Hooper’s Beta Ep. 127

Intro

Whether you’re a new or experienced climber, you’ve probably encountered lots of advice from other climbers about training, technique, rehab, beta, etc. And often that’s a great thing; good advice helps us learn and succeed. But unfortunately, there’s also plenty of bad advice floating around, sometimes even from super strong climbers, that often hinders or even reverses people’s progress. So in this video, we’re going to dismantle and debunk my top five worst pieces of advice climbers give each other. And since we’re all about positive learning here, we’ll also suggest a better alternative for each piece of advice.

Climb with Straight Arms and Rely on Your Skeletal Structure

This might be the most common piece of advice for new climbers… ever! But before we dismantle it, I want to first mention what I *like* about it.

It is absolutely true that newer climbers, and even some intermediate climbers, have a habit of staying very tight and contracted in their upper bodies, especially their arms, and it’s also true that this is generally not a good thing. It uses up a lot of energy to maintain these positions, plus it doesn’t allow you to take advantage of leverage, counterweight, and momentum that allows strong, efficient movement on the wall. So yes, it’s true that *this* is not good to do all the time, and *this* is useful for many situations.

Beyond that, however, this advice quickly becomes problematic. There are three main issues. 

First, this advice is usually given with little to no context or explanation, meaning it’s unclear how it should be applied. Am I always supposed to climb with straight arms? Should I always be in this super relaxed position? It might sorta work on the easiest, most straightforward climbs, but it quickly leads to awkward movement on anything harder or more complex. We’re now no better off than when we were climbing with bent arms.

The second issue is that, to the layman, the phrase “hang on your skeleton” encourages problematic habit development on the wall. Again, without a more detailed explanation of what people really mean by “hang on your skeleton,” the layman is forced interpret it however they can. Should I disengage all the muscles in my upper body? My arms are loose, so maybe my shoulders should be loose too? I should try to stay as relaxed as possible, right? This is definitely *not* want you want to do, in fact it’s a risky habit to get into that I’ve actually seen contribute to a shoulder dislocation as well as plenty of less severe injuries. 

In reality, climbing should involve a constant cycle of relax, set up, contract, catch, repeat. At the bottom of the motion, my arms are straight and my shoulders may even protract to help me load up. Then the contraction happens, propelling me up the wall. When I catch the hold, I need to maintain enough contraction in my upper extremities to properly control my momentum, often involving scapular retraction to protect the shoulders. Then I’ll find a balanced body position and repeat the cycle over again. This is one important method we need to be practicing, but it’s simply not taught to many climbers. In fact, I’ve seen many times where this “straight arm, hanging from your skeleton” advice becomes so ingrained in people that it actually stops them from completing moves that would be easy if they bent their arms and engaged their upper bodies more.

Finally, the last reason I think this is bad advice is simply because I’m a nerd and it’s not anatomically accurate. The real reason this straight arm position is more energy efficient is not because you’re “hanging from your skeleton,” it’s because you’re simply not contracting as many muscles as intensely as you are when you’re all tight and bent-armed. By minimizing unnecessary muscle contractions, your body literally uses less energy. The PT in me always chuckles a bit when I hear “hang from your skeleton”, because… you’re always hanging from your skeleton. That’s what your muscles and connective tissues are attached to! You can’t stop hanging from your skeleton any more than you stop your tendons from attaching your muscles and bones! You can certainly *relax* your muscles so your joints go into a more passive position, and sometimes that will transfer some of the load to connective tissues, but that definitely is not a universally good thing that we should be doing all the time. That shoulder injury example is good evidence of that.

So in summary, I have nothing against climbers who have given or gotten this advice, but I think we can do much better!

You Just Need Stronger Tendons

This is a huge misconception that keeps getting spread around the climbing community, so let’s be extra thorough here.

For a little background info: by far one of the most common complaints you’ll hear from climbers is, “if only my tendons were stronger.” Maybe they try that one crimpy climb in the gym and get annoyed when they can’t pull the moves, even though the climb is a grade or two below what they’re used to sending. Those holds are so darn small and painful, your finger tendons must just be too weak to handle them, right? Maybe you need to spend more time hangboarding to strengthen those bad boys up? The answer to both of those questions is probably, “no”, but let me explain.

One of the biggest misconceptions in climbing is that grip strength is primarily determined by the tendons in our fingers. This is inaccurate for a few different reasons.

While tendons are extremely useful for absorbing and transmitting energy, among other purposes, they have no motor units. That means that tendons cannot produce volitional force. In other words, a tendon doesn’t flex our fingers. The flexor tendons run from the tips of our fingers down to the FDP and FDS muscles in our forearms. The muscles contract, pulling on the tendons and flexing our fingers. None of that happens without the muscle. You can have the strongest tendons in the world, but if they aren’t attached to an adequately strong muscle, we wouldn't be able to hold onto anything.

“But Jason,” you say, “sure you need strong flexor muscles, but those tiny holds are so painful, it feels like my tendons can’t handle it! Why else would climbers always be worried about ‘popping a tendon’!” Well, to be fair, grip strength is not solely reliant on muscular strength; of course we need adequate strength in our flexor tendons and other connective tissues in our hands to be able to grip hard. However, our flexor tendons are robust pieces of connective tissue. In fact, I’ve never seen nor can I find a single confirmed case study of a finger flexor tendon rupturing due to climbing. Some smaller strains can occur, but those mostly happen from traumatic injuries rather than just crimping hard. Of course, if you have other types of connective tissue or joint injuries in your fingers, your brain will limit the amount of force you can generate with your flexor muscles. But that’s a completely separate issue and is not evidence that your flexor tendons are too weak.

So why are we making such a big deal about all of this? Mainly because the idea that your tendons are somehow “too weak” is just not very accurate or helpful, and it’s important to be accurate when discussing anatomy and training. Imagine you start plateauing on your weighted pullups -- you wouldn’t blame the tendons that connect your lats to your spine, would you? Besides, your tendons are stimulated every time you use the muscle that they attach to. You can’t train the muscle without using the tendon as well. Unless you’re on anabolic steroids, the tendon will thicken and strengthen in conjunction with the muscle, given an adequate stimulus. 

Lastly, if you agree with all that, you might still be tempted to argue that “tendon strength must be important since hangboarding is an effective training tool.” This is the last misconception that one part of the system (aka the tendons) are more important than the other components.. Hangboarding involves an isometric contraction of… what? That’s right, our flexor *muscles*. It also involves a resistance to elongation from our connective tissue. And yes, of course, hangboarding does stimulate the flexor tendons as well. There are indeed times when the pulleys can be more limiting than the musculotendinous structure, and vice versa, however it would still be a mistake to discredit the function of the system as a whole. In fact, in a study on muscle and tendon adaptations, the researchers concluded the “muscle and tendon adaptations appeared to occur in synergy, presumably to maintain the efficacy of the muscle–tendon unit.”

Tendons Take Several Years to Strengthen in Climbers

This myth tends to be used as a justification for telling newer climbers not to use the hangboard or not to climb on crimps. You’ve probably heard that tendons take much longer to strengthen than muscles do, therefore you need to be extra careful during your first one, two, three, five, or even seven years of climbing because your tendons haven’t caught up to your muscles. But, we actually have compelling evidence that this is totally wrong for a few reasons.

Now, research on long term tendon hypertrophy is much more limited, especially directly related to climbers. Part of this is because iut depends on many individual factors like genetics, diet, training history, etc.

Perhaps the simplest evidence is that tendons, when injured, heal in a matter of weeks or months, not years. Even fully ruptured pulley ligaments, which probably get far less blood flow than our tendons, can stitch themselves back together in a handful of months. Given that, in my opinion it would be unreasonable to also assume that a healthy tendon would take years to reach some arbitrary level of adequate strength for climbing. Tendons may appear to adapt and heal more slowly than muscles, but that doesn’t mean we should be worried they’re going to explode at any moment, which leads us to point #2.

The second factor to consider is that we probably shouldn’t be worried about our tendon strength in isolation in the first place. As we established in the previous section, our ligaments, tendons, and muscles are all part of a cohesive unit that is working together. So something like hangboarding can actually increase the adaptation rate of that entire system, which would lead to more robust tissues that are less prone to injury.

The third and most important piece of evidence we should consider is the literal scientific evidence. Research shows that there is an acute molecular response to exercise with regard to collagen synthesis. In other words, when we exercise, the mechanism in our bodies that leads to stronger tendons is activated very quickly. Furthermore, there is data that shows the actual structure of a tendon can thicken in just 4-8 weeks of training. So the tendon is actually getting stronger in just a few weeks!

Suffice it to say that climbers are far too focused on blaming tendons when the real issue may be muscular strength or training errors. 

If You’re Injured You Need Full Rest

A lot of climbers probably encountered the flaws of this advice during the COVID lockdowns. Many were forced to take an extended rest, and when they finally got to go climbing again, they were shocked to find out some old injury was still very much a problem. How could it not have healed with all that rest?

While some acute injuries will certainly need a period of initial rest, these days we have a plethora of research showing that early, safe loading of injured tissue promotes improved outcomes, strength, and pain scores. By just resting, your tissue may heal, but it will likely be at a slower rate which will also mean more muscle atrophy, aka you lose your gainz! And some injuries will just straight up refuse to stop nagging you, no matter how much rest you give them.

Why does this happen? Muscles, tendons, and ligaments tend to need some external stimulus to trigger full healing and strengthening adaptations. Especially when it comes to climbing injuries, often your daily activities will not provide enough stimulus to make those adaptations happen. With strict rest, your body is kind of like, “Why would I spend time and resources healing some weird ligament in your finger when you’re barely even using it? I’m feeling lazy.”

Some amount of pain science will come into play as well. Pain is not as straightforward as you might think; some injuries will continue to feel painful even after the tissue has healed because your nervous system is still “afraid” of high loads to that area. To solve this, you need to re-introduce those loads to the tissue in a safe and controlled manner to teach your brain that everything is A-OK.

So, if you want to heal back to full strength as quickly as possible, using an active rehab plan is key. [1, 2] 

If You Find a Weakness, You Should Train to Fix It

What?? You shouldn’t train your weaknesses?? Hear me out. 

I think this one stems from the fact that once we find a weakness, it feels good to work towards correcting it, like plugging a hole in our armor. We love to see ourselves progress and we love the feeling of accomplishment. As athletes, we also find any challenge to our athleticism to be a threat if we are not excellent. Not only can we jump to conclusions and think that this weakness is going to cause an injury, but a lot of athletes experience plateaus and then think that the plateau must be caused by a specific weakness that they just haven’t discovered yet. As a result, whenever a new weakness is discovered, dramatic steps are taken to correct it. But, after all that hard work correcting the weakness, what happened to your climbing? Did you climb a grade harder? Are you climbing the same grade but feeling like every move is easier? Or, did nothing significantly change?

This is the challenge: not all weaknesses are weaknesses that need to be trained, because not all weaknesses are relevant to your goals -- thus, training those weaknesses won’t necessarily improve your climbing (or whatever your goal is). If your goal is general fitness and you simply love identifying and correcting weakness, that’s OK. But if your goal is to improve dramatically with climbing, you need to question the training and ask “is this weakness actually holding me back?”

The biggest problem with not critically thinking like this is that training every single weakness you come across costs you time and energy that could have been spent accomplishing your actual goals. The other problem is there isn’t a lot of information out there about what weaknesses are relevant and which are not. There are clearly some obvious ones like a weakness in finger, back, or shoulder strength. Then there are ones that are completely overblown for most people, like core strength. There are then those that can be a bit more cloudy like “mobility.” If you have extreme mobility issues, then improving that may certainly be helpful, but if you can’t do a full side split, is that truly a weakness, or do you have adequate mobility?

Finally, how do we assess how much weakness is truly a problem? For example, if you can’t hold a hollow body position for more than 10 seconds, is that a problem? What if you climb V10, but your max weight pullups are only +30% bodyweight? That might be weaker than average, but that doesn’t mean it’s hugely holding you back. Self-assessment is quite difficult with these things as there is no official guide to strength benchmarks you need to hit for each grade. Comparing yourself to other people and averages can be insightful to some extent, but often gets vastly overemphasized and ends up making people chase averages rather than actual self-improvement. Thinking critically about your climbing and training, tracking your results and optimizing as you go, and having an awareness of but not obsession with other peoples’ benchmarks, is the best way to improve in my opinion. And, of course, a knowledgeable coach that takes the time to understand your real strengths and weaknesses can be invaluable.

Sidenote: if you’ve never tracked your training before but are interested in starting, we’ve included a link to a free google sheets template you can use to start today. Of course we’ll have Dan’s info linked in the description as well.

So, should you train all weaknesses? No, you should train relevant weaknesses.

Conclusion

What’s some advice that you’ve received that you don’t find very helpful or that is highly questionable? Be sure to comment below!

Until next time: train. Climb. Send. repeat!

Research

1. Chen J, Zhou R, Feng Y, Cheng L. Molecular mechanisms of exercise contributing to tissue regeneration. Signal Transduct Target Ther. 2022;7(1):383. Published 2022 Nov 30. doi:10.1038/s41392-022-01233-2 [1]

2. Maempel JF, Clement ND, Duckworth AD, Keenan OJF, White TO, Biant LC. A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Traditional Plaster Cast Rehabilitation With Functional Walking Boot Rehabilitation for Acute Achilles Tendon Ruptures. Am J Sports Med. 2020;48(11):2755-2764. doi:10.1177/0363546520944905 [2]

3. Quinlan JI, Franchi MV, Gharahdaghi N, et al. Muscle and tendon adaptations to moderate load eccentric vs. concentric resistance exercise in young and older males. Geroscience. 2021;43(4):1567-1584. doi:10.1007/s11357-021-00396-0 [3]

DISCLAIMER

As always, exercises are to be performed assuming your own risk and should not be done if you feel you are at risk for injury. See a medical professional if you have concerns before starting new exercises.

Written and Presented by Jason Hooper, PT, DPT, OCS, SCS, CAFS

IG: @hoopersbetaofficial

Filming and Editing by Emile Modesitt

www.emilemodesitt.com

IG: @emile166