question is what initially sparked your interest in climbing and then also treating rock climbers?
Speaker 2:first of all, thanks for having me and the nice intro.
Speaker 2:I think just growing up in utah driving through the canyons for sporting events or with my dad going doing other things, I would see like little ants on the wall and I like grew up my probably my best sport growing up was wrestling.
Speaker 2:Like I was a wrestler up until I was in like 11th grade, like like greco-roman style wrestling and so like I always had, and just based on my like anatomy and mechanics, I have good leverage for like strength, so I've always been like very strong in the upper body.
Speaker 2:And then seeing rock climbers on the wall, I would always kind of be intrigued by that and be'd be like that looks cool, I would be interested in that, and so it wasn't until I moved to college and I like was kind of totally over the team sport thing and going to practice my whole life and just like full heartedly just kind of stopped that and then met some friends that were mountaineers and into outdoor stuff and took Knowles courses and I was like like just attached myself to these kids and then just started hanging out with those kids pretty much and you kind of started out with more of the adventure like big wall type climbing right yeah, so my initial like friends that were into climbing were into trad climbing and so when I moved back to I lived in colorado for a couple years in crestedrested Butte, went to school at Western States in undergrad and then worked at the Alpinist, which is like a cool gear shop there, and then, just like, bought a pair of climbing shoes and started climbing there and met people there that were climbers.
Speaker 2:And then when I moved to Salt Lake my friends that I met were trad climbers for sure.
Speaker 1:I never knew you went to Western. I actually went to Adams State, so we climbers for sure I I never knew you went to western, I actually went to adam's state.
Speaker 2:So we're we're enemies now I guess, yeah, I don't even know adam's state. I wasn't, I'm not, I'm never, I've never been that much of an alum junkie, I guess I'm not really either, but I was a.
Speaker 1:I was a runner in college, um, hence why I got injured all the time, uh, but in the running community, that's like a, that's like a big old rivalry right there, adams and Western, to the point where, whenever that comes up, it's just like a thing, it's just like a habit, like a thought process that comes on. Now you've had some injuries with climbing before right and specifically, you had a finger injury a couple years ago. I mean, I follow your Instagram I recommend everybody to follow your Instagram honestly but you had a finger-related injury, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I ruptured a pulley probably four or five years ago.
Speaker 1:It's been a while now and since then, and especially over the last couple of years, you've really been quite innovative in the realm of climbing training and climbing-specific training specifically around the fingers training and climbing specific training specifically around the fingers, like. Was that one of the major like impetus for you looking into a deep dive into the physiology of training for climbing, or was it some other stuff that came up?
Speaker 2:no like in when I did my master's degree I was able to like hang out with brian man, who was at the time the head strength conditioning coach at Mizzou and like he's just like one of the one of the smarter guys on the strength conditioning side of just like sports science application, so was very interested in that realm because I it's kind of weird, my wife always laughs at me because I went to chiropractic school out of like practicality, not because I really wanted to like have a chiropractic clinic Like I wanted the education which at that for me it was like made sense monetarily.
Speaker 2:And then as a healthcare provider in Utah I just get a better scope of practice than a physical therapist would, and so. But I kind of and I knew that the science behind chiropractic stuff is kind of like kind of weird and sketchy and low quality whatever. So I kind of attached myself to the strength conditioning literature and so like I really was just focused there as terms of uh, in terms of like a rehab strategy, and then I would say like for me the biggest impetus to like for my career in graduate school was like anatomy. Like I was a total geek for anatomy and like ace those classes and then became a tutor as soon as I could and tutored for the entire duration of my four years at Logan, or my rest of my three years, and that has been just like paid massive dividends in terms of you know how I apply my thought process to climbing injuries and rehabilitation stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, still the best anatomy lab that I've ever seen personally, the one at Logan.
Speaker 2:So dude, it's so sick. It is so sick, it is so good.
Speaker 1:Really, it's better than most medicals, oh yeah, and like the, I mean I got weird and I got like dove into like those buckets of hands and stuff. I don't know if they had those when you were there oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:I like did a bunch of the dissections on the fingers oh, really yeah, oh, thank you for doing that.
Speaker 1:I'm sure sure it was probably like the same hands and stuff, so thanks for doing that. I benefited from that and really seeing, like the, how difficult it was to actually find the pulleys was, like pretty intriguing to me. It's always different from the textbooks, right? Yeah, oh uh, now, regarding actual, like climbing, specific injuries, what would you say is the number one risk factor, or what is the number one factor that's related to the onset of an injury?
Speaker 2:uh, it's got to be like as with other sports, it's got to be the total volume of the sport. So the biggest differentiator that I like to tell climbers is if we try and apply the same dosage of the sport to a climber as we would like a soccer player, let's say, I kind of like parallel the knee joint to the pip joint, although there's not a meniscus in the pip joint joint and there's not an ACL and PCL of course, like it's still a hinge type of joint and you know it has it's it's stronger inflection than it is in side to side in motion and so but if we, if we think we're going to climb as much as we could play a sport like soccer or running, like it's just not possible. Like the common, most common injuries in climbers are to the fingers and that really has to do with just the size of the joint and the mechanical tolerance of the joint, you know. And so it's definitely climbing volume or just total load volume.
Speaker 1:And I recently listened to one of your interviews on the nugget podcast, which was really really good, and one of the things that you were talking about is, you know, you're treating climbers all day in a remote fashion, so literally climbers from all over the world. It seems like the story is pretty much the same every single time and you get these similar patterns as far as what brings about these climbing injuries. And you're talking to these climbers. You're like well, of course, if you look back, if we look back at your training load, hindsight's always 2020. But these are the things that probably caused your injury. So if we were to flip the script there, if you were to design a training program that was designed to make someone get injured, what would be some of the key components that would make that person get injured?
Speaker 2:Oh, that would be. That's an interesting question. That would be pretty easy to do. Actually, they would climb like have long sessions until they're exhausted. So one of the biggest problems with climbing training and people maybe not understanding the nuance of how much they should do, is they just go and I used to do this when I was younger too, in a gym just climb until you're exhausted, you know, and that typically consists of someone warming up to other performing well and then, after they stop performing well, they stick around and they do easier things for a longer duration because they want to you know we have this idea that feeling exhausted equates to a better adaptation right, which, as we know, that's like that's a bad idea.
Speaker 2:That just means you have to recover longer from that session. So really the easiest thing you could do is just climb five days a week until you're exhausted and you will get hurt. It's a you know how long that takes is very individual, but that definitely is the number one way to get hurt. And then, certainly, incorporating training interventions that have too much intensity for the tolerance of the athlete, where I actually don't like the idea of climbers telling beginners that they can't strength train their fingers. I don't think that's true or that doesn't make sense. It really is just about the dosage and the steepness of the incorporation of those things like how quickly they do it. You, you know where I would say. So I wouldn't say don't train your fingers as a beginner. That doesn't make sense. Or I wouldn't say you know, don't do this or don't do that. It's really just like don't climb until you're exhausted and then do a bunch of other stuff in conjunction with it to try and train for climbing.
Speaker 1:I see that a lot too, and that's something that I definitely did when I started climbing, even though I came from like a very structured and regimented training background as a runner. Like all of that stuff, like every single pace that you run and every single run that you do is quite regimented and you're the amount of volume and intensity that you're doing, and then I would just take all the knowledge that I had and forgot it when I went to climbing and it would just climb until I was exhausted. And then I would just take all the knowledge that I had and forgot it when I went to climbing and it would just climb until I was exhausted and then I would climb some more and then maybe do some other training like you know, hangboarding and stuff after being fully exhausted from a climbing session. I'm sure that's something that you see all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, it's just kind of different too.
Speaker 2:Like as a wrestler you would be exhausted from just like your whole body breathing hard, like just physically it's like wrestling is kind of the equivalent of doing four by fours on the bouldering wall, you know, just like climbing until you're totally tired and fatigued and then resting a little bit and then doing that again, which is a common training protocol that gets people injured.
Speaker 2:In my opinion it can be helpful, but there's a bunch of nuance. But I think think if we take the, the kind of the sensory or the perceptual things that happen with other training, and we apply it to climbing, you know you just don't get that kind of fatigue when you're climbing but your fingers get exposed to a lot of stress on the climbing wall. Even beginners, you know, people assume that things that are less intense, meaning the grades, are less risky and so they do more of them, which is kind of like very confusing for people. But more is not better when it comes to practice. You know there are reasons we want to do more things in some points of our training, but not always. That can't be the every session.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are your thoughts on that kind of classic injury pattern of the new climber that comes on, goes into the gym for their first time whether it be at like a birthday party or like whatever and they get, or a friend brings them, they get super psyched on climbing and then they climb, you know, basically every single day for like five or six months. Their muscles get stronger, their grade, they really jump up in grades because of that neuromuscular coordination and then they blow a pulley. Is that something that you see fairly often, or is that just something that people just say because they've heard about it once or twice?
Speaker 2:I don't see many new climbers that get pulley ruptures. I ultrasound a lot of climbers that are new that have what I would consider like a bruised finger or cystic changes to the pulley, either distal, further away or proximal, closer to the A2 pulley or the PIP joint or the A4 pulley.
Speaker 2:From like just that that, that angle or that arc of stress across the PIP joint is just beat up by grabbing jugs and just yarding on jugs when you're tired and essentially grabbing and like twisting and just like essentially you're pinning down the tendon to the pulley and the synovial sheath and you're like rubbing your tendon across it. I actually just made an infographic from my account that I posted today on it that people can check out. I'm not sure when this will be aired, but what's today?
Speaker 2:today's the 26th I think this is 29 oh yeah, tomorrow concert, tomorrow we're going to, but so essentially it's like it. I kind of am dramatic maybe in explaining it like this, but it's kind of the equivalent of taking, like you know, lowering your partner off the edge if you're belaying them down, let's say, over the edge of the cliff, like with no, like you know like straps or directional anchors, like, essentially, it's like pulling your rope over the edge of a rock, it's just like creates a lot of friction and if you do that a lot at some point it's gonna get a little tear in the membrane.
Speaker 2:Then you have an inflammatory response that creates a cystic change which, like, is a real pain to get rid of.
Speaker 1:Those are more common in beginners so I could see how that would really behave similar to like a pulley injury, just really like irritated and tough to get to go away yeah, most, most people think they have a sprained pulley.
Speaker 2:Like everyone that has a sore finger wants to say they have a sprained pulley. Like everyone that has a sore finger wants to say they have a sprained pulley, which maybe there is some sprain mechanism that goes along with it. But it's really hard to diagnose a sprained pulley. But incredibly commonly I see the cystic changes and so they push down on it and it hurts. And they grab onto a jug and it hurts. And they grab onto a pull-up bar and it hurts. Those are the symptoms that people typically get.
Speaker 1:Awesome, not awesome, but that's really interesting. I haven't heard of that mechanism of pain or injury before, so we talked about if we were to make a program to get injured. Now the flip side of that. A couple of years ago you wrote an article for Training Beta about an injury prevention program or an IPP, and the major components of that included one strength, balance, flexibility, agility and then plyometrics and you incorporated that as part of a warm-up and it was kind of for team kids and for teams to reduce the risk of injuries and youth athletes and stuff like that. But which of these components would you say are the most important and what are some of the best ways in which we can focus on those things?
Speaker 2:mostly because they need consistency in their warmup, where a lot of times youth athletes will go to a competition certainly not a big national one, but a local competition where they don't have, like, a climbing wall or they don't have their normal stuff that they use to warm up, and so it's kind of catered towards giving youth coaches and athletes something they can do, that they don't need a climbing wall for, that will adequately warm up their shoulders and chest and hips and ankles and knees et cetera.
Speaker 2:So, it's kind of a kind of a streamlined way of having them have that consistency. So they know the warmup or lack thereof is not why they didn't perform at their limit in their comp. You know the there's like some evidence for soccer players that these programs reduce injury risk as well and they're kind of the same thing. They're just like some form of strength training sets before that transition into more dynamic things which transition into more plyometric things. I would think for a beginner climber it's probably too much of a warm-up. They don't need the plyometric stuff at the end, but they could do the first couple portions of it. I forget exactly how many exercises they could do the first four or five exercises and that would be helpful.
Speaker 1:And essentially it's just like a different kind of load and a more intense load than they would get with climbing yeah, I think that you you had like six circuits in there and yeah, it was pretty similar to some of the stuff in the FIFA 11 plus I found yeah, I pretty much just took that idea and just applied it to what a climber would do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and how would you change that for like an individual going to the gym, as far as like, oh nice, like warmup protocol, that will hopefully reduce the risk of injuries.
Speaker 2:I use a lot of the same things in the same exercises for my training clients, for my rehab clients. Essentially, it's just the easiest way to think about it in my mind is climbing has a lot of variation in the directions of the forces and the joint angles and the speeds of movements, which is like the power output, but it doesn't have that much intensity on the shoulders or the elbows. It has a good amount of intensity on the fingers but it doesn't really load the hips and the knees that much. And so the I guess the primary direction or goal of the IPP is to warm the athlete up more generally, more targeted off the wall, so they just get that stimulus in prior to training on the wall.
Speaker 1:Nice and one quote from that article which I think is going to stand the test of time is. I really just like this quote. I think you worded it really well Exposure to training loads greater in magnitude than sporting loads reduces injury risk. So what does that mean and how do we do that?
Speaker 2:so that's like I forget which that's out of a research, the, the, that, not that exact quote, but that idea comes out of, um, some of the research that's cited in, uh, eric mira's work on the knee, um, and essentially it's called, like the I think it's the envelope of function. So there's like this you know, this space and an athlete's training that is protective, and then beyond that range is like a risk factor for getting hurt. So it's kind of like a lot of other people now I forget who coined this term we'll use the Goldilocks zone someone I forget which, like well-known sport scientists use that, but I think that's maybe a brian man quote too. But anyways, but essentially it's like the.
Speaker 2:The goldilocks zone would represent the space that's going to be a space that's adaptive, which means it's like pretty high threshold, but the athlete can tolerate that load. They'll back off and then they'll do that again and then they'll kind of kind of move that needle to some duration, but beyond that envelope is like risky and they will get hurt. And so you know, it's kind of like giving athletes an intensity that's like controlled and slow and is good for muscular recruitment, good for tendon adaptations, but not that's really long, that's going to be really tiring, you know, and just like we'll get them prepared for their sport and then they can do their sport, and as long as they keep the volume low, that in a lot of cases that's lots of that's plenty of strength training, probably for a beginner.
Speaker 1:You know that's going to be climbing yeah, and what kind of set and prep schemes will you be using for those kinds of like just weight lifting loads, because I think I usually I usually make the ipp, not weight lifting, just so they don't need more equipment but, like you know, you could do variations of pull-ups.
Speaker 2:so most climbers are really strong doing pull-ups but doing, you know, six to eight reps per set of a pull-up is still enough intensity that like it will warm up your, you know, back and your chest and your biceps and your brachialis muscle, but it's not like going to be so hard. You're going to get really tired Right. And so I typically have people do circuits, which is what the IPP is set up as something for the upper body, something for the legs and then something for the fingers, and then I'll just do like maybe three circuits for each athlete and they'll do a pulling circuit, pushing circuit, a shoulder circuit, and they'll just kind of go through and like warm up really good and then get on the climbing wall. But it can look like a whole bunch of different things. Like the options are limitless, as long as someone gets a basic understanding of the goal of the thing and then give them some directions on how they can modify it.
Speaker 1:Do you ever do some of your strength training as part of your warmup Like? All the time. That's what kind of like what I do is. I go and I start like lifting a little bit of weights and then the bonuses warmed up and then I've already done like part of my strength training protocol before I've even started climbing. So then after I'm done climbing and doing my more sports specific things, I can go back and do some more sets and reps if I have time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do that a lot for myself Because my now my, because I moved my weight lifting stuff is at my home so I can get up early, go warm up for 30 minutes and drive to the crag and start trying hard.
Speaker 2:I think, when I think there's some pushback there from people that haven't done that before and they will feel a little bit tired. I hear quite commonly, when I don't necessarily do the lifting stuff but do the non lifting strength training as we just described before, they'll feel tired. For the first couple of weeks They'll be like, wow, I felt really tired for my workout, but once they have adapted to it like they won't go back to not doing it, they're like I feel so much better. So essentially it should. It should increase the quality of the climbing practice because you know, if I get more muscle fibers involved in a muscle group, I have more options for performing movements Right and so, because all the movements are slightly different, you just get a whole bunch of variability and ways that you can perform movements on the wall, which typically increases performance.
Speaker 1:Nice, um, and right now it seems like you're on this almost like crusade, with a lot of the podcasts that you've been on, talking about the different forms of isometric, isometric training as well as, like finger training, and the biggest differentiator, it seems like, is overcoming versus yielding isometrics. So I don't really want this to become like an hour-long like thing describing like overcoming versus yielding isometrics, which I feel like they are pretty tricky concepts to get down, but the overcoming isometric being more of an active, like you're trying to curl your fingers even though your fingers aren't moving versus the yielding isometrics, where you can use other body parts or external weight to kind of hang into that isometric. What was the big impetus for differentiating those two and why is this important for our finger training and then for risk mitigation and training?
Speaker 2:yeah, I chatted, I did a podcast with lattice I think last week or before with josh, one of their coaches, and was telling him like you have to, kind of from my experience, I'm maybe a bit ocd, where I just like get interested in something and like, because of my anatomy background in the hand, like I've just become maybe obsessed with the hand.
Speaker 2:The hand is like such an amazing body part and you know where so much dexterity, it's so coordinated, there's so many muscles, there's so many moving parts is part of the reason why I've like not, I don't and it, yeah, it's like, uh, it didn't really hit me for like probably six years to really understand the difference. Like. I have videos that I'll repost every once in a while on my stories of me doing the standing curl method with the standing version, with this g strength unit which I used to use, which was like before strain gauges were like a thing, because like it's not until the last couple years where you could like buy an affordable strain gauge that actually measured rate of force and force and endurance stuff, and so it was like before those things.
Speaker 2:but I was trying to isolate the finger flexors and there's an obvious difference between isolation of the finger flexors and stuff on our fingerboard. But it didn't really occur to me the importance and the difference until I had a client who was a female climber, who was like I know that her fingers are stronger than mine because she climbs at a higher grade than I do, consistently, like bouldering right, and a really good climber, obviously technical skills, but when she does like a yielding style test her numbers don't look that good. But she's a really slender female climber. But when you look at her numbers, when she does the overcoming style, her strength to weight ratio bypasses mine by a lot.
Speaker 2:And so really it was like understanding, like, and I did a like, a 10, I think 10 hour consult with Chris Beardsley, who's like a UK researcher, and so I like I think it was a couple of summers ago I did all these calls with him and I recorded all these calls and I made notes of all those calls and then I reconsolidate. So I like leaned hard into really understanding what the hell is going on with strength training more generally, and so is it kind of those things that really made me understand, like why those are different, because the climbing research has not done that. The climbing research is kind of a mess when it comes to protocols and what to do and suggestions, and I don't know if I'm ramblingambling, but I don't know if I've answered your question I just, I I mean chris beardsley awesome, great, best infographics like in the whole game, um.
Speaker 1:And then I just remember you talking to chris dimmit about like all the different ways in which we assess climbing, and it was something like like 230 different ways in which we assess like climbing.
Speaker 2:That's not even including strength. Yeah, that's not even climbing, that's just let me actually have it sitting right here, just um. This is like a langer paper which is like, oh so, upper body and limb strength. There's 120 out of 156 studies included. But it shows in this review paper there's 230 different ways of implementing implementation for finger strength in the climbing research 230 different ways to just measure how much force someone can produce on hold. You know that really comes down to my not my, not my gripe or complaint, but my critique of what climbers have done just traditionally is we've tried to make our strength training tool look too much like our sport, and so people have gotten like lost down the rabbit hole of trying to make the most specific protocol which, according to the other strength training research, misses the point of the adaptations that we get from strength training, you know.
Speaker 2:So it's really like people want to be very confident and stubborn about their finger strength training like protocols and history but, like the science would not support that at all it just says we don't know yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's like when we're strength training, it's like just strength train and then when you're trying to get more like climbing specific coordination, just get climbing specific coordination on the wall. Is that kind of the, the gist of that?
Speaker 2:that's the gist of it for me. But the other thing too is you know my again my bias is towards talking to so many people like I've already talked to three people this morning with finger injuries and so like I have three more calls this afternoon. They're all finger injuries and so like I talked to so many climbers with finger injuries that you hear the same kind of stories over and over about the things that they do. And it doesn't mean that fingerboarding is bad, necessarily, but it's like made me want to better understand what are the adaptations we think we get from it and what should we really think we get from it. And that's where the overcoming, yielding style, isometric difference really plays in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I fell into that trap. I mean, when I was in graduate school or like chiropractic school, I had a hangboard in my garage and I had a couple of weights. So, like a lot of times I was too busy with studying to really go and do a gym session, so I would just hang off a hangboard with really heavy weights, right, and my fingers certainly got a lot stronger and that passive like yielding isometric, but my climbing grade kind of stayed the same and just plateaued. Some things felt a lot easier, like holding on to small holds and stuff like that. But as far as like the transfer, which is something that I think you talk about a lot, that's going to be more through climbing specific things like being on the wall. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent. And so in other sports, you know, our research is kind of behind the times and our coaches and their sports science background is also, maybe, you know, less par, I guess, than other sports. But no like football coach would expect the back squat to make someone a better offensive lineman or a better running back, but they still do the back squat because they know that the back squat has these adaptations that their athlete will get, so they can, you know, thrust harder on the field or they can tolerate more practice time. So it's really a, you know, a performance enhancer, only if the athlete still is doing the performance, which is the sport itself, and getting their practice reps in. So it's like, for me it's strength training is more about increasing repetition, competence and intensity than it is like, oh, I hang on this edge, so I'm going to climb better on this edge.
Speaker 1:That doesn't really make sense, but it's really hard to understand that because we've made our strength training look so much like our sport yeah, I think, uh, something that, um, mike boyle would talk about is like soccer players or team sport athletes and being able to squat like over 500 pounds, and it's like if you're a soccer player, there's no reason that for you to squat over 500 pounds and really that would be just more risky than anything else and it would detract from If you're a soccer player.
Speaker 1:There's no reason for you to squat over 500 pounds and really that would be just more risky than anything else and it would detract from your soccer training. And the point is not to be great at squatting a super huge amount. The goal is to be a better soccer player and it seems like in this context, the goal is to be a better rock climber. The goal isn't necessarily to be great at training, which me. I'm somebody who kind of falls into that trap where it's like I feel like sometimes I'm better at training for climbing than I am at actually climbing, um, but it's just because I need to go and spend more time actually climbing on rock yeah, and it's for some people it's easy to train because it's like more accessible and climbing outside's hard, harder to get to, you know.
Speaker 2:So there's all these other bears and it's fun to train people like the numbers and it's fun to like see the numbers go up. For sure I would say the the Josh asked me a question of like what do I think or what would my perspective be on what's the next step and evolution of climbing training and understanding? If I could pick one thing, and it would be having digital readouts on forces on climbing holds on the climbing wall and so like that's the thing that we do not understand in climbing is you know what actually happens on the climbing wall with a power move? How much force goes through the hand? What kind of rate of force is that?
Speaker 2:And from the small research that we have, that lattice did, the numbers are not that mind-blowing. It's like 45 body weight goes through a handhold on a dead point move at 200 milliseconds, which is not that fast. It's because they make their connective tissues more stiff, not because they need to produce more force on a climbing hold. Grabbing onto a hold and being able to hold onto it if maybe you didn't before is really because you're actually applying more force, because what we know would say that doesn't make any sense, but they're making their connective tissues stiffer with strength training, which is one of the important adaptations, but they're able to hold that position and just move their feet around better.
Speaker 1:And could you give people an explanation of what you mean by stiff, because I know a lot of people would say, oh, I don't want to be stiff, you know, I want to have range of motion and stuff. But when we're talking about tissue stiffness as a result of training, that's actually a beneficial thing, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, in some cases. So like stiffness, would be like a material property change to a tendon, not a quantitative change. Unless it's like a youth climber, they will get quantitative changes in their tendons, meaning cross-sectional area. But as an adult, most climbers will see a qualitative change, which is mostly water content and cellular structure, covalent bonding between adjacent fibers, kind of change.
Speaker 2:But what will happen is if I and this is what the exercise science research tells us on strength training if I make a tissue stiffer, my tendon, now that tissue shortens at the speed of my muscle and I can train my muscle to contract faster.
Speaker 2:I just got to do power stuff. And so if I make my tendon stiffer with strength training and then I do powerful things like board climbing and RFD training, I will absolutely see an improvement in rate of force development. And so when people go into like a hard, you know when people are climbing at their limit, the moves are powerful. And so when they like see an improvement on the wall, they're like, wow, now I can hit that hold. That's probably because now they can create enough force fast enough to grab onto it while their feet are on and just get that timing down. And so that's not that that's a bad change and that sounds like it supports fingerboarding, which it does. But the question is how much extra load on top of my body weight do I really need to make that change and is it worth just going indefinitely in a linear way, because that's what gets people hurt yeah, like there's no reason to hang from a fingerboard with 500 pounds, just like there's not really a reason for that soccer player to back squat 500 pounds.
Speaker 1:Is that kind of what you're saying?
Speaker 2:yeah. So I I usually tell people when they ask about like how much is enough, like I deadlift this much, at some point I should just stop doing it. I usually tell them that that misses the point of why you strength train in the first place. Just because you're like I have really strong fingers, not because I've trained them a lot, just that's just my mechanics and my muscle fiber types. And so for me, like I still train my fingers, but not because I expect my numbers to increase that much, to increase my performance. I do it because it's a different stimulus than climbing and it keeps my muscles strong and my tendon stiff so I can tolerate climbing practice pretty much. So it's like, but at some point it becomes like not worth the risk and we don't really know what that number is. I have some pretty good ideas, but that's not something that we really understand all that well in any sport, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's a D emphasis or a lower emphasis, but that doesn't mean that you don't still do it. It's kind of what you're saying.
Speaker 2:For sure you should still do it because strength training is just protective in that sense. But it should be a really small amount of the stuff you do and it should be easy to recover from and it should be as safe as possible, which is why I have people use other tools for training their fingers and their hands, not just 20 mil flat edge hangs half crimp you know that that to me is way too simplistic and way not, um guess, comprehensive enough for training the hand as a climber.
Speaker 1:And so why will you use an unlevel edge versus you know the thing that looks kind of like a little podium for your fingers versus just only using a 20 mil edge?
Speaker 2:I mean it's it's really just the idea is to get more load to more tissue to load the pinky and the index and the index finger. You know, the pinky just doesn't get a lot of stress unless people are full crimping, and so I talk to a lot of people that get pinky ruptures when they full crimp and I think a lot of that has to do with just not getting the same stimulus and tolerance that the rest of the fingers do you know, if it comes to like training, strength training we want to produce as much force as we can in the first short duration and then we want to recover. Good, but we're going to get more recruitment with more fingers than less fingers. So it's really just a muscle fiber type. You know quantity, I guess. Answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really never thought about it until you started posting about it on like instagram and things like that. But it makes a ton of sense when it's like yeah, your fingers are different lengths, so that holds those little like platforms that they go on should probably different lengths away in order to equalize pressure amongst all of the fingers, so then we can more equally load all the fingers, as opposed to have a difference in the load in the fingers based on finger lengths on a flat edge yeah, and I have like so many pictures of people's hands on a half crimp.
Speaker 2:I have my, like my clients a lot of times come in and say let me look what your finger looks like on half crimp, I'll just take a picture and get their approval.
Speaker 2:And so even with like small hands, like female climbers tend to have a weirder position on a half crimp because their pinkies tend to be short just compared to the other fingers.
Speaker 2:And so even with a small hand, half crimping on a 20 mil loads the middle two fingers more than it does the outside two fingers. And so if we're doing that as the intention of like that's the only way I train my fingers and I only use a 20 mil edge and I only do this and then I only climb on flat edges, you're just like making your middle two fingers take a lot of load and they're the most commonly injured fingers the middle two. So it's like to me that doesn't really make sense because we don't not only don't need that much intensity on the fingers off the wall probably, but that's an unequal distribution to the middle two fingers which we already get on the climbing wall. I would rather not push that stress off the climbing wall and just get that tolerance on the climbing wall. That's where, like the coordination stuff on the wall happens and what are your thoughts on training other grip positions?
Speaker 1:So things like you know, let's say I'm going to 10 sleep which has a ton of pockets and monos and things like that. Would you recommend somebody who's preparing for a trip like that to train some of those positions, such as like pocket pulling monos and like three finger drag is a popular one that a lot of people train, stuff like that yeah, I think there's no problem training those grip positions, but those from my perspective, those grip positions would be for exposure and for, like, uh, coordination not really to make.
Speaker 2:I mean, we use the term strength, you know, but like, getting your middle two fingers stronger with a force gauge will not equate to you getting four fingers stronger, you know. So it's like you're never going to get more recruitment with two fingers than you will four fingers. And so, since it's like one muscle belly essentially and one like nerve, you're not going to get a better adaptation there. So I usually tell people that there's totally a good reason to do that if you're preparing for a trip there, and that's actually a really good use of a fingerboard if you don't have access to a wall with pockets and stuff. But I have a lot of people that are going to tensely train pockets on the kilter board and just put the kilter board at 20 degrees and treat those holds like pockets because they're rounded and comfortable and then getting that exposure.
Speaker 2:I think makes a lot of sense. But it's really hard to know how, off the wall with two fingers, how much is enough and how much is too much, you know. So it's like it's really hard to recreate the distance of a route and the same work dress ratios as a route and try and replicate those instead of like doing you know particular protocols yeah, and at the same time it's like if you're going to 10 sleep, doesn't matter what you do, you'll still probably flash 512 anyway.
Speaker 2:So I've never climbed there, is it soft and sleep.
Speaker 1:There are some things that are pretty soft, like a lot of their 12 minuses are one super fun and then like soft compared to like other places. Like I mean I can you know at the time that I went to 10 sleep I spent like a week or two weeks trying to do a 12 minus called lost and found and rifle and then I went to 10 sleep and I flashed like five 12 minuses. So those grades are kind of soft. But then when you get to like the 12 pluses and 13s I think it gets and then the 14s that are just fucking heinous you just have to have really like good and that's a maybe an important thing for people to listen to.
Speaker 2:Maybe that are like newer to climbing is like your ability to tolerate that kind of stress, pockets, mono, stuff. If you're not doing that regularly in your normal climbing, like it takes a long time to develop the tolerance for doing a lot of that at your limit. And so when people hear, oh, I'm going to train pockets before, if they're not used to that kind of stimulus, the, the steepness of the inclusion of that, or how quickly they incorporate, that will be too steep and they will get hurt so they have to like.
Speaker 1:The idea is like get a little bit all the time, but a lot is risky, you know and then will you um kind of use that acute to chronic workload ratio to talk about some of these like volume changes or intensity changes with, like climbing, specific training as well?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think there's some. The acwr is kind of like let's call it out of out of style. Now there's been some good critiques on your perception kind of being off. But ultimately having some way to track how much you're doing and how much you've done in the past bit of time should predict what you should be able to do, you know. And so let's say people are planning on to go into 10 sleep in June.
Speaker 2:It's May now and they're rope climbing and they're kind of fit and they've been bouldering but they haven't been doing pocket stuff. So I would have them like, have you know, do their warmup routine. Whatever they do normally, I would do it off the wall. But then in some of those sessions they need to be spending time doing more pockets, like in their sessions. It doesn't need to be every session and it can't be a really long exhausting session, but the first, let's say, two boulders that they do or three boulders after their warmup is they're just loading with pockets, because not every hole is a pocket intensely, but they need to get that stimulus every time they train. So three days a week they just do maybe say, three to four boulders at 20 degrees on the kilter board where they're just using those different positions front three, middle two, you know, maybe alternate front three middle two, four, back to you know, maybe alternate front three, middle two, four, back to, you know.
Speaker 1:Whatever positions they need for that style okay, so not necessarily doing like a hangboard specific, like five sets of five or like five, you know, uh, five, one rep, like with a mono, but just incorporating it. Incorporating that on a wall in a really safe manner is what you're talking about I mean, yeah, I mean it depends on the person.
Speaker 2:Like that's the thing that gets maybe missed. And when people I hate it when people do a youtube or when they we do a podcast and they take a youtube snippet and they put that snippet on instagram and it's just like maybe a provocative snippet or one that has a good catchphrase and people just freak out about it. When it's just like one snippet, so like you could do both like you could do either I mean, don't do both for the sake of doing both, but you could do either one.
Speaker 2:And the stimulus should be pretty similar. If I got to choose for myself and my clients, I would have them do the thing on the wall, because getting to getting comfortable positioning your body under two fingers on the wall is going to be a different coordination than it will be on a fingerboard. So if I did a five seconds on one second off, five rep repeater on a fingerboard, that's just a really slow ascension of a kilter board with the same number of hand moves. You know I'm just like laddering up the wall but I'm still learning to put pressure through my feet and balance under my fingers. So I, like the, I would be very strong in my conviction to say on the wall stuff would be better, but if people don't have access to that, do it on a fingerboard and also, like I mean gyms recognize that pockets are were previously something that were really provocative or like were associated with pulley ruptures and finger injuries.
Speaker 1:So you see that a lot less now is setting with like really sharp holds or like pocket holds in gyms, so that could be a good alternative, I guess as well. Yeah, will you do the the overcoming, or like the the actual, like constant, like feeling, like concentric with the pocket training, or like more like just the hanging?
Speaker 2:if people, if you watch people climb on pockets, they are hanging okay, like sometimes you'll have a pocket, but like most of the time in a real pocket people are like sagging into it and so that's another like important difference in like the training style. Like I just did a three and a half hour like finger testing course. That is on my website if people want to watch the recording.
Speaker 1:It's just like a recorder probably gonna do that at some point. That thing looks. It looks really really good, but it's like.
Speaker 2:But I go through and I do like maximum strength for pulling and RFD for pulling and yielding, pulling and overcoming curling and like, compare all these and like, show people how to do it with the Tindac. And so my argument there is, like when you're climbing, like we want to rely on the connective tissue and use the yielding style contraction because it's more efficient, we can go further. It's like a like we can. You know, it's a capacity, let's say it's capacity building type of muscle contraction or tolerance. Right, but if I'm training, like I'm not trying to be really efficient in my muscle contraction type, if I'm training, I want to like see what my muscle can do, right, and so like. With the curling method, really the goal is to try and assess how many muscle fibers I can activate for a given thing and then, like that number is probably pretty close to like with maybe an extra 10, 15 load is the number that I would have someone fingerboard with.
Speaker 2:Okay right because then I would like I can more accurately assess their muscular strength and then add some connective tissue, because the goal is to increase the muscular strength, not really just to overload the connective tissues. Right, but doing that with a mono, like it's not how you use the mono. Usually when you're on the wall you're usually hanging on it Sure, you got a curl, but like it's more passive than active. If that helps differentiate yeah.
Speaker 1:So we're really not trying to like significantly load up that mono, but more increased coordination and more specific coordination to utilization of that mono hold how you would hang so for open.
Speaker 2:That same thing applies for open grips. Open grips like aren't in a muscle length a length tension relationship. That's like a strong position, right. So like training slopers on a fingerboard with added weight, you're probably, in my opinion, better training the hand with like something round or with a wrist roller or a wrist wrench where you can overload it and add your thumb and then train your coordination or your tolerance or your capacity on a finger board or the climbing wall with slopers. But I don't see a big benefit in like adding a bunch of load to a sloper because it's not really that strong of a position for the for the finger flexor muscles yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of times friction dependent too right super friction dependent always um. What are your thoughts on wrist specific training? So I know you've talked about like using that wrist wrench and things like that, and how does that improve our finger strength?
Speaker 2:so to like. The wrist wrench is unique, or like. Another one that I've been using in my house is the um rolling thunder, which is iron mind product. It's the same diameter as the wrist wrench. It just spins. The whole thing spins where the wrist wrench is an attempt at trying to like, create an eccentric. It's trying to overload, so you, so it opens you up and drops it. So in that case you still have to flex with your fingers, you know, and you still have to flex with your thumb, and then with the wrist wrench, you have to like, flex your wrist slightly to lift the load.
Speaker 2:So it is a really it's just a simple way to add wrist flexion which are slightly different muscles and finger flexion at the same time. But it's like pretty safe, because it doesn't require the athletes to bend their finger at 90 degrees and it doesn't require them to, like on the climbing wall, do a bunch of side to side stress, because the science would say, or what I see too, is open-handed grips are harder on the joints and then closed-handed grips are hard around the pulleys yeah, that makes a lot of sense and would you say there's some validity to saying that training more proximal segments of the body, so like like training the wrist, training the elbow, shoulder and the core would then facilitate finger um, um, I think, if I understand your question, um, sure, but you would still have to make your finger stronger, like, yeah, I don't know that I would say, like training your shoulders and elbow flexors and like wrist extensors are going to make your finger stronger.
Speaker 2:I think those things they're. They are intersegmental in that sense and, you know, lean on each other and utilize each other for balancing whatever.
Speaker 1:But like training the hand, I would I like to think about climbers now, just hand training, instead of talking about finger training okay, and that's one of the reasons why, like in your warm-up, you do all these different types of grips and things like that.
Speaker 2:so, so, training like the full hand as opposed to just doing like a level edge, like finger training and physiologic, like ratios of muscle fiber types in the hand and the finger flexors, and I found a couple of papers on the index finger showing that, like the lumbar muscle muscles and the interosseous muscles have more or type two motor units than the finger flexors and the extrinsic ones do, which means that the muscles in your hand have more fast twitch fibers than the ones that are in your forearm that flex your fingers.
Speaker 2:And so from like a, from like a contact strength or a grip positioning, like capacity, it makes sense that you would and their, their papers suggest that you would, flex your MCP joint before you flex your PIP, ndap joints, because it's just like an efficiency, it just is a leverage thing. And so in the hand, like again, that's just like applied anatomy knowledge, like those muscles ad duct, the fingers or ab duct, and then they flex the mcp joints and so that's not like a been a focus of climbing trainings history. People have done like finger rolls, people have done like the bar roll thing, people have used the hand. The hand grippers are actually a pretty practical tool.
Speaker 2:They're just not comfortable on the thumb, like those metal gripper, things they're yeah that's like concentric contraction, but they fucking hurt the inside of your thumb. They're weird on the hand, you know. So being able to train those muscles to make them stronger for a coordination standpoint to me makes tons of sense.
Speaker 2:But you can't really train them with a pinch because your fingers are together and you can't train them with a half crimp because your fingers are next to each other so you have to like separate the fingers and then grab onto something. So I like to joke with people like try and squeeze the juice out of an orange, cut a hole in it and then grab onto it and just squeeze as hard as you can.
Speaker 1:That's kind of the movement nice and then so kind of like those tension, like those like half balls and stuff that you see a lot of times and people will like campus them and stuff like that yeah, the tension board holds can work.
Speaker 2:The tool that I have, like an orange, is a really pretty good size for like a diameter. Where I have like a like a atomic climbing makes these things called ninja balls, which are like ninja warrior things. So a lot of people use those where you just like squeeze it and then you just like do a lift from the ground, like a deadlift with it, okay, or you can stand over the tindak and do an overcoming oh, it's not really an overcoming, but where you just like squeeze it and then you just like do a lift from the ground, like a deadlift with it, okay, or?
Speaker 2:you can stand over the 10 deck and do an overcoming oh, it's not really an overcoming, but you can pull against the scale with it too, to see what the forces look like. But it really requires you to like, squeeze your fingers towards, like some center point to you know, to get the grip Nice.
Speaker 1:You've done a ton of lectures and put out a lot of content on blood flow restriction therapy, and that's oftentimes catered towards rehabilitating from an injury. Is there a role for BFR and injury prevention? And then, is that role more for just decreasing tensile forces in the injured area, or is it more beneficial because of the metabolic stress, or is it more of just a both, a combination of the two?
Speaker 2:Definitely a combination of the two. I don't tend to suggest that any type of exercise reduces injury risk. I think that misses the point in terms of people hearing that my big gripe with the rehab world is people will hear. This exercise for this thing fixed my thing and so then people get obsessed with that exercise, assuming that it has some property that's going to make them never get hurt right, and they're just going to do a bunch of it and that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2:Anything at too high of a dosage is toxic, right, it's risky for getting an overuse injury. Bfr's place, I think, in the rehab world is great for when people have to reduce the load. So I'll use bfr for, like. I have quite a few clients that get elbow dislocations, falling, bouldering or they'll get like a distal bicep tendon tear or they'll get a pulley rupture right, pulley ruptures. I've kind of leaned off on the how much load we need to take off and how often or how much off the wall they need to get.
Speaker 2:But. But essentially it's times when you don't want to put a lot of mechanical load on the body is like one really good spot. Youth athletes and stress fractures I think is a good one. Oh yeah, on the body is like one really good spot. Youth athletes and stress fractures I think is a good one. Oh yeah, you know, when it comes to performance it's kind of a. I will use it for more metabolic stress, but I wouldn't use it in the as a total replacement for climbing stress, of course, because the climber still wants more intensity on their tendons, but for targeting like capillary density and tolerating pump and keeping recruitment high. I have a lot of older clients that like don't want to load heavy on their fingers or don't want to do a lot of volume where it's really good option. So again, it's kind of like a. It depends on who it's for and when it's used and what, but it can be a great tool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Especially when you're doing more of those like load modification procedures. So when somebody is not tolerating those really high tensile forces, you'll probably or will you sometimes input a little bit of BFR training to get them over the hump of that like tweak or minor injury, so then they can get back to full capacity without fully irritating those tissues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. It really just depends on the person and they're like that's where it's like hard to make blanket statements. I would say the only blanket statement I would say which is a no load or loaded a ridiculously low intensity, is stress, fractures and youth athletes and post-surgical stuff, but like most climbers with tweaked olfies or tendonitis or cysts. They can still do stuff. It really is kind of a preference thing where some people do not like bfr. It's just like not a pleasant experience.
Speaker 1:So those cases I don't have them do bfr, it's not fun yeah, I have like a love-hate relationship with it too, because I get a little bit of like paresthesia, as I like. I'm probably turning the cuff up a little bit too much, but you know it is what it is oh, it depends you.
Speaker 2:That's pretty normal, but it's intense for sure yeah, there are some warm-up protocols that I've had people do with pretty good success. If they like doing bfr it's like the ischemic pre-conditioning or they'll have you done that before. Have you heard of that?
Speaker 1:um, I've done it, but I haven't not not because of any like research that I've found or anything I've just like. Sometimes I'll use it to, like, warm up a specific body part or something, but I'm excited to hear more about it.
Speaker 2:Well, the ischemic protocols are and I think they were doing this at some like division one level soccer program, like stanford soccer players were doing it female soccer players. Essentially it's like a five minute protocol of high pressure, so like 70 to 90 percent arterial occlusion, which is really high, with no exercise, and then three minutes of deflation so they take them off for three minutes and then they do that again, and then they take them off, and then they do that again.
Speaker 2:They do that like four times, so it's it's like creating a, a lack of oxygen, where the easy way to think about is you just like kickstart your glycolytic process without actually having to, like, do a bunch of muscle work. So it's kind of a way of warming up your energy systems without physically putting load on the muscle oh, so they're not.
Speaker 2:They're not doing any exercise at all, they're just doing really high levels of ischemia yeah, I've had people do this on the way to the crag, if someone else is driving, or at the crag with like good success to just like. But it's kind of like a thing you gotta like learn how to do it and you gotta try it and you gotta like kind of fine-tune your setup, you know. So it's like nothing. In my opinion, with training is like definitely do this, everyone should do this. Like it just doesn't work like that.
Speaker 1:But that's an option that people have used and some people really like it I really like that from the uh, analgesic sense too, like as far as like pain reduction if you've got like little tweaks or like like consistent, like little angry fingers and stuff like that. Just having that wash of like blood flow return I found is really nice in like a therapeutic sense for a lot of people, because then they can go and do something that was painful before and now it's like oh, it's really not that painful anymore and a lot of that is just from that metabolic cascade from the BFR. Yeah, what are your thoughts on nutritional? And I know the nutrition sphere is kind of like the most like intense sphere with all these like conflicting things but what are your thoughts on nutritional not really interventions but nutritional components for either injury prevention or performance enhancement?
Speaker 2:I'm like, I'm pretty simple and pretty, I guess, naturalistic in that sense of like. I think the majority of what we need we can get just in our normal diet, and a big fan of people's like healing response is incredibly powerful as long as they get what they need, which usually can come from the diet and then also just sleeping better and recovering better. So I don't tend to promote a ton of nutritional supplements. I think the one that's probably the most accepted would be creatine, certainly for males and females. That one has been around a long time shows a lot of effectiveness, not much risk.
Speaker 2:You know, the collagen thing I think is overhyped, but it's interesting. I like Keith Barr's work and respect his work, but I think there's enough evidence to say that, like, if you're getting enough of that in your regular diet, you probably don't need more, but some people maybe won't get more. So again, I'm kind of always in the middle of how much are you getting in your week, right? It's important to ask that to people much protein you're getting. If they're not getting enough, that might be a good option. Whey protein supplements obviously are a slam dunk for busy people that don't get enough protein, which is just hard to do period.
Speaker 1:So aside from those, I don't tend to suggest or promote a lot of supplements for my athletes yeah, I really agree and I think, even with like the collagen, it's like collagen is just another means by which we can just meet those protein requirements, and I've done a lot of like posts and stuff on this, but so many people are looking for that magic bullet supplement. Um, and I think that you know that answer is so perfect as far as like you, just we really need to focus on the basics of like getting your macronutrients in order and including water and things like that, because a lot of climbers, especially, are fairly under fueled, I think, and it's like, oh yeah, for sure, I got up this morning and I had like one egg with breakfast and and it's like you're definitely not meeting your protein requirement necessary for the day.
Speaker 1:So, whether it's like whey protein or like throwing a scoop of collagen in your coffee or something like that, like all these extra things are just means by which we can meet those building blocks and like the basics right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it can be more simple than that. The other thing, too, is I'm very upfront with people about just like basic information there.
Speaker 2:But I've learned from you know, I've said for 10 years, since I've been out of school, like, if you really want to be like what would be considered like an expert, in a field like you just can't know all that stuff Like I spend, like I lose sleep over thinking about methods of modifying finger training or understanding rate of force development or force vectors and all this stuff like that's something that I'm just really passionate, interested about.
Speaker 2:so I will actually in my spare time read all the papers on endurance training for climbing that have been published and like really understand their methods like I don't have time to do other stuff, and so people that are like will ask me like you know, how did you get to where you are? Like, what can I do to do stuff like you like. So people that are like well, ask me, like you know, how did you get to where you are? Like, what can I do to do stuff like you? Like I want to go to this round. I was like like my, my niche is so unique, my expertise is so unique, but it's really just something I'm super interested in and passionate about. So, like, when it comes to the nutritional stuff, I have a pretty basic understanding. But I will ask other people like I'm doing a presentation for the CWA in a couple of weeks on adult injuries and like strength training and prevention.
Speaker 2:And I asked Shannon, who works at gnarly here is like in the same building as me. It was like a PhD in nutrition. Like hey, will you write me a slide on? Like and I'll credit you guys like write me a slide on what the absolute basic you know recommendations are for adults and youth. Like I have pretty good ideas, but like that's her thing and she like hooked me up, gave me like all these things like. So I would rather like lean into people that know more about it, that that's what they do more than me, to answer those kinds of questions yeah, sounds like I need to have her on the podcast too, right?
Speaker 2:she's, she's cool, like their podcast was fun. My wife kind of like not got mad at me, but we were borderline obnoxious and said I sell like a lot of f words on the podcast. I was like I'm, I'm sorry, I'm really not that crude. Well, I guess I am normal, but yeah this is the level of honesty you know I mean it happens.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I'm not a very censored person, but I'm not a very like I'm. I think I'm relatively quiet and not outspoken, unless it's like something that I know a lot about and I'm just like you know.
Speaker 1:But I don't know, unless it's about how campus rungs are the best way to improve climbing performance. Right yeah.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting or interesting topic.
Speaker 1:I mean I know I know you did like a pretty deep dive on that with like Steven Demmitt and stuff, but I mean campus rungs like is there a place for that in climbing training or is it something that's just, you know, not really worth the risk to the finger flexors I would say for some people, sure it's probably helpful and probably something that's just, you know, not really worth the risk to the finger flexors.
Speaker 2:I would say for some people, sure it's probably helpful and probably has some utility, but for every gym dropping, you know, allocating a gigantic space in their gym for campus boards is, I think, questionable because no one really knows what to do.
Speaker 2:Like there's a lot of coaches suggesting a lot of things but none of that is like has been validated and it's been around long enough that it should have been validated, in my opinion, with some research. But like there's two papers on the campus board that have been published and all they do is show that the one increase rate of force development on the fingers and these athletes which no surprise, but it just made them stronger pretty much element on the fingers and these athletes which no surprise, but it just made them stronger pretty much and then they were able to do more. Campus moves to failure. So they got good at campusing and they got stronger right, but being able to show that that's utility to rock climbing the same thing applies. Like, campusing is a unique coordinated movement and if you need it for a project, then it's probably worth getting good at right in some capacity at a really small volume.
Speaker 2:But to assume that everyone needs to use it for a sport that really is requires good footwork, makes no sense to me like I even posted a story yesterday about like your finger strength is only as good as your body positioning in your footwork where, like I'm a perfect example, I have terrible range of motion because of my injured hip or my messed up hip, but like I have really strong fingers. But I had no. I know tons of people that have way less strong fingers than I do that can climb way harder than I will and that's just because, like I can't get in the body positions on the wall to really optimize those holds from like a balanced perspective.
Speaker 2:And so your finger strength is useless if you can't use your feet. In my opinion, yeah.
Speaker 1:So in that sense it's like maybe time better spent on a spray wall, working on coordination moves and continually developing the quote unquote skill of climbing, as opposed to just the strength for climbing yeah, I mean the power, the power output and the contact strength and the coordination you would develop by doing single or, you know, sets of two rep.
Speaker 2:Power moves on a, on a, like a mirrored board, like the tension board for 90 of rock climbers would be better than using a campus board yeah, with your clients who are oftentimes coming to you after an injury.
Speaker 1:How does previous injury alter some of their programming? And we could use a specific example, because I know it's going to be different depending on the person and the type of injury, but we know the biggest predictor of injury is previous injury, right? So how does that alter some of your programming strategies for athletes?
Speaker 2:I don't know if that number or that I guess, term, previous injury, implies the same injury in ACL. It does, like people that have ACL rupture and they get surgery. Their incidence, if I remember, is like 65%, maybe likely that they get it again. Maybe it's lower, I don't remember.
Speaker 1:It's one in five.
Speaker 2:It's pretty high yeah.
Speaker 1:Pretty high right, so they have a high risk.
Speaker 2:But that's a really unique tissue that's really susceptible under certain positions and degrees of rotation. Certain you know positions and like degrees of rotation. Um, I think in the climbing world, I think like maybe previous injury would be a predictor of future injury, because that's how tendon injuries are, where most climbing related injuries are overuse, tendonitis, rotator cuff tears, labral tears, bicep tendonitis, pulley ruptures but once you rupture a pulley, you just don't do it again. That's not an increased susceptibility as far as we know. So I think it's. I think about that more as like a training habit problem than it is. Oh, you can't do this because you hurt your elbow before. I think that's bad advice. I think it's more. Your elbow got sore because this, this and this. We got to like titrate those things better.
Speaker 1:So this doesn't happen again going to like, titrate those things better so this doesn't happen again. Awesome, yeah, that is an interesting perspective on that um, because I would have always thought that, like, maybe we need to cater to or like um, load those tissues and really focus or emphasize loading those tissues in order to appropriately get you back up to where you were before or, even better, because it was injured previously. But it seems like it's more of like no, it's more of a training dosage issue. That got you there in the first place and now we just need to work with those variables, make sure that those variables aren't messed up for when you're training in the future I mean assuming the athlete got good rehab, which is, you know, kind of questionable.
Speaker 2:it's like, if they can, if they get back to doing normal heavy strength training, like that's as best we can do in the world of rehab to like get someone back to their sport and then, once their strength is back, they can start doing multi-directional high rate loads, you know explosive stuff, but that is like the rehab process. And once they're back there, I don't think that their previous injury maybe in some cases from a tissue, maybe it drops their tolerance level a little bit but I don't like the idea of like having them be fearful of doing things because of that previous injury, in very rare circumstances, that last weekend sent her project.
Speaker 2:She had a 50% super spinatus tear, you know, and she's like a slender, really good, experienced climber but doesn't have a lot of muscle mass and so she and she's a PT. She was really worried about coming back to climbing and the doctors that gave her, you know, the advice and read the MRI and they just scared her and she's like I'm never going to go back to climbing.
Speaker 1:Just like freaked, like, freaked out, and it was only we did like three phases of rehab and like she is doing like a 514, 5 yeah, 514b project like and she's like one, hang away from sending it, wow and so it's like like I have multiple clients that have big tears like that and they get back to their sport and the science would overwhelmingly say that that is possible oh yeah, and then also the science to support that, like the words that we, as like clinicians, use, can also have a really big effect on people's prognosis and their ability to get back to previous levels of activity too big deal, for sure one of like I think my job now, why this is.
Speaker 2:The majority of what I do in a room is just chat with people as like education, like being able to try and understand what people want and what their goals are and what kind of their habits are, and kind of helping them navigate and giving them suggestions but letting them figure out on their own is kind of what I do for my job all day pretty much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what does good? I mean a lot of the papers on strength training for climbing. Just talk about the fingers. But what about other strength training? Like movements or exercises will you employ to reduce the risk of injury to like the shoulder or elbow, et cetera?
Speaker 2:There's some papers on strength training um bench pressing for climbing and other things, and like there's not a ton of research, um bench pressing for climbing and other things, and like there's not a ton of research, but like I think, generally speaking, everyone can be pretty confident that a small amount, and that's, like you know, a couple times per week, like twice per week, doing the primary movements something, pull, something, push something, hips, something, shoulders is like enough strength training for most climbers and it can be really simple in terms of the number of exercises and the set rep schemes, but it needs to be just progressive overload. So I think there's plenty of evidence to justify that argument for a climber Convers. Conversely, something that people don't like hearing is that things that are more of a coordination demand, like calisthenic stuff, are not as protective. It's not the same thing, as you know, progressive overload with strength training is, but that's very much built into the climbing kind of fabric.
Speaker 2:And something else that came from my conversation with josh was and which was a cool perspective that I never thought of. Like in the uk where they're from, in other countries they don't have like access to gym equipment like we do in the states, and so, like. His perspective was like at the depot, which is like one of the first climbing gyms. I think all they had was the climbing wall and they had like a pull-up bar and a set of rings and a fingerboard so everyone that went through and a, a fingerboard, so everyone that went through, and a dip bar. I think everyone that went through generations of climbing training that's what they did right and so like to push back against that is like you know. That's like you know slandering someone's religious beliefs in some ways, to say jokingly. You know it's like a, it's like very much like a part of the whole, like social, physical dynamic of the sport oh yeah, you know, there's like go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, you go um, and then it goes, you know, oh well, this really strong climber also does this and they said it helped, so like we should do it too, you know, and there are just so many limitations to like doing things that really strong people did in order to improve in climbing, because it's like a lot of times they're strong for more like genetic reasons and they're just kind of like a freak, honestly, and it doesn't matter what they do. They could go chop wood and then still climb 514, you know.
Speaker 2:And there's lots of examples of that. But there's there's a really good like international paper on professional athletes and the differences between those athletes and other athletes and it really would suggest that people, those athletes, are genetically more inclined to tolerating physical stress. They can just tolerate more training days than the average climber or average athlete training days than the average climber or average athlete. And so they're and not to blame all genetics they're obviously hard working and they like, oh yeah, have great skills and they just have like all the things that make athletes elite. Right. But following the advice of those people is not a very good idea in a lot of circumstances.
Speaker 1:So it's like it gets very kind of tricky there with who does what and why you should do it yeah, I mean, I could hangboard every day for the rest of my life and I wouldn't be close to as strong as like, uh, what was alice invest that you tested in your, in your office?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, it was just like no one will be as strong as her she's just like you just got that particular set of mechanics that just like make it happen? I have no idea. I've talked to a lot of people. As blows my mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I know some guys that have worked with, like you know, pro level, like pitchers and stuff like that, and just the ability for them to coordinate the movement of like throwing a ball is just it's not just on such a different level, that it's not just like them working hard, but those are genetic gifts and those genetic gifts are why they get, you know, millions and millions of dollars a year to throw a five ounce ball, you know right, and it's way more difficult than people think, you know.
Speaker 1:Um, so we're a little bit over an hour and this has been such a fun conversation. Honestly, I just love talking about this stuff, um, but this is about the time that I bring up this really nerdy quote from Benjamin Franklin an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that's a quote that he kind of came up with or said when he founded the Philadelphia Fire Department. So obviously very obvious reasons as far as why he came up with that quote. If we prevent a fire from burning down the building, even just doing small things can lead to really big changes or really large amounts of risk reduction. So if we were to sum up this entire like slightly over an hour conversation. What would you be your ounce of prevention for rock climbers, trying to prevent or reduce the risk of climbing related injuries?
Speaker 2:I would probably say the incorporate some strength training stuff, like regularly in your routine and for for most people, like doing a little bit in your warm-up for the fingers, is enough.
Speaker 2:Like like overload, it doesn't need to be maximum effort, but it needs to be above 75%.
Speaker 2:And if people can get in the habit of doing that in positions that are not so stressful to the joints and do that for the pulling muscles and the pushing muscles and the you know, the squat muscles, the hip extenders, like in the shoulders, that's probably enough strength training.
Speaker 2:Cause the reality is is some people kind of lean into the strength training and they like love strength training and then they maybe climb equally or, you know, maybe a little bit less. But other people they just want to climb more and that's okay too, but you still want that stimulus on the tissues that's different than your sport, and so for those people I would say incorporate a little bit of it and learn how to do those things with the equipment that you have before each climbing session and then cut every climbing session off when you have a power loss. So like, wanting to climb more doesn't mean that you should climb five days a week, right? Maybe some athletes can get away with that. Most people aren't going to be able to get away with that, and so you know, understanding when your coordination happen, your coordination loss happens on the wall, is incredibly valuable for any climbing athlete and if they people do that, they will get hurt less and they will be able to have more quality sessions in their training blocks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nothing reduces your climbing volume like getting hurt climbing right.
Speaker 2:For sure, and your, your finger strength gains will not be you know um. They will not transfer if you can't get, if you can't climb cause you're hurt either. So you won't even build up, experience those games If your fingers are.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, tyler, thank you so much. I mean, there's always like more stuff I could ask you, but usually I try and keep these around an hour and we're well over an hour now. So thank you so much for sitting down with me today, and I'd love to have you on again at some point if you're interested. So thanks again.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, for sure man Happy to chat. It's good to chat about things we can. I got like my again my kind of niches finger things, but yeah, other. We can talk about shoulders and elbows and other stuff too, if you want. Yeah, elbows would be interesting because there's like a lot of ideas on what to do with the elbow and elbow pain but there's. It just doesn't need to be that complicated. People just make it way over complicated rehab exercises, so that'd be a fun one to talk about.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. And then if people are looking for some of your content or some of your courses, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:uh, probably the most social place I am is on instagram, at c4hp, and then we have a patreon that we started this year or maybe end of 2023, which is where a lot of my like long format like videos will go and a lot of the content for the testing course. Those videos are on there, and the YouTube videos now are only on there, so that's a place people can check out too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I've taken one of your courses. I definitely highly recommend your courses. They're all extraordinarily valid, backed up. Everything you say is very much backed up by science and things like that. So really really high quality content there for honestly not that much money. So I highly recommend anybody go and find you for any more in-depth exploration into all these topics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool man Thanks, appreciate you. Yeah, cool man thanks appreciate you.
Speaker 1:I hope that you enjoyed this episode of the Art of Prevention podcast. If you did enjoy and or benefit from some of the information in this podcast, please be sure to like, subscribe and share this podcast, or please give us a five-star review on any platform that you find podcasts. One thing to note that this podcast is for education and entertainment purposes only. No patient is formed and if you are having any difficulty, pain, discomfort, etc. With any of the movements or ideas described within this podcast, please seek the help of a qualified and board-certified medical professional, such as your medical doctor or a sports chiropractor, physical therapist, etc.