A few weeks ago I picked up a mild A2 pulley injury in my finger. As many of you know, I wrote a whole chapter in Make or Break about finger injuries, but I thought I would make an episode showing you how I work around it to keep training despite the finger injury. Obviously, copying exactly what I do here is not the objective - every injury is different. It's about the general principle of working around injuries and how you might go about that. I hope it comes across in the episode that finding workarounds allows you to stay in better shape and remove a lot of the psychological pain of getting injured. I’ll make another video further down the recovery process, and if you have questions, do leave a comment and I’ll try and address them.
In June I had my fourth ankle surgery. I managed to get back to climbing E10 in a few months with a few key strategies and tactics I describe in this video.
My annoying tennis elbow improved enough to start bouldering regularly again a month ago. Since then I feel like its stronger every session. A good feeling. In this session I keep on with working through the established problems on my board, building up to starting on the projects. At the end I’m getting close to my Pjs on the fingerboard, which is kind of surprising to me, but great! I also go through some of your questions about training from my last full session vlog episode. If you have more, leave a comment here on my YouTube.
BTW Did you subscribe to my YouTube channel yet? Lots more videos sharing climbing, training, nutrition and nice routes and mountains coming in 2022.
In an age of lots of information about training for climbing, so many either get injured or fail to make progress because of the basics. Right now, as I come back from an injury, I am building a foundation of physical capability. A foundation of sleep, recovery, gradually increasing load and consistency.
A core principle of doing well in sport (or other things) is to find ways to turn bad circumstances large and small to your advantage as much as possible. So many training decision pathways start from this principle, or at least should do.
I got injured. So what do I do now? Some ideas for how to manage the recovery.
The warm up for climbing is fairly simple and there's no need to overcomplicate it unless you have poor conditioning or injury. But there are definitely some basics to get right. This episode (Vlog #35) goes through them.
Many of you then asked how I warm up at the crag, especially when there are few options for warming up. In this episode (Vlog 36) I warm up on the crux moves of my 9a project. Just take it step by step!
Trying hard projects, hard goals, hard training all means encountering problems, setbacks and the mental challenges these bring. How you respond to them determines whether they upset your progress, or propel it. In this episode (Vlog #22) I go through my approach, which is pretty simple.
I had a severe (grade 3) AC joint separation in 2017. I followed a careful rehab programme and was back to reasonably hard climbing (8b) in six weeks and normal climbing (V14) in 12 weeks, well ahead of schedule. In this episode, I share what I did, when and why.
Vlog #19 Elbow Tendonosis, Golfer's Elbow, is a very common injury among climbers. In this episode, I go through ten ways you can both prevent and/or treat this very troublesome condition. I suffered with Golfer's and Tennis elbow for many years before finally resolving it completely three years ago.
Andrew MacFarlane interviewed me on his YT channel, discussing many aspects of how to stay healthy as an athlete, avoid injury and keep progressing in climbing over the long term.
People are busy, including me. This post goes through how I manage busy work periods from a training point of view. I also discuss a common theme related to failure to recover from climbing injuries which I've discovered through the many thousands of messages I've had from climbers worldwide since I published Make or Break.