‘Coming Back’ versus ‘Carrying On’.




Climbing in Pfalz. © Leon Buchholz

Something that bugs me now looking back at past injuries and how I’ve dealt with them is that I’ve had a definite tendency to treat an injury as a complete road block to any kind of training or idea of progression and effectively put my training and goals on hold whilst waiting for the injury to heal. 

I’ve mostly had finger problems which is pretty ironic considering that when healthy and injury free my finger strength is probably the strongest aspect of my profile as a climber. The result of this kind of injury is that it does place genuine limitations on how involved you can be with regular climbing training and as a result I had a tendency to drop everything and just go climb easy trad or similar, meaning the injury usually took way longer than necessary to heal because I was doing very little rehab and often pushing against the boundaries of what the injured finger was capable of in its current state. 

All of this is unhelpful to healing and results in an unavoidable drop in performance. 

I can tell comparing my instinctive reaction to injury in recent weeks versus in previous years that my brain has been rewired regarding this topic. I acquired a mild overuse injury in the classic middle finger A2 pulley and ignored it for a bit due to competitions and trips in the hope that it’d go away on it’s own. After a pretty unsuccessful trip to Spain where I managed one 7c onsight and little else due to being unable to pull hard on smaller holds I decided it was enough and that I needed to dedicate a short but focused period of time to concentrate on recovery in order to get my body back into good climbing shape - otherwise my whole winter would be wasted trying to train around a tweaky finger. 

I set out a simple plan based on fingerboarding, running and aerobic circuits 4x per week alongside introducing a small calorie deficit to lean up a little in this time period. I figured a combination of max hangs to heal the pulley combined with a pretty high volume of aerobic exercise would set a really good base for further winter training once my finger recovered instead of having to build up my whole base again post recovery. I was also hoping that the high blood flow from the aerobic circuits would have a positive effect on the ligament recovery as these ligaments have notoriously poor blood flow. 

At this point I should probably point out that I’ve never done any serious running in my life before.  I was previously told as a teenager that the way my feet rolled outwards when I walked was causing knee problems and that I shouldn’t run unless I wanted to make it worse. This has meant my aerobic fitness when walking or mountaineering has always been pretty crap but I always had the excuse of ‘oh the doctor said no’ to put me off doing anything about it. I was also told to never wear shoes without special orthopaedic insoles lest my poor fragile knees crumble to dust. 

This summer I spent a lot of time walking barefoot and generally not doing what I was told when it came to knee health. For whatever reason this actually seemed to do my knees good so I stopped using the insoles which also improved matters. Based on this, I decided that enough was enough and I would use this opportunity to start running and build a good endurance base ready for next year - the goal being to enjoy and feel ready for the long alpine approaches instead being knackered and weary by the time I reach the base of the route. 

So far I’m about 16 days into my very basic self-assigned program. I started off with my max hang protocol by testing how much weight I could still add on a middle size campus rung (18/20mm or so) and was pleased to find that with very careful loading I could still add 30KG to my body weight for my max hangs - the protocol I used was 6 x 10 second hangs with 2.5 minutes rest in-between. After around four sessions my finger was already feeling stronger so I decided to start increasing the weight by 2.5KG per session until it felt hard again. After several sessions I reached 40KG which currently feels like my limit - so I’m going to stick with this for several more sessions until this starts to feel steady again. For reference my previous max effort on this hold is +63KG for 10 seconds, meaning there is still a fair way to go before returning to previous good form. 

For aerobic circuits, I’ve been using a 6bish circuit for 3 sets of 8 minutes with 8 minutes rest and focusing on maintain excellent body positioning whilst on the wall, maintaining regular breathing patterns and keeping a steady pace whilst allowing for forearm recovery. My feeling with this kind of training is that it is so much more effective when pace is kept steady but constant meaning each arm only has a short recovery period in-between moves, effectively forcing the recovery to be more efficient than say hanging on a jug for 30s in-between several fast paced movements. After the first 16 days this circuit is starting to feel easy to complete all three sets even considering that I’ve also been in a calorie deficit, so I’m planning on increasing the grade to 6cish and seeing how that feels - the really key thing for rehab seems to be to slowly but steadily increase the loading and keep the body in a ‘progression’ state instead of letting it get too settled into a certain difficulty level so my plan for the next few weeks is to continue trickling more weight into my fingerboard sessions as it eases up and keeping the circuit board volume relatively high - if the increase in grade is too much for the finger then I may drop back to the lower grade circuit but wear a small weight vest to add to the difficulty. 

Getting the loading of the running right was a tricky one for me as I’ve got no background in the sport and was really playing it by ear, so I decided the best bet was to go with a set length of time rather than distance and then try to do zone 2 runs as this would be most advantageous for alpine approaching. I decided on a 40 minute run time to start, running outwards for 20 minutes and then following the same route back so that I would have the possibility to increase distance as I got fitter. I noticed after a few runs that I was starting to go further so decided to use Strava to track my pace - so far I’ve managed 7.2km with 180m height gain in my 40 minutes so hopefully I’ll see these numbers increase as the weeks go on - I’m also going to increase my overall run time to 1 hour once I feel like the 40 minutes is starting to get steady. 

The above increase in aerobic loading is having a good effect on body fat combined with my small calorie deficit, meaning I’ve dropped around 1.2kg in the last couple of weeks - hopefully all of the above combined will leave me in great shape for the new year with a strong aerobic base and healthy fingers. The last factor I want to address is working in some conditioning as this seems like a perfect time to build some core strength and shoulder stability - the reason I’ve avoided this so far is that the running was having a pretty knackering effect on my core muscles already, but this seems to be dropping as my body gets used to the impact so I’ll look to build in some rings/bar work over the next few weeks and see how it feels. 

One observation I’ve made from the above is that because I planned well and set goals, broadened my training horizons etc is that I almost don’t feel like the injury is setting me back because I’m using my time very effectively to improve several aspects of my fitness profile that are lacking whilst healing my injured finger. It’s less of a ‘Come-back’ and more of a ‘Carry-on’, which is remarkably motivating. 

I’ll update as the weeks progress - time for a fingerboard session now! 

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