Climbing Tips and Resources

As with any challenging activity, climbing doesn’t come without risk for potential injury, but the reward of adventure, fun, mountain top views, and improved strength and fitness is worth it! The resources below are intended to help you with the following with your climbing:

Help you manage injuries while still being able to climb
Reduce your risk for injury
Maximize your overall performance and fun!

Before we progress to anything specific to climbing, we believe your success will be correlated with your overall health and fitness. Even if you do all the below perfectly, if your general health is poor, your success will be limited. If your general health is good, you may not have to be that specific with the below tips and you may recover and limit your injuries just fine. Learn about our 6 Pillars of Health here.

We reference a ton of other blogs and resources that are helpful throughout the blog. You can review them ahead of time here, or you can review them as they are linked below later:

The following tips and resources are organized to help you systematically determine any pain, mobility, and strength needs you have and how to improve upon them to achieve the three goals above. We start with assessing any pains you do have, specific to the elbow to finger region, to help you try to keep climbing and still be able to improve your pain. Next, we check mobility because even the world’s strongest person can’t move through a range that they don’t have. Finally, we build a foundation of strength. One would think we would only focus on finger and hand grip strength. While that is hugely important for climbing, a foundation of core, leg, and shoulder strength is also vital.

The following tips and resources will guide you to assess your needs and guide you to improve the following:

Managing pain while climbing
Hand, Wrist, and Elbow Mobility and Strength
Core and Lower Body Mobility and Strength
Shoulder Mobility and Strength

First, some basics related to managing pain, mobility, and strength:

Managing Pain while Climbing

What a drag it can be to have pain that keeps you from climbing. Even worse is when a health care provider tells you to “stop climbing” because of an injury. The intent of this section is to teach you how to assess any pain you may have and give you strategies to be able to continue to climb and function while properly managing and working to improve your pain. Since the most limiting pain is pain anywhere from your elbow to fingers, this section focuses on those areas.

Before you go any further, make sure to check out our POP Acronym For Pain/Injury Management Blog to help you know what kind of pain you should “push through” and what pain you shouldn’t. Learn to “know your pain to know your gain”.

Climbing Dosage:

This is really the rocket science of keeping your climbing to the point where any pain you have is acceptable and not worse the next day. Essentially, you could climb the same amount the next day with the same or better pain, not worse.
Usually the best way to do this is to track the amount of time climbing since various routes can take varying times.
You also may need to consider difficulty. You may need to stick with routes with better foot holds to take some stress off of your elbow to finger muscles.
As pain slowly decreases, slowly add 30′ at a time, and some more difficulty until you work back to your desired levels.

Mobility for Climbers

As mentioned, we start with mobility because you need to have full range of motion available to then get strong through that range of motion. In general, stretching is over emphasized in most programming, when strength provides most benefit. Typically areas that tend to feel “tight” actually need more strength and endurance. They’re “tight” because they’re fatigued. As you get stronger, you have less fatigue and feel less “tight”. That said, there is an ideal amount of flexibility for every day life and, in this case, climbing, to maximize performance with less risk of injury.

There’s a ton of different stretches you could do, but don’t necessarily need. The goal of the first part of each body region is to teach you to self assess if you have sufficient or insufficient mobility in a certain body region and then what to do to improve the areas that need it.

Mobility Dosage:

Self massage is typically performed before stretching. The most important part is getting the mobility work in. If self massage doesn’t feel helpful, skip straight to the mobility. If self massage feels helpful, work it first, then work into your mobility/stretching work.
- Typically 1-3 minutes of self massage is sufficient for a sore or painful tissue.
In general with mobility, spending 3 minutes during your day to improve whatever mobility you are working to improve tends to be the sweet spot. This 3 minutes would be in addition to any self massage you work.
- You can either work 1 set of 3 minutes, 3×1 minute, or 6×30 seconds; this can be all in one session or at various points in the day.

Strengthening for Climbers

Climbing is a strong person’s sport! It takes a ton of grip, forearm, and shoulder strength to climb and boulder well. We will also point out later how core and leg strength is important too. Because climbing itself is so fatiguing, it’s very normal for climbers to feel like that is sufficient strengthening on it’s own. The problem with that is that you need to have more strength than just what you build while climbing. If climbing is your only strengthening, that’s kind of like living paycheck to paycheck, eventually you’ll overdraft which will result in pain. Strengthening is like building a savings account so you have more strength then you need. Just like building a savings account isn’t always fun and short term gives you less money to spend, long term, it’s a great investment. This is similar to how strengthening can take some of your endurance out of your climbing short term, but make you better with less risk for injury long term.

Strengthening Dosage:

In general, to maximize strength, pick a resistance that is fatiguing in about 8-10 reps or 30 seconds, and perform 3 sets of it ideally 2-3x/wk.
- 3-5×8-10, 2-3x/wk
To learn more about how to properly strengthen, check out our “How Hard do I push with Exercise” blog.

Now, on to the specifics.

1. Managing Pain While Climbing /
2. Hand, Wrist, and Elbow Mobility and Strength

Now, to help you manage pain while climbing and improve your hand, wrist, elbow mobility and strength, follow the steps below:

Assess what type of pain you have
Learn to modify gripping and hand position based on your pain
Assess if it’s a wrist mobility problem
Self massage to help manage pain
Strengthen your way out of having pain now and in the future

1. Assess what type of elbow/forearm/wrist/finger pain you have

2. Modify gripping and hand position based on the pain you have

3. Assess if you have any wrist mobility deficits contributing to your pain

4. Self massage any painful areas

5. Strengthen any movement patterns that are painful

In general, if we have an “overuse” injury and we want to keep using those muscles the same amount, then we need to have more strength and endurance to tolerate it. It’s important to follow the Optimal Load strategies from our POP Acronym (more info linked above).

Load a little bit more each day
If you have pain it’s an acceptable level of pain that you don’t think will be worse the next day

The other balance with strengthening is that if we have pain because we’re overusing and fatiguing some muscles and then we fatigue those muscles with strengthening, we may not be able to use them in function as much. As your strength improves, then you can steadily also use your muscles more and more with function.

Work your way through the playlist below and work on strengthening any painful movements, or areas you feel you can improve your strength. As these movements get stronger and less painful, you’re comparable climbing holds should become stronger and less painful. The various strengthening tools in the videos are linked here: Grip Strengthening Tools.

Another important aspect of strengthening is working it into your climbing. To improve your functional finger and grip strength you can use various Finger Boards linked here. With these tools, you can work various holds and work sustained hangs or pullups.

Other Pain Management Strategies

If the right amount of optimal load from the above isn’t cutting it, there are various self taping techniques one could use both with the stretchy kinesiotape or firmer athletic tape. At this time, we don’t have videos of those taping strategies, but can customize any taping needs by seeing someone for a Physical Therapy evaluation in clinic.

3. Core and Lower Body Mobility and Strength

The reason we hit this before shoulder strength, is we integrate a lot of core control into our shoulder strength to avoid compensating through our low back. In general, well rounded strength is good for your climbing and overall health and fitness. Check out our 7 Foundational Movement Patterns here as well as the Strength Progress Charts within that blog.

Low Back Mobility/Stretching

Lower Body Mobility/Stretching

Core Strengthening Progression

Hip/Leg Strength Progression

Foot/Ankle Strength

4. Shoulder Mobility and Strength

Obviously, shoulder mobility and strength is a huge compliment to your grip strength while climbing. Check out the videos below to address any mobility deficits you may have and to work on strength as well.

Shoulder Mobility/Stretching

Shoulder Strength Progression

Summary

We hope you find these tips and resource helpful to maximize your climbing performance and to limit any pains now and in the future. Our passion is to try to give people the tools to help themselves, hence this resource. However, everyone is different and sometimes it takes a more custom approach to best address your specific needs. If the information above is overwhelming, or you’re trying on your own and not improving as you’d like, schedule an appointment with one of our Doctors of Physical Therapy and we will help you reach your goals and beyond. No pain, but want to avoid it or improve your overall performance, schedule a Performance Training visit.

Happy Climbing!

Dr. Dane Happeny, PT, DPT, OCS, CF-L1
Doctor of Physical Therapy
Board Certified Orthopedic Specialist
CrossFit Level 1 Trainer