You successfully reduced/eliminated finger joint pain after cutting out __ (fill in the blank)

I want to ask this question to a broad audience after I listened to a recent TrainingBeta podcast interview with Neely's sweet MIL Elyn. In that, she (68 now) mentioned that her finger joint pain (and swelling) went away after she cut out nuts and seeds years ago. For full disclosure, she also cut out gluten and diary for other issues, but nuts and seeds were mentioned in the context of joint pain.

I could find no research reference online about that after a quick search, and if anything, plenty of references mention the anti-inflammatory properties of nuts and seeds, but I am very interested in hearing these anecdotes. 

Do you have a similar success story? I'm most interested in finger joint pain, but if you experienced other joint pain and had success getting rid of it through elimination, please share way. I'm sure it might help some people.

Cutting out climbing is not an answer I'm looking for.

The Moonboard

I have bad stomach problems and RA. My crazy mother and stepmother always thought it was dietary related. I felt like trash whenever they went on wierd diet trends. Now as an adult I eat absolute “trash” food and feel better than ever. Some things can’t be managed away on diet alone or are totally unrelated. 

However I may have swung too far. It is pretty wierd when the McDonald’s cashier asks if this is your second stop today.

By going to PT

"Climbing" - for real when covid hit and I was totally off the wall for a 3 months or so, a lot of stuff got better, including lingering finger pain from a ruptured A2. 

Not by cutting out but rather by addition: My synovitis cleared up quickly after I added heavy finger rolls to my routine. It was relatively mild, but the affected joints were still constantly painful + a little swolen beforehand.

After years of constant finger injuries and never letting my body fully recover before reinjury I, stopped climbing for 9 months. I have not had finger injuries or had to use tape on my fingers since. For me, my body just needed time to recover.

I had it pointed out to me that I would cock my wrists while climbing quite often, which is hard on your hands and wrists. Like full crimping, its stronger, but do it in moderation. Once I actively stopped doing it as much, pain in my hands gradually went away.

Recently eating a much higher protein diet seems to be helping overall in a very noticeable way

Mei pronounced as May wrote:

Cutting out climbing is not an answer I'm looking for.

Doh!

That's the answer I was going to give. Experimental evidence during Covid-winters showed it to work for my finger-joint pain.

pockets

I’ve been prone to soft-tissue climbing injuries since the age of 19. Factors include an overabundance of try-hard, too much indoor climbing due to having a proper job and not living close to rock, and - possibly - poor genetics as injuries started when I was young. 

I’ve tried different diets from carnivore to full vegan, eating very healthily and not at all healthily at different times. My year of climbing hardest coincided with a full-on junk-food diet; I still have a Proustian attachment to pancake mix of a brand I’m too embarrassed to name. I’ve tried various fashionable eliminations; anyone remember the no-fat Pritikin diet? None of these had a noticeable effect on my tendency to get injured. 

I tried intermittent fasting. It was mildly interesting that missing breakfast was not the disaster my mum said it would be, however I didn’t feel healthier, happier or a better person and it was completely unsuccessful as a weight loss or injury prevention strategy. 

I seem less sensitive to diet manipulation than others report, perhaps because my diet is not a disaster in the first place, perhaps I’m not a fanatic about anything, or perhaps I’m a poor placebo-responder sceptic. Caveat: I’ve never tried cutting carbs. which would be a big challenge for me (meat and alcohol are trivial in comparison).  

Although not a dietician I’m a musculoskeletal pain researcher by trade and I have seen a lot of overenthusiastic adoption of guru-led treatment fashions on the back of anecdote and poor research. I am somewhat sceptical of the great majority of nutritional research and marketing. Remember glucosamine? This followed the standard path: vaguely plausible mechanism, neutraceutical so no need for proper testing just go straight to market, frothy endorsement on social media (lots of placebo, regression to the mean and confirmation bias), a few small scale studies giving encouraging results, followed by well-conducted large scale RCTs which showed not better than placebo. Also some discouraging reports of association with Dupuytren's (‘natural’ ingredient so it must be safe right?!). I’m disappointed Eric Hörst has hitched himself to this wagon, Training For Climbing was a major breakthrough in disseminating training knowledge, but his collagen products are based on very shoddy science.

There is a happy ending to this story. 4 years ago I dislocated my shoulder going all out on the last move of a nemesis route. This is a rare injury in an old man, we’re too inflexible and generally don’t try hard enough. Due to nerve damage it nearly resulted in life-changing impairment. This was a wake-up call to get serious about strength and conditioning. I started using my fingerboard consistently, little and often, very slowly progressing the load. UK gyms were closed for months in 2020 and again in 2021 and this was my only outlet. My fingers are stronger. This hasn’t had a huge impact on my grade (trad. climbing at my moderate level isn’t greatly limited by strength) but I feel generally more robust and less prone to aches and pains. The only covariate is I’ve also recently left a disastrously stressful job but the climbing related tweaks had started improving before I stopped this work.

caesar.salad wrote:

pockets

^this, big time, and crimping micro edges. Once you climb crack, you don’t go back. Fingers have never felt healthier. Internally, that is. Externally, some days it looks like I’ve stuck em through a pencil sharpener

over 40 club here, I cut Beer, Milk, and sweets/deserts.  Now 1 salad a day and mostly simple foods.  Dropped 20 lbs and joint issues have decreased.   Also, 2 Aleve before climbing really helps!  

full / closed crimping

I'm in the same vein as Duncan. Tried all the various diets and cutting things out. Nothing seems to make a difference in my propensity to get injured or the speed of my recovery. I found keto to be good for weight loss, and cutting out refined carbs is obviously a good thing for that as well. And I found cutting out acidic, salty, high calorie meals before bed helped me sleep way better. But for direct effects on injury, probably the only significant improvement was found in elimination of alcohol.

Things that actually do seem to help:

- Getting stronger and adding muscle mass around the injured joint.

- Moving more consciously on the wall. Packing the shoulders instead of flaring my elbows out in a chicken wing. Focusing on pulling moves statically instead of wildly slapping for the next hold. Focusing on starting each movement "from the core"

- Improving recovery.

The last one is important. You can have the best PT in the world, and do every exercise correctly, but if you don't recover from those exercises you will never reap any benefits. Similarly, you might move with perfect and exacting form on the wall, but if you don't recover, you will inevitably gain an injury eventually.

For me, recovery looks like this:

- Stress management. Making sure I have a handle on things at work and at home. Long term planning, routines, and to do lists help here. When I know everything is taken care of (or will be taken care of), it's a lot easier to relax.

- Limiting exposure to screens and the internet, especially the more toxic parts like Facebook groups and some forums which will not be named. 

- Meditating. Nothing magical here, just setting aside some time each day to chill the fuck out and intentionally relax.

- Keeping a regular bed time and wind down routine.

- Limiting alcohol intake.

It's pretty simple and obvious. If only I could actually stick to my own advice!

..grabbing holds that hurt my fingers. 

I tend to switch it up and try not to force grabbing tweaky holds too many times in a week if my fingers arent having it. Working on gripping pitchy holds and slopers are great ways for your fingers to take a break but still work on your larger climbing muscles. Finger/forearm/wrist stretching and massage help a ton. And resting more in between sessions to let your fingers rebuild before your next sesh.

I suggest playing around to see what works for you. Gl and dont stop climbing!  

edit: It also seems a little counter intuitive but maybe finger boarding a bit with weight to strengthen that sore part of your finger/hand. I definitely suggest resting heavy though after those hang sessions to let your tendons fully heal!  

In the 1990's I was climbing a lot, and doing routes which were, at the time, considered to be hard. Finger, elbow, shoulder pain, and big toe tendinitis began to plague me. Other than climbing and having a very fun moderate/flexible hours job, I had no burdens of responsibility, so my life was pretty stress free (other than banging my head against the wall when a route was getting under my skin  ). 

I came across a book called Eat Right for Your Type, by a Dr. D’Adamo. Before I go any further, let me say that so far as I am concerned this book is deeply flawed in many ways. He takes what appear to be a sound set of basic ideas and pushes them to extremes. In so doing he comes across as a quack. But I think there might be something to his basic principle; since different blood types are evolutionary adaptations to different human living conditions (for example rural agrarian vs hunter gatherer vs densely urban), the nutritional needs for each type tend to vary. What might be an optimal diet for an A type might suck for an O, etc. 

According to D’Adamo wheat, and specifically gluten, is a significant inflammatory for my old school type O. At that time, I was eating a lot of pasta. It’s easy to whip up a meal of spaghetti in camp, and I was following the idea of carb loading. Around the same time my usually excellent ability to heal broken bones, something that I gave myself a fair amount of practice at, was failing me. A bad wrist break–surgery and all that–was healing well and then stalled out. The doc asked me about diet and read me the riot act when I told him what I ate. With a top notch ortho and D’Adamo both offering the same advice, I flipped my diet from high carb/low protein to high protein/low carbs. I ate the first red meat I had in years. 

Now, it could be that my joint pains went away because the wrist took me out of climbing for more than 8 weeks, but when I got back at it the pains never returned and my climbing got better.

I’m not a nutritionist, and your mileage may vary. Just throwin’ it out on the table. 

Edit: The big toe tendinitis came from jumping off boulder problems and doing hard edging wearing those damned slippers that Firé used to make called Ninjas. Ouch. And I might have pulled too hard a few times...

I added spicy food and joint pain decreased noticeably. Also milk causes some inflammation of my joints so no dairy if I can help it

Nick Budka wrote:

I added spicy food and joint pain decreased noticeably. Also milk causes some inflammation of my joints so no dairy if I can help it

Ha! You just don't feel the joint pain because it's masked by the unpleasant and painful day after effects of that spicy food.

Just kidding. Turmeric in particular, and other spices like paprika, have strong anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Kristian Solem wrote:

Ha! You just don't feel the joint pain because it's masked by the unpleasant and painful day after effects of that spicy food.

Just kidding. Turmeric in particular, and other spices like paprika, have strong anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Im also fairly sure capsaicin (spicy compound) is used in arthritis medication. But u might be right, my searing joint pain may be masked by another sort of pain that starts at one end and migrates to the other throughout the day. 

I had to crash a mountain bike and break my elbow to get a multi year bout of chronic lateral epicondylitis to heal. YMMV.