Pushing ratings while avoiding finger injury..
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...How do you guys go about doing this? I've been climbing for about 2 1/2 years and sailed through .7-.9s during my first year and have been working my way through .10s and .11s since. I find myself at a frustrating point where I'll be trying to push my ratings and project progressively harder climbs, but my fingers are holding me back. I'll often feel soreness in the tendons and joints for a few days after a hard climb, even as the rest of my body bounces back pretty quickly. I've heard that building finger strength takes time and often under paces everything else (technique, other muscle strength, etc), yet I've met climbers who shot through and were leading .11s and .12s within a year, which to me is insane! Any ideas? |
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drugs |
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Genetics, age and diet play a big factor. People that can progress and climb 12s in a year probably have 2 of the 3 going for them. Also, I've seen people climb overhanging jugfest 12s who get spanked on techy vertical face climbing (both indoors and out). |
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I agree with Andy. Also, tendons and ligaments take up 7 years to catch up to newly hypertrophied muscles in terms of strength. You'll be risking a serious ligament/pulley injury if you ignore what your body is telling you. I speak from experience. |
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Ted: I had a similar transition, although I had been climbing for almost 4 years before I started to push into 5.12, so maybe I had more base finger strength. But when I moved into those grades the fingers on both my hands started swelling constantly, and my fingers always seemed to hurt. I couldn't touch the base of my knuckles with the tips of my fingers (think of clenching your fist) for almost a year on each hand. During that time I taped, iced(huge help!), warmed up my fingers before climbing, and listened to my body. When they hurt a lot I stopped climbing, when they just seemed sore and swollen I kept climbing but with focused attention on them and stayed on bigger holds. I also started trying to open grip everything as opposed to crimping everything; this relieved the stress and strain on my fingers while still climbing and building finger strength. It was a long process, took time and energy, but eventually the swelling went away and it felt like my fingers had caught up to the rest of my body. |
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Are you talking about a gym or real rock? I normally see alot of gyms make "hard routes" by using tiny crimps etc. If you are doing harder routes outside it is different and will not cause injury like trying to climb hard in most gyms. |
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Progress slowly. |
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Thanks for the replies, guys! Yeah, that's exactly what I'm afraid of Ryan...sometimes I'll feel myself holding back and not quite locking into that crimp because I'm afraid of hurting myself. The hard thing is telling soreness from injury when it comes to fingers... |
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Ted, I've been climbing just about 7 months. I've had a lot of joint soreness in my fingers, ocassionally some soreness in the pulleys, and almost constant soreness in my forearms (though) it moves around. |
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You're playing with fire if you continue to push it with swollen fingers. It's particularly foolish to do so indoors. |
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Yikes! Thanks for the link. I don't have it nearly as bad as some of the posters there - just a little stiffness - but perhaps I should take a break and/or get a training board. |
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I think that if you want to climb hard that badly, you should move to a climbing town. Climbing hard in a gym doesn't translate well to climbing hard outside. Ive been looking for almost a year to find an easy overhanging jug route on real rock around where I live. I'd say about 25% of the routes at my gym are that style and "grade". Also, most gyms try to keep their ratings as close to their interpretation as possible. This is why some folks say they haven't ever climbed harder than "real" 5.9+ in a gym. At least to me there is very little correlation with a 3 finger "crimp/jug" pull on a 45deg wall that is a 5.12 and a 5.12 that is 2 miles away in the canyon. |
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Eliot Augusto wrote: Also, improve your diet. 3 meals a day, 5000+ calories, a practiced and steady workout.Unless you are a hyperactive teenager, this is excellent advice for becoming obese. |
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Jon Clark wrote: Unless you are a hyperactive teenager, this is excellent advice for becoming obese.Nonsense. That's what I eat. Except I'm also a carpenter moving hundreds of pounds a day. That's down from I used to eat in the Marines, which was about 6,000ish. Most .12+ climbers I've met can pack away lot of food. Granted I don't sit at a desk and I burn a LOT of energy. So the internet advice should be taken with a grain of salt... |
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+1 drugs |
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Eliot Augusto wrote: Nonsense. That's what I eat. Except I'm also a carpenter moving hundreds of pounds a day. That's down from I used to eat in the Marines, which was about 6,000ish. Most .12+ climbers I've met can pack away lot of food. Granted I don't sit at a desk and I burn a LOT of energy. So the internet advice should be taken with a grain of salt...Diet will certainly help but what you eat is critical not just 'more calories'. Realistically you're likely to be well served by more core work and some fingerboarding in a controlled fashion. Most people have plenty of finger strength to climb 5.12 pretty quickly but lack in the core realm it seems. |
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Eliot Augusto wrote: Most .12+ climbers I've met can pack away lot of food.You might as well add taking big dumps as a factor. It'll be just as relevant. |
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reboot wrote: You might as well add taking big dumps as a factor. It'll be just as relevant.Why is the shortest part of my long winded point talked about the most? Climbing hard in the gym isn't the same as climbing hard at the crag. Working out your core strength and maximize it with a diet. |
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Eliot Augusto wrote: Why is the shortest part of my long winded point talked about the most? Climbing hard in the gym isn't the same as climbing hard at the crag. Working out your core strength and maximize it with a diet.Because the rest of the post offered nothing but a large helping of misinformation. Moving to a climbing town is absurd, tell Ben Moon, Jerry Moffat and any number of other legendary crushers that the time they spent on indoor boards wasn't what helped them climb incredibly hard (spoiler alert, it is). If what the dude wants to do is climb 5.12, he has to climb 5.12. Climbing a bunch of 5.10 is all well and good, but will do little if he is limited by other factors (i.e. how hard he can pull on the small grips). Additionally, advising him to keep climbing when tired is poor advice, training to exhaustion will do more damage than good. Also core strength has nothing to do with how quickly you raise your heart rate. These among other reasons are presumably why people focused on your "eet moar fudz" suggestion rather than the rest of it. |
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Jon Clark wrote: Unless you are a hyperactive teenager, this is excellent advice for becoming obese.x2. No one needs those many calories a day unless they are are doing a deca-Ironman, RAAM Solo world record, bodybuilder, or maybe if they are Honnold climbing three walls in a day. For reference, at 160 lbs running at 5 MPH, to burn 6,000C you need to run about 51 miles across 620 minutes. That is about 1.4 miles short of a double-marathon. If you can pack in those many calories a day and you are not working out like your life depends on it, you must have an extremely high metabolism. That might work now, but once your metabolism slows down due to age, the scale will start to go up. Also, you cant just eat any form of crap food and expect it to work. To build muscle, you need protein. So if you are working out like a bodybuilder, you need to eat a lot of meat or use protein supplements. As far as endurance goes, if you start to feel faded you need to increase sodium intake (you loose sodium through sweat) and calories. Sugar helps for quick bursts of energy, although some people crash later in the day so you have to test it. During triathlons, I eat energy gels, which are typically just a gel form sugar, sodium and a few other things that increase calorie density. I think I am going to start using these on hard multipitch routes as well because they are very light, pack small, and very dense on energy and calorie content. |
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ViperScale wrote:Are you talking about a gym or real rock? I normally see alot of gyms make "hard routes" by using tiny crimps etc. If you are doing harder routes outside it is different and will not cause injury like trying to climb hard in most gyms. Maybe you just find a different style of climbing than what you are trying. Go do a 12 slopper route and you should have no finger problems.I'm not saying that I fully disagree with you, but you can certainly get finger injuries on slopers and pinches. Joint capsule and collateral ligament injuries are worth watching out for with those hold types. The bigger problem in most climbing gyms is that the setting is poor. Setters can get away with setting crimps and pinches without proper body positions; the effective incut allows climbers to just yard through. Because they are effectively unusable without proper setting, poor slopers tend to be the least injurious hold type in the gym. If pinches and crimps get set with as much forethought as slopers the climbs will be both better and safer. |