UKC

First time posting!

Started climbing (mostly indoor bouldering) about 4 months ago: just once a week for first two months, then 2-3x/week starting in August or so. Since then have developed tennis elbow and shoulder impingement injuries, although I've done everything I can to prevent them, including:
- always warming up for a solid 15-20 minutes
- reading up on injuries as soon as I felt the tennis elbow coming on (read Dave McLeod's Make or Break)
- seeing a good physio for both
- taking improvers' lessons at a local climbing wall.

HELP!!! What am I doing wrong??!!?? Am I cursed with crap genes?

Is there something I'm overlooking? More technique classes? Did the sessions ramp up too fast? Several friends who climb or boulder and have similar lifestyles (i.e. desk jobs) climbed at about the same rate or faster when they started out, and none have developed any climbing-related injuries yet.

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

In reply to mopa:

To be honest, 15-20 mins warm up might be insufficient especially if you're then throwing yourself at hard boulder problems that are at your limit right after this.

Try a warm up in the region of 30-40 mins. If I'm down the boulder wall I'll often do circuits to warm up. Another good thing to do before you're even on the wall is a quick 10 mins stretching routine. I found that both times I've had a impingement ive improperly warmed up and not stretched at the beginning of my session.

Being new to climbing you are susceptible to injury if you're really going at it. Your body needs time to develop strength and maybe you're just pushing your body quite hard right now and that is resulting in injury. This is why the likes of campus board usage is discouraged for new climbers.

Hope some of that helps and you have a quick recovery. Being injured is never fun. Do the exercises your physio told you to do and take some rest if they advised that.

In reply to mopa:

After a string of injuries I read some of Dave McLeod's stuff where he described a similiar sequence happening to him.
One of the things he recommended was to avoid climbing hard in high temps or humidity.
This rang a bell as all my injuries had been in overheated walls.

I changed to a training venue with better ventilation and that seems to have done the trick.

In reply to mopa:
Hi mate. You didn't mention antagonist exercises. If you're not doing them then you should start, it might be the solution. I wouldn't worry about other people, everyone's body is different. Also, I assume you're doing static stretching at the end of a session? I know loads of people who don't bother, but I don't know how they get up in the morning. It made a huge difference to me. I had quite a few shoulder / elbow / wrist niggling injuries until I got serious about antagonists and stretching. I've had only the odd finger tweak for the past couple of years (touch wood).

https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=7364

http://nicros.com/training/training-articles/antagonist-muscle-training-to-...

In reply to mopa:

It's likely due to a low level of physical conditioning/poor warm up and down tactics. Weaker muscles means higher impact on tendons which means higher risk of stress injury (i.e. injury caused by repeatedly high levels of stress on a specific point). I recommend ensuring that you don't climb more than two days in a row, stretching properly after sessions (google stretching for climbers) and put together a little set of antagonist/core/general strength conditioning exercises to help stabilise shoulders etc. An example of this would be press ups, planks, crunches, spiderman holds (again, google).

I personally would also recommend at least 30 minutes warm up time moving progressively up the grades. A good warm up should start with an exercise to raise heart rate (skipping, jogging on the spot etc) followed by some dynamic stretching before moving into light bouldering or climbing.

You could also consider adding in some route climbing time as the impact of route climbing is very different to bouldering.

Best of luck!

In reply to mopa:

There may be a genetic component (certain blood types) but susceptibility to injury is generally multifactorial so look closely at your lifestyle and training habits. The big take home from Make or Break (at least for me) is that injuries are generally the cumulative result of habitual training/recovery failures and therefore they provide valuable information on how to rejig/finetune your approach to climbing. (They are also a massive pain in the arse but you already know that).
Key things to look at are:
How much sleep do you get?
How good is your diet?
Are you stressed at work or working long hours?
Is your posture good? (Really important given you have a sedentary job)
Do you have a balanced training schedule that includes cardio (active recovery), flexibility work and antagonist training? (the second two are crucial)
Do you have any pre-existing injuries/joint instabilities/muscular imbalances?
How are your training sessions structured? Are you limit bouldering 3 x per week? If so it's not a surprise the wheels are falling off. Personally, when returning from a lay-off I can boulder hard once every ten days, throwing in occasional high volume sessions strictly at lower grades. This definitely puts me in the bottom quartile of training frequency and it's frustrating, but when I get excited and ramp things up too fast I pick up injuries.
How varied is your climbing diet? Is all the bouldering at one centre? Do you spend a whole session working one project? Restricting yourself to two attempts per problem per session is a good ground rule for avoiding tweaks and forcing you to read the sequence properly before starting. If you can, try to do some lead climbing, it's less brutal than bouldering.

In the short term, I'd suggest you rest until your shoulders have calmed down a bit (don't charge into rehab if they're inflamed, you'll piss them off more), just do some eccentrics for your elbows and some wall slides (back off if your shoulders flare up) on a daily basis. Then add in face-pulls, strict form tricep pressups and reverse wrist curls whilst easing back into gentle climbing. Also yoga. Lots of yoga.

Good luck!

In reply to MischaHY:


A question from someone with little knowledge of these things and who has never done any training/exercises programmes.
It seems counter intuitive that weak muscles could strain tendons whereas I've heard of instances where very strong muscles have apparently caused tendons, in eg fingers, to tear or even snap. Why doesn't a weak muscle tear before its tendon? I suppose the word
"repeatedly" is important here.

In reply to mopa:

Without meaning this to sound rude: you're probably just doing more than your body can cope with, too enthusiastically and with poor technique while not recognising the warning signs. Easy done when mad keen on a new thing especially one as physical as climbing.

Experience helps but it's hard won and the experience of others never as useful as you might hope. I'd say do a little less, take time off, spend a little longer climbing *very* easy stuff as deliberately and well as you can at the start of the session, this pays dividends as warm up and in training you how to move your weight around on the holds to get it going where you want it to go. Listen to, feel and learn to recognise the little warning signs that you're getting tired or hurt, the bad skin, stiff fingers, sore knuckles, the twinges in your arms that come when your elbows start lifting as you tire, the creaky shoulders that won't quite do what you want... Steer well clear of moves (and route/problem styles) that aggravate existing injuries, just cheat past them if you can't bear not to climb while they heal. Don't get carried away and go home while you're fresh not knackered. Enjoy the process of learning to move well, solving problems cleverly, not just fighting up something by the skin of your teeth by brute force. Stay hydrated. Get flexible. Learn to find or make rests and enjoy taking them on route. Anyway, that's my experience of a similar string of injuries recurring many times over the years (plus finger joints, lots of those) and how I eventually mostly managed them.
jk

In reply to mopa:

How old are you? How active are you generally in daily life? Have you played sport or trained seriously before? Are you doing any other training besides climbing currently? Do you feel like you're very arm dependent with your technique?

In reply to mopa:

The problem is that in the safe, artificial environment of an indoor wall you are always going to push yourself much much harder than you would in real climbing where there's weather, exposure and risk. Cyclists and runners know that it takes time for the joints to catch up with muscle growth as you develop strength so that beginners are particularly prone to injuries.

It took 3-4 years for my knee joints to feel fully accustomed to the extra muscular stresses and more sustained exercise when I moved from mountain biking to road cycling.

In reply to mopa:


Ok, looking at your schedule, and assuming you have diet (nutritionally complete), and sleep/rest dialled in, what strikes me is that you probably don't program in back-off/deloaded sessions.

I'd imagine you are aiming to climb hard every session. That is fine, but you have to give your body time to recover and 'always pushing' will just push you further towards damage (the training effect is a consequence of damage repair).

Schedule in at least a week of easy climbing every 4 weeks or so. Take a week off climbing completely every 3 months or so. Your mileage may vary depending on conditioning - so this is high level advice.

Look at training 'opposite muscles' (harder in climbing down time, but as an ongoing thing as part of prehab).

Never seek medical advice from the t'interwebs!

In reply to mopa:

Did you get any injuries when you were climbing one a week?
If not then i'd go back to once a week for a while to give your tendons some time to strengthen up, 2 months is nothing.
If you want to climb more than that and you're getting injured then you need to climb easier stuff.

Also how much do you weigh? If you're heavy then losing some weight will ease the stress on your tendons.

It pays dividends to ease up on your climbing when you're injured, otherwise you're in danger of getting chronic injuries that may take a long time to heal (or may never really go away).

In reply to oldie:
In my experience the issues tend to arise around connection points (elbows shoulders etc) where the focal point of the stress on the tendon is. For these points to be injured, it's often necessary that the joint/connection point be put through repeat levels of high stress - these tend to be caused when doing powerful moves with poor form due to lack of power/fatigue. Improving overall muscle conditioning theoretically solves this to some extent by allowing you to maintain good form for longer and thereby place less impact on joints/connection points.

A higher level of conditioning also means that your body is used to recovering faster and will be less fatigued by each move thereby leaving you in a better place to train harder and take on multiple sessions in a row without problem.

For comparative purposes, imagine two people on a campus board. One has strong, well conditioned muscles that allow them to control their movement very well and easily catch holds with forearm/bicep/shoulder and core muscles fully engaged and ready to absorb the impact of the dynamic movement. The other has weaker muscles or an underdeveloped muscle chain (i.e. strong forearms/biceps but weak shoulders and core, possibly a muscle imbalance meaning they favour one side) and therefore whilst able to make similar reaches as the person with a good level of conditioning, they are unable to easily control the dynamic motion and therefore the impact is transferred directly onto the joint and connective ligaments.

The first climber is way less likely to be injured than the second climber when they are performing a similar series of challenging moves, due to their superior muscle conditioning protecting their connective ligaments and joints.

*Disclaimer: Keen climber but certainly no sports science graduate and therefore likely over-simplifying/plain wrong.

In reply to Martin McKenna - Rockfax:

Thanks for that! Amazing community here, didn't expect so many helpful replies.

I should've clarified that 15-20 mins was off the wall warmup; then I usually spend about 10 mins. on the wall on easy routes/traverses.

BUT, I haven't been static stretching before getting on the wall, as I'd read in multiple places that static stretching could actually lead to injury. Do you mean dynamic stretches?

In reply to Wilberforce:


I remember reading this section in Make or Break too, but don't think it had as big of an impact at the time -- good to be reminded of this. Trying to improve my work set-up, but it might be a previous clavicle fracture that's screwing me over, now that you mention it. And have definitely been using each session to try and do some problems at my limit, so that might be it as well. Thanks!

In reply to mopa:

Coincidentally there was a cellist on R3 last night talking about how she injured her elbow though constant practice and in the end had to take a two-year break from, er, fiddling, to allow her body to heal. Repetitive strain injuries to wrists and elbows are quite common amongst budding musicians.

In reply to mopa:

What grade are you trying to climb? Maybe you are trying too hard and getting hurt.

In reply to mopa:
I'm not convinced any beginner needs to stretch before climbing and was always told pre-climbing dynamic stratches can be a particularly bad idea for beginners ( if you end up shock loading cold tendons). Just warm up and do some easy stuff. If anyone has some papers indicating the contrary I'd be interested. If you don't stretch it doesn't seem to be a big problem:

https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/fitness/Pages/Do-I-need-to-stretch-before-or-af...

As others have said, you are probably climbing too hard, too often for your body condition and not stopping when you have signs of problems. Even the best planned sessions, including antagonist excercies, may be little use in such circumstances. Certainly never do similar hard stuff two days in a row, avoid campussing and fingerboards for the first year or so and go easy on dynos; mix up sessions as much as possible with some sessions just training stamina on easier problems (whilst you can maintain good form... stop otherwise).

In reply to mopa:

This is just my experience***

First year I went to font I had really bad elbow pain (Font Elbow) with the style of climbing & a while back I had tennis elbow I couldn't shift:

1) Dips / Press ups work the opposite muscles to the biceps ( antagonist exercises ) this helped me a lot in Font and for the previous 5 trips I never had a problem despite working harder problems each year. Even at an indoor wall this would help to counteract the strain on the biecps (I found as I climb 99% outside that its easier to get injuries from indoor climbing)

2) After 5/6 weeks off from tennis elbow my friend had me back climbing again dropping down to an easier grade, I'd say 1/2 max rest then back on it but take it easy (I now never take long off with an injury I just take it very easy, mainly fingers for me so I tape up and cold water therapy)

In reply to Offwidth:

You're right, static stretching before exercise is a bad idea. It can also reduce your ability to exert power, apparently. Static stretching after exercise is good for recovery and to avoid injuries (as your link describes). It's a good idea to do it before you get injured as the physio will only prescribe it as a cure anyway, at the cost of £50 per hour. Source: bitter experience.