EP 12: Blame It On The Boards?! - with our new co-host, Paul "Huffy" The Climbing Physio Houghoughi

(upbeat music) - Hi, and welcome to the Climbing Injury Podcast, hosted by Stephen Christofston, Paul Hugoge and myself, James Walker. Where facts are few, experts are many, we want to use this platform to discuss both scientific research as well as our own experiences working with climbers of all age groups, genders and abilities. I hope is that through sharing of knowledge and experience, we can understand climbing injuries better, treat them better and hopefully prevent some of them from happening in a first place. As we're all physiotherapists, talking about injuries and injury prevention, this podcast will be aimed at health care professionals working with climbers. But hopefully, there will be something here for all climbers curious about climbing injuries and injury prevention. Feel free to drop us a message with questions or subjects you would like us to discuss. Enjoy. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hi everyone, and welcome to a another episode of the Climbing Injury Podcast. And today, we have a bit of an announcement about the podcast, we have Stephen with us, which, as you guys know, is normal. Hello, Stephen, how are you doing? - Hey, yes. - Good to see you again. - And we also have Paul Huffy with us. Hey, Paul, how are you doing? - Yeah, I'm good, it's like to be here. - Nice, nice. So, you guys who listen to the podcast will know that we have interviewed Huffy before. But what we have actually decided between the three of us is that Huffy is gonna join the podcast and be a sort of co-host with myself and Stephen, which we're all super psyched on, 'cause many of you listening to this podcast and interested in climbing and climbing injuries will know of Huffy and his work in his background. So, to have his kind of expertise and his thoughts about all of the things that we talk about in this podcast is both exciting for us guys. And I was also gonna be hopefully really useful for you guys as a listeners. So, for anyone who kind of doesn't know you, Huffy, if you wanna just give us a brief kind of introduction again, and then also, I guess we can all talk about the conversation that led up to us kind of thinking it would be cool to get you on board with the podcast. - Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm psyched to be jumping on this one. So yeah, my name's Huffy and I was born Paul, but I'm quickly called Huffy and that's just stuff. And physio second, climber first. And like you guys just, yeah, blended the two quite quickly into climbing and found climbing was just a really sort of natural home for the work. And in terms of experience, I started in elite sport outside of climbing actually just in mixed martial arts and professional rugby, so I ended up working with some of the England rugby team through mixed martial arts, which is interesting. But the whole time I was climbing and studying to be a physio as well. So when I started to get more experienced with physio, I just found being around climbers much like you probably get asked a lot about climbing injuries and you automatically get exposed more to that. And they're obviously very interesting climbing injuries. They require some upskilling and also understanding what climbing does to your body. And the more you do that learning and the more you climb, the more it feels natural to lean into that. So that's kind of taking me to some cool places, a couple of Olympics and like you guys just regularly seeing climbers in clinic whilst trying to stay psyched and get some time to climb yourself. - Not always easy. - Not always easy indeed. You have a long professional record working with lots of professional athletes. And even though I think we all agree that working with some of the best athletes in the world doesn't necessarily make you a very good physio. I think this is definitely the case for you. We've had some chats before and I really respect my things you put on social media and our discussions. I'm really excited to have you on board. And this sort of like function as a study group for the three of us, I guess. It's not that many physios where we can exchange ideas and like the whole climbing injury podcast came to be alive just because Jameson and I had different approaches to the same condition with similar outcomes. So I think now we have so much to learn just by discussing things and throwing our thoughts into the mix. So I'm excited to have you here. That's what stood out about this podcast actually. And it was the podcast on pulleys if people haven't listened to that. It's definitely worth listening to because it was refreshing to hear two people really openly discussing and disagreeing, not disagreeing, but differing in their approaches very respectfully. I thought this is just such a lovely breath of fresh air. Like what better platform than this? I don't know any that way. People come at it from totally different angles but very much respect those angles. There's so much learning in the middle there and I just thought that was really good compared to say social media where things can be taken out of context and people don't often spend the time to listen for extended periods. So I've always liked that about this podcast and the idea of that in podcasting in general. So it's really great to be on the panel now. I'm really looking forward to being on the other side of the questions and actually half the time I'm just wondering about the person questioning me how they do things because so I can learn from them. So I get to do that now which is ace. - Nice. - Yeah and I think the one of the things that we also chatted about before when we're talking about you kind of coming on to the podcast was our sort of outlook about learning and wanting to sort of push things forward, I mean, for example, me and Steve, we don't really have any agenda of this podcast. We do it because we want to talk about these things and we want to get some hopefully good information out to people who are listening in the climbing community. But let's be absolutely honest here, like us guys kind of see more climbers regularly than a lot of people, there's not a huge amount of sort of climbing physios in the world, I suppose, really. If you kind of really think about it, it's just very niche deal and let's be absolutely honest here, the sort of evidence base and the actual solid research that completely categorically backs what we do and what advice we give is just not really there. I guess a lot of us originally kind of just kind of go off the research that Volker has kind of done in the past, but when it comes to the actual therapeutic guidelines for physiotherapy and what to do in certain situations, it specifically for climbing, it's not really there. So I think one thing that we all have in common is that we don't have any sort of agenda or kind of emotional ties to the way that we do things and we're completely open to ideas about doing things differently with the sole purpose of just trying to improve the information out there and push the sort of knowledge base forward and I think certainly, from my point of view, that kind of seems like is always apparent with yourself. You know what I mean, a lot of this with working with climbers is a passion first, isn't it? We are, I think we're all the same where we kind of sometimes are spending a lot of time getting back to people and taking our time up and answering questions for people 'cause we just really sort of love what we do and I feel like this hopefully with you on board as well can be a real platform to open up these discussions but without any sort of ideas of your wrong guy and right type thing, just a simple case of, oh that's interesting, let's maybe think, well why is that and why do we not think that and you know what I mean? Just being open to ideas really. - Yeah, agree, definitely. And I think it could be fun today just to discuss in general like board climbs because obviously there are more people climbing and there are more training boards out there like the TB2, the moonboard, the kilter and obviously the spray walls and then you see more injuries related to climbing on boards. And so I've asked myself the question, is it because of the board or is it because of the load management that people do or do not do whilst climbing on the board? So a trend that I see is like more PIP related, PIP joint related pain from kilter board and I can't really say that it's because of the kilter board and it's designed but do you guys see the same trend and if so on other boards as well? - Well, I certainly see kilter boards factoring into new PIP joint symptoms. Usually it's not traumatic, normally it's insidious it takes a while to come about but the number of people who start getting middle finger joint pain creeping up on them usually at three months after starting to kilter board. There is definitely a correlation there and you're going through the subjective and sometimes I've called it out and said if you start climbing on any new boards like the kilter board and they'll say, yeah, I have actually but a few months before so they don't really have it and then my desire is a causative factor for their symptoms but it's sort of a traditional so I overload over time seeing rotational stress starting to get that to that joint. It's definitely something I see correlated with the kilter board and I think we talked about whether it's the boards fall. I've talked to Tyler Nelson about this and it's never the boards fall, is it? It's always the person on the board just to like protect kilter a little bit. But that speaks to what we've been talking about in the messaging about the volume and intensity and not burying it and things say. Yeah, 'cause it's like, well, it's not my intention to be harsh on the kilter board but for my own experience climbing on boards like in also we have moon board and kilter board there has recently come up a TB2 an hour away but so that's like my experience from it for my own sake and I definitely feel that my joints are more stressed after a session on the kilter board than especially on the moon board 24 set. So I also think that there's something with the hold selection where I find that the kilter board is way better is more useful on like 45 degrees, maybe 50 degrees than on less steep angles. And I find the holds to be fairly good like it's a lot of positive incot crimps on it. So it allows you to hold, like to grip holds or hold grips with like a very narrow angle in the PIP joint whilst rotating around it and cutting your feet off. Whereas I don't seem to find that same climbing pattern on say a moon board 24 set. So that's one thing like the hold selection and I also think that it's easier to do higher volume on a kilter board than on a moon board. And that's my personal experience. I don't know if you've experienced the same whilst climbing on the different boards. - I haven't got many kilter boards near me. James, you've got some near you haven't you? - Yeah, there's a couple in Sheffield. There's one at the climbing hango, which is a fixed kilter board at 50 degrees, I think that is. And there's also one at Awesome Walls, which is a movable one. So it goes from like 30 degrees to 70 degrees, I think. That's always fun putting it at 17 sort of climbing in like a roof, it seems a bit daft, but it's yeah. And I don't know, I just think it's really it's an interesting one 'cause yeah, it's really hard because I'm just saying all those boards, like I see a lot more people, so let's take Awesome Walls, for example, there's a kilter board and then literally behind it there's two moon boards. And whenever you go up there, everyone's always on the kilter board. And I think it's just easier, I think it's more accessible. You can check the hot, like just starting often getting into the board, like the moon board, I think it's just much harder to get from the bottom to the top of. So it'd be an interesting thing to say, well, are we seeing more kilter board stuff because of the holds and the in-cut nature of it and people been able to sort of do more on it and cut loose on it? And it's also a bigger board, like maybe more sort of moves on it, or is it because the type of people who are climbing on it that it's more accessible and there's maybe just more ability to do it and people sort of climbing on the moon board is less really. Yeah, I'm not really sure the answer to that one. And actually, before you came on, hopefully we'd just quickly have the chat. And the new 2024 moon board, I climbed a lot on that last summer in the school room. And it's pretty hard to like cut loose on it, really. It's quite tensiony and it's kind of more open-handed. You compare it to the 2019 set, the black, white, and yellow. Is that all right? 2019, 2016 set, the moon board. I think it's the 2016 set of the 2016. Yeah, it has some woodies on it as well. Right, OK. Yeah, that one is-- you can get your form kind of underneath every hold and just really dig in and sort of not let go. And it's quite crimpy, really. Whereas the 2024 is-- Yeah, it seems to be hard to kind of swing around on, I suppose. And I wouldn't be that part of it. A lot of people who I work with, who have pip joint symptoms, who switch onto the new moon board set, say that their finger joints don't hurt as much. I think it's probably because you need to be body-strung to not rotate because the movements are lower-- I don't know the word for it, but with a kilter board, I've found when I climb on the kilter board. If I drop it, then I know what I need to do. I just need to try a bit harder. But with the moon board stuff, it's more like outside, isn't it? So a lot of the forces are absorbed in your body, not rotating in order to use the hold properly. And I think that probably protects your joints to some extent. I agree with that. And I think there's a mix of balls, really. And you can see small kids going onto the kilter board and be able to climb on it on 45 degrees. And not to take it away from kids, because they are a fantastic climbers, but they can hook onto things. But you don't see them do the same thing on a 2024 set on the moon. So it's both more accessible, and it's easier to do bigger body-in, because you can just drop a grain and drop a grain and drop a grain. And you can still climb on the same wall angle on the same holds. And like I said, you could just pull harder, generally, on a kilter board, compared to a moon board. Right, so magic wood. What's that? What's that? Magic wood was like that for me. We're no one there. I could tell whether I was going to do a problem after two or three goes. I could tell-- I just need to be try a bit harder. And I would do it. But yeah, on grit stone, for instance, or something like that, I've never felt like that. And maybe they're comparable in some ways. I wonder how much, obviously, the moon board and the kilter board kind of-- well, the kilter board's a bit of a hybrid, isn't it? Because it's got some footholds on it. As in, the moon board, you've just obviously got your kick board at the bottom, and then your feet follow hands. Whereas the kilter board, it's got the hybrid of sometimes its feet follow hands, but then sometimes the little footholds are in. But I wonder whether the boards that are feet follow hands, where, obviously, the feet are pretty big. And obviously, some people can just like-- some people can just use any feet, for example, and just kind of climb on it. But they can still put a lot of stress through their hands and jump around on it and stuff like that. Whereas I certainly remember when I first moved to Sheffield and was climbing on the worksboard, for example, the old worksboard, where the compole is like-- and you couldn't put your feet on the feet, on the handholds. And it was just the wooden little sphere things. And let's get in from the bottom to the top of that board. Just in any holds, it's really bloody hard. So I don't know whether the actual type of board of being able to use the handholds for feet. Do you know what I mean? I wonder if that's part of it as well, just the accessibility of having these big feet and kind of just being able to make it up, whereas old school boards, you're just like, well, you can't just put your feet on these non-existent sort of slippery spheres. Then you can't really get much stress through your fingers, because you're not strong enough to do it. I don't know. That's a good-- could be a point with it as well. I mean, thinking about that with the increasing shoulder injuries as well, that like, steeper bulging used to be sort of like reserved for the elite climbers almost. Like, you had to have all the steeper walls back in the days were set with like, pretty shit holds. So you couldn't like have climbed for a year, and then maybe going to the works are going to whatever wall, and just boulder on 50 degrees, bouldering wall, because the holes were too bad, whereas now you can do a lot of bouldering on steep walls, on pretty massive jugs, and just swing around on it. So I think accessibility has a lot to do with it, and that you could also like have climbed for six months, and then go and do almost horizontal roofs on jugs and swing around. And the finger strength is not necessarily the limiting factor anymore. You know, I was thinking about whilst we were talking about this, and we can actually, I think, divide the types of problems we see in pip joints with kilterboard and other boards. For me personally, I see different types of pip joint symptoms in a kilterboard. It's much more coming from the joint itself, in my experience. And I think that speaks to the fact that the holds are bigger, and often cut around the level of the pip joint. So when you do cut loose, you see a lot of rotational stress in that pip joint in particular. But because the holds are quite good, you don't go into such high flexion angles, like you would say, on a ratty little boulder. So I do see less software problems, like central slip problems and lateral band problems over that pip joint, simply because the hand isn't quite as high angle, but because they're bigger, and it never to be because the holds are a bit bigger and to make it hard, you need more distance between your hands, you need to jump and cut. That's where I think a lot of the rotational stress comes into the joint. So I think we can actually divide it into joint-based stiffness more so than overload of central slips and lateral bands for that reason, makes sense. So how is a climber then supposed to know what an OK volume and intensity of starting a kiltoport is? Because you've basically sat in front of you, Huffie, and you've said, did you start a kiltoport bored in within the last three months? And they're like, well, yeah, I started three months ago, but surely that's not got to do anything, because it's only been sore for two weeks. Right, there we go, you start a kiltoport in three months ago, and they're like, OK, but it's been fine for two and a half months. So how was I meant to know that I was doing too much? Is it a case of the writing was on the wall from day one? And it was because of their volume and intensity, they were always going to do that. Is it because they've got better at the kiltoport in the last two and a half months and the last two weeks? If, do you know what I mean? Like, where's the learning point from that climber? And if they've got a mate who's going to start on a kiltoport, what would they say to their mate to stop them getting pit joints in three months? It's a question, that. Yeah, I think one of the things that you can put a fire out in their minds about is that it took a while to come on. So it's-- and the ground scheme of things how long they've climbed for, it hasn't been that long. And so it's usually just changing the way you climb, should see it just gradually getting better. Because there's no actual injury here. The joints just a bit stiff. That's always a nice way to reframe these things, isn't it, when it's kind of come on slowly? You're right, though. And I think it's probably a lot of the answers to that question depends on the experience of the climber. Maybe they've climbed for 20 years, and they've never been on a kiltoport before. They joints are already a bit stiff. So it's much more likely to get quite a lot stiffer, especially if they start having fun on it, like Cian says, and just do more. So that would be one type. Then the others would be just climbers who probably quite new to the game. And just generally have poorer conditioning, poorer core, so they're cutting more, which means their fingers end up being isolated more, and they don't have the requisite control outside of everywhere, basically, and their fingers are getting hammered. But there'd be lots of different reasons for their fingers to get hammered. But like I say, if you're listening to this, and you've been on the kiloboard and your fingers are stiff, it's likely something that can slowly get better if you can just answer the puzzle that you've just presented there, James, you know? And I sort of found it that on a kiltoport, like even though I've climbed for many years, that I still have to be-- I have to treat the kiloboard more the way I treat a spray wall. So I'm more selective on what kinds of holds that I use, and more selective on the boulders that I pick. And also, for me, at least I like to-- I like to full crimp when I can. So I have to approach the kiloboard trying not to full crimp. So there will be boulders that I know that I could do if I full crimped it, but trying to half crimp it instead. Focus more on like the pinches and the more slope and stuff, so where you can't cut your feet in the same way. Whereas on a moonboard, I could treat it more as a-- I just want to project these boulders to a certain degree and try to really hard on them in the form that they are. So I think maybe the kiloboard with the whole selection, it has that people might want to be a bit more critical in what holds they use and what boulders they try. So not that everything is like doing big box moves on positive in cuts, but try to mix it up a bit more. So I think that's at least one way to reduce the stress on the PIP joints climbing on the kiloboard. Well, that's a really interesting point, Nesteen, because the idea of being selective about what holds you use on the board, I really don't think many people will resonate with that because of the modern day sort of app-based system. Just flick it onto the next one and you're off straight away. Obviously, when we all sort of started board climbing, it was a little booklet, handwritten sort of-- remembering where the holds were and like, you know what I mean? Like taking that time to do that. And yeah, I think maybe potentially the app-based system is just flicking through to the next one. I think, oh, this looks good. Let's just go on it and also maybe degrading of that being a little bit all over the place and people just trying hard and stuff like that, whereas when you used to have the old booklet where you spent time, which holds, again, A2 did it whatever. And also they were pretty tried and tested sort of problems that people had been doing for a long time. I'm not sure, maybe not, but I wonder how much of it is just to do with that sort of the ease of which it is. You can just get onto your app and just crack straight on. And you can do a lot of volume of problems in a session without any sort of fought, really. Essentially a part of it as well. I think you're right. If you really skim through that app a lot of the time when I've been on sessions with people, they're looking for problems that allow them to flex their strength. I think the killer board's very good for, like, if you're good at jumping between holds, you can have a really good session on the killer board trying hard problems. And like you say, it's easy to select lines that kind of feed that little bit of psych. But with the moonboard, I think it presents movements that aren't natural to you, and you have to learn that movement. And you could easily turn a killer board into a moonboard session. But what I notice on the killer board is the feet are always in the right place to make your arms move work really hard. They're really in a place that require you to do an awkward move and keep your foot on. Normally it's awkward for hold jump and swing, whereas on the moonboard you can't do that. It's the whole time good enough. And so the feet positioning often allows you to move as gymnastically as possible, which isn't always the best thing for getting body stronger. We know when you climb outside, you need to be body stronger. Your feet can't cut. And that's something that I think don't think translates so well. Yeah, I agree with that. And especially the movement thing on the moonboard compared to a killer board, I think, is important. I think it's easier to learn moves quick in a killer board session, which makes it easier to have another goal and another goal. It's like a killer board. And any board session, in my opinion, is high intensity training. And if you were to go and do that lift as high intensity training, you would stop the session as your power dropped. So if you could barely lift the amount of kilos of the ground, like that set is done. Whereas if you learned the movement really quick on a killer board, then you could just keep on going. Because even though you're slowly getting powered out, you don't necessarily feel it in the same way, because you can still do the moves. Whereas I find a lot of the boulders on the moonboard harder to learn quick. So you get more smack in the face if your power drops. So that could also maybe be a reason for it. Yeah, I mean, you touched on a couple of things that are interesting to see. And the comparison of the gym, the other thing that you wouldn't do in the gym is if you've tried really hard and powered out, you wouldn't then go, well, let's drop the grade. Let's put 70 kgs on the deadlift rather than 100 and stick around for another 45 minutes doing kind of easier deadlift. Which I think a lot of people do on the boards. They just like, OK, I'm getting a bit tired now, but I'll keep going. And I suppose really the reality for that is because it's just fun. You're with your mates, you're on a board, it's just fun. Whereas conditioning work in the gym is a little bit of a means to an end. Like I'm sort of some people enjoy it in a psych, but they're not going to do, imagine doing like three hours worth of deadlifting. Just like one thing where I was like, the poor climbing, you just stay with your mates and you want to do it. And it's fun and you're all encouraging each other and your psychs and like whatever. And I think that's it and what we're not trying to say here is that like one board is better than the other because like you said, hopefully, like it's not the board's problem, it's the climber's problem. Like you could give yourself any injury you wanted. I mean, if you did some sort of I was to talk about like elbows or whatever, I'm like, OK, great. So let's give myself some elbow pain, like, yeah, great. Wait, it pulled up perfect. Just start doing that every other day or something like that. Like some exercises or types of climbing or whatever. Potentially will trigger injuries more than others. But you could give yourself a PIP joint problem in multiple different ways. It's it comes down to that approach and your load management at the end of the day. So yeah, again, one of the things that we've just talking about before we jumped on this was was the idea of how sometimes climbers and we could link this to board climbing quite nicely is that their approach to sessions is kind of full till every session. And Steve, I think you said in the previous podcast, if we compare it to runners, climbers sometimes would be the equivalent if they were runners of trying to run as fast and as far as they can every session, which obviously from a running point of view would be pretty mad. But sometimes climbers, it's just like cool, let's just hammer at this session. And then day later or two days later, we, we, they do that again. So so in terms of like, if we take boards, for example, like, I suppose what we're saying here, like a variation in different boards, because a lot of people have their favorite board and they climb on that pretty much exclusively, just a variation in the type of board would be one way to potentially mitigate these type of issues. But, but going back to what I'm just saying here is what, what, what do we see in clinics generally in terms of climbers approaches to their weekly session and their overall load management? Do we think climbers are good at that or do we think that can kind of not be so good of climbers and cannot contribute towards these injuries? Well, I think climbers generally have got a pretty fixed state of mind Wednesdays, I'd kill to board weekends, like, or climbing, you know. And when you talk to them about when they went outside, they often say, I didn't feel that good. And that's normally the precursor of something going wrong, which so it's not only in what they do in the week, but it's only that it's also their ability to not not necessarily listen to warning shots that are carrying into the session. So, I think it's a combination of external, you know, intrinsic and extrinsic factors. What they do to their body and the way that they listen to their body in the moment where things don't feel quite right, that kind of contribute overall to something not going so well. And I think so both the like auto regulation, like that skill, obviously, that you're able to do that both within a session and within a week or within a training cycle. But also climbers, like climbing being a very varied sport, like, you could vary a lot and you could even vary a lot on boards. And then obviously grip selection is one way to vary. So the more varied the grips are on the board, the easier it is to vary. But then that comes at the cost of the specificity. So if you want to use say a kill to board for building up a body strength, then obviously the whole selection needs to represent that. But I think a general climbers aren't very good at using the natural variation that climbing provides. So it's sort of like just keep on doing the same thing over and over again. And maybe without like an intention on what that training session should represent. So like if you go on a moonboard or a kill to board or a TB2 and your focus is to build a finger strength, then the type of climbing needs to represent that and not being everything else. So that's one session. And the next session could be on the same board with a different approach. So I think like to have climbers understand that you could vary the way you treat a session, even on the same training installation, that would be better in the terms of load management, especially when it comes to the extrinsic factors. Yeah, and and even I don't know like the climbers have de-load weeks. The climbers have any weeks that are less intense than the previous week. Like recreational climbers. I don't I'm not even sure. Yeah. I don't know you guys as a steam with your coaching and your experience at the elite level who feel like from an outside and I think from a sort of more sort of normal climbers point in view, they might look at the sort of really high level guys and think, wow, they train or climb six days a week, wow, that's that's a lot. And I wonder how much of the decision of how much to sort of more regular climber climbs per week and how many hours of climbing they do. Like how do they make that decision and when, do they should they have de-load weeks? Like would that just help generally with injuries and why have a de-load week? Like what's the point? So yeah, it's an interesting one about like how the climbers make these decisions about what the correct sort of volume or intensity of their week or session or month is. I don't know what guidance they can sort of pull from on that. It's harder with someone who works full-time and is really psyched and trying to push your performance. You often don't have many goal posts to move so you can only go climbing at seven o'clock till nine o'clock on a Tuesday and a Thursday for whatever reason because life is waiting outside the climbing wall with family and kids and things like that and I think that alone makes it harder to have things perfectly on a plate as to when to train and just trying to make the most of that time and be patient if you've only got say four hours a week to train on the board with the weekend just as a smash and grab. Just that alone, that pressure cooker is enough to make it harder to be objective about how much you're pushing it because you know when you go climbing, your cup of happiness is full, it's overflowing but the cup of tissue adaptation is just like 1% to 2% full if you try and to do something new and those are so out of kill with each other. So if you've got a narrow window to do, was that a pun out of kilter? No, it wasn't, I'm terrible at that stuff, I didn't even realise I was doing that. It's hard to be objective and that means more than ever you need to really think about what your month is going to look like and where you want to be in a month's time if you've got a project or a trip in particular you've got to really be extra smart because people like Toby can train throughout the day whenever they want with very good resources and that makes it way easier to build capacity in a sensible way especially if you've got good people around you. So it does require extra work if you're recreational in my opinion to actually start building capacity meaningfully and performance over say a period of 6 to 8 weeks, you know. And I'm not really sure about the D-load weeks when it comes to like regular climbing, it obviously makes sense for athletes like you say with Toby or others that like if they go, if they study then that's so to say the only obligation they have outside of only training. And then so you could just plan for three weeks of hard training and then know that the fourth week will be easier which makes sense in how to build a training programme whereas the average climber with jobs and families maybe and all of these things I would be more in favour of just having had the continuously in training like instead of like really having to push through the next two weeks even though you're fatigued because if not then the D-load week in three weeks doesn't make any sense. So very often like the D-load weeks they just happen they you'll have sick kids or you'll be sick yourself or there's a week where you're just more fatigued and then all right then that's the D-load week just just slow it down that week and then try to build it up but try to avoid like the big the big tops and drops in in loading pattern I found to be a more preventive measure for the average climber compared to like a planned D-load week because things rarely go as planned. I think the more you build a vocabulary on a board as well the more you've got some sort of like frame a reference so I've got the board where I climb there's like ten blocks and I know I can do all those ten blocks in the session if I'm going well and if I can't then I'm immediately taking note of what block it is that I can't do I'm thinking well why is that why am I shaky in that position where a month ago I was smooth and I'll always think what do I need to change in this session and perhaps over the next couple of days to try and get whatever is not working properly there back up to speed and what can I do to move around that and then if you've got like say a hundred blocks on that board if you climbed a little long enough then you've always got ways to work around that and also to check in with way right so I do think spending time on a board and getting really into it is really useful in that respect if you learn to listen to your body in real time I definitely recommend people do that yeah but I think I think of you that comes down to the um the mentality of what you've just said and and if you're sort of rational and sensible like you've just said and you've kind of gone that's interesting I wonder whether I can work something out and why that isn't used to accept it I actually sometimes thinking people have their personal benchmarks on boards and they're not feeling so good they will just try really hard and push and sort of grit and grind through it and do you know what I mean so it's it comes down to that mentality of how you take that information and one go okay well this is just clearly a sign that I should probably back off this session or maybe just look at something else as to why whereas I think sometimes climbers will just take that as they get frustrated at that and they just push through it and pull harder and when it comes to saying injuries that can pretty obviously lead to flare ups and and and that sort of thing so yeah no I think that's that's interesting like since you mentioned since you mentioned grit like Angela Duckworth wrote like the book on grit several years ago and like you say that if you if you show off to a board session and you feel weak then all right just have grit and pull harder and get through it and then a couple years ago a woman named Annie Duke wrote a book called quit like really emphasizing that sometimes you just you would just need to quit like it's like grit yeah grit has it has some some constraints to it like how much how much could you really like just push through and I think when it comes to injuries and pain conditions like we see people on both sides of the spectrum like you get those that are very fair avoidant and probably could use some more grit to like work through stuff and then you have the more like enduring types that have way too much grit so they just keep on running and hitting the same wall over and over again and just pushing pushing pushing and maybe they should not necessarily quit but at least like slow it down a bit and do something else and like obviously that have that feeling of your body and how it responds and pay attention to that and just for anyone listening who lives in Sheffield like me and is near the Pete district he is not talking about grit stone here he's talking about determination wait I generally when you first said that someone written the book I was like what a grit stone I'm not red this one I do I do think there are books written about grit climbing as well though but it wasn't that I referred to yeah yeah exactly yeah well that said but then the problem is is like listen um oh sort of climbing community is is bill on grit the determination version of grit and and try and hard um it's glorified isn't it or is that just any sport you know what I mean like just try harder like you know moons um what's moons what's on the moon board train train hard climb harder you know just try hard keep you I don't know like it feels to me like climbing is maybe I don't think it's old school I was going to say it's a bit of an old school thing of just like try really hard and whatever but you have to try hard climbing but this is exactly what we were just saying a second part of this conversation do you need to try hard on every problem every session for the whole session and that's from an injury point of view is the is the question because at the end of daylight as you said hopefully like the happiness the happiness thing really overflows when you try really hard and all of you makes give you high fives because you've just done the problem that you've been trying and that's when you're like the most sight and that dopamine little injection in your brain really kicks off and you feel great so you know what I mean like where's the balance we're not deaf like to try to get really good at climbing you have to try really bloody hard and like do a lot of it but you know is is there a better way to get there rather than going through this like up and down yo yo have been injured and then not being able to do anything for a while and then you know I don't know I don't know where the place of try hard comes into it I guess the thing that we're saying here is don't do it all of the time but it's a hard balance in act isn't it because it's really fun and it's really gratifying when you do it and you get the rewards that you're after it's very difficult not to just do that all of the time yeah it's like you were saying about deadlifting you weren't deadlift for three hours if you're doing a session it's 90 minutes and you're giving yourself 90 minutes and you're going to say I'm going to leave when this 90 minutes is over then maybe this is an idea for some people within their session and we know this from strength training longer rests actually yield much better results and there's no reason that you don't you can't apply that principle to the climbing world you set a timer of four minutes which is probably painfully long for some people like they'll be getting bored after two and a half and that extra 90 seconds will seem like an eternity but see what that does to the next go especially if you've not felt good the go before and and then do that and leave in 90 minutes with your best go under your belt I would say you're allowed to try hard if you're being responsible in some way with your energy systems and you're not taking it beyond the point of fatigue that would be a green light for me and I think you're allowed to fail and not be so strong if you're resting for four minutes learning what went wrong being rested sort of on a metabolic level and then going for it there's learning in that I'd say and your body's probably going to build resilience if you're being smart about it yeah agree and it comes back to it comes back to intention with the session I think like you have to you have to sort of make a decision of what is this session about besides just feeling that happiness cup full especially when when people start climbing like three times a week then then you need to start thinking about that I think you could like if you have one session per week and you go all out then at least you'll you'll have enough time to recover for the next one but maybe you don't climb enough to become a better climber but then you have two sessions and three sessions and they all look the same and so I think like that's that's sort of like the tipping point for a lot of climbers is when you start to train in more regularly and your weekly volume goes up that your sessions need a bit more a bit more intention to it than just to go climb for the fun of it at least if you want to get better at climbing I think that's that's important and like this this sounds like a conversation on on the climbing for performance but I think this is like a conversation that I have many many times every week with climbers coming in with injuries because of these things going wrong so like even though we're discussing boards and grip types and and how to train then it's obviously this is sort of the preventive measures to try not to get injured whilst doing all of these things so that's at least from my perspective the key message from from this conversation yeah I mean really what we're talking about here is his load management aren't we and and climbers being a bit more mindful of that one little sort of analogy I kind of gift climbers is imagine you had some like a little sort of sensor in your finger and it was it was linked up to a sort of Strava type app on your phone and at the end of each session you it leave it she gave you like a readout of like total amount of stress for your finger peak stress number of moves kind of like you know that sort of stuff in the same way that Strava gives you this like elevation distance average speed whatever and and maybe trying to think about it like that like planning your session and and what total amount am I going to do and and for how long and what sort of peak thing in the same way that a runner might do that for their sort of weekly weekly session because because really if you think about it if you could break climbing down into like well how many moves did you do when you killed the board session today well I don't know like well how many problems did you do well I don't know like you know even now it's just planning that but but you could if you wanted to if you had this idea of this sensor in your finger so okay today you've done 137 moves the average load through and was this and the peak load was this and whatever and you're like okay fine right so over a month we're going to look at that and we're not going to hit that each week and blah blah blah and and and whilst that isn't practical to actually do it gives to climb at the idea of what you're trying to get at in terms of that overall load management and being mindful about their sessions and I and I found that quite a useful sort of analogy really yeah I think it's easier to do that when pains involved because the person who's climbing is no longer trying to fill the cup they're trying to get back to filling the cup and they've got pain as a guide which is always makes it easier I remember when sometimes when you know some of the more elite athletes I look after I'll be as strict as riding down their time and attention over the week for the fingers training they're doing and then we look at that with weight and we multiply it by the weight and that gives us an overall volume of stress through that finger that this is when you've got something really niggly and that just isn't settling and we just need to understand it a little better so we do do that with pain and it's even much easier but it's hard to get people to do that when they're just having fun isn't it yeah definitely I think it's the same with like throwing athletes especially they're the younger ones like handball playing handball in Norway is like increasing in popularity so we see more more young handball players coming into like sport schools such a trend then and then they come in with the painful shoulder on their throwing arm and you don't really find you don't find any structurally wrong often but then you start to do that summarization of like all right how many how many handball sessions do you have per week I don't know maybe six all right and how long are they like all right they're two hours I guess you have 12 hours of handball specific training how many times do you throw per handball session I don't know all right let's say a hundred then so a hundred throws how many of those throws are on my high intensity I don't know all right let's say like 80 percent since you're 60 and boy so like 90 percent of you throwing the high intensity right so so you'll have you'll have like 600 throws 90 percent of that so like say you have 500 throws on your absolute max every week and you've done that for two months and you're asking me why you why you're why you show the shore it is like it's the same it's the same mechanism but like you say it's so much easier when people come in complaining about stuff then yeah I think it's a it's a skill to like to try to use that as a load management into climbing as well so it's not now climbing is very very unique is that the structure is different from other sports many of you guys how many people do you see who are good on a board you say I never think aboard loads think aboard yeah I think finger board is pretty boring board climbing is really fun and yeah look absolutely loads yeah loads of that's well is it the problem with that is I don't know like if people if if if as physios we're saying things like oh finger boarding is good really controlled way to get yourself nice and resilient and build up you know whatever okay nice our finger board as well load on load and it's like it's that the best idea or yeah I don't know what about you do you do you see do you see many or is it is it same yeah I see really good outdoor climbers saying I never finger boards who've got really strong fingers and I see people do climb who climb a board a lot who are really good and say I don't finger board much I see people who finger board and climb on boards not really be discerning about what is the getting from the finger boarding or the board climbing and I guess that's what speaks to Stian's point on intention when you're on that board what is it you're actually trying to gain from that board session are you trying to get better at undercut moves a big spany moves you're trying to get better at dead points you're trying not to cut so that your body's strong and connecting the dots you know because that would be a slightly different stimulus to just training your fingers but I wonder whether these people who just are naturally strong they're just climbing a lot in crimp positions and they understand when their fingers are feeling good because they're on these projects trying really hard outside or they're on familiar movements on a board and therefore they can check in and say my fingers feel good I don't need to train them separate to this I do wonder whether sometimes people are on boards and finger boards trying yeah on boards and fingers are trying to get the same thing from both of them and whether that's really necessary yeah I think with finger boards at least I think that people are like increasing the volume too much it's the sort of the same discussion as on on a board really that the volume is too high to call it strain training basically yeah if you if you were to try to gain strength in a bicep curl it's it's a limited amount of sets per week you should do before it starts to get get into to wasted reps land so like the cost benefit analysis of doing more is is pretty low but we tend to get a bit fanatical on on like training the fingers and then so then you should do max hangs or pickups and then you should do like the no hangs and then you do no hangs every day where you do them like on a bit too high load so you're just getting more and more fatigue and then you're wondering why you suck on the board suddenly and then you go back to lie all right it's just great let's just pull harder and then it just gets too much yeah I think people are actually getting more discerning about what they want from a finger board probably because it's a bit more like you say James it's a familiar strain it's a controlled way to introduce load in a specific way but I'm personally saying less and less people show boating on tiny single digit edges doing one armors I'm seeing more and more people using a finger board sensibly and using them to actually recruit motor units from the most stable base to then go into their session and using that process as a way of checking in on how their fingers are feeling so they've got that consistency so they're already being discerning about how the session might go based entirely on how their fingers are feeling that that session I think that's a really sensible way to use a finger board and you can use it to benchmark as well if you wanted to but I think people are starting to think why am I hanging on this what is it I'm trying to achieve yeah I think that's really important to think about maybe we'll get there with boards as well at some point yeah just stop making this so down fun yeah yeah I think that'll be I don't think we'll necessarily talk about that now but for me I think that'll be a really interesting uh be a bit of a nerdy one we could talk about the history of a finger boards um what what are they doing and why do we do six times ten seconds I always think that to myself like imagine load of like shrimp and conditioning coaches came in from like elite level sports who knew nothing to do with climbing we were like this is a finger board we dangle off it six times for ten seconds I'd be like okay then what do you do then no that's that's it that's the session and if all right that's an unusual rep range and like you know methodology and behind it and and also realistically the industry sort of edge because of well I guess it's just because Ned and Ned and Dan decided all those years ago is 20 millimetres so the entry level for most people even if they're not super strong is to do body weight at 20 millimetres edge in half crimp because they can't be bothered or it's a bit of a pain in the ass to set up a pulley systems take weight off so yeah for me like I've really sort of found the whole idea of finger boarding like really quite interesting and why why do we do it like we do it and is how useful is it and should we use different grip types and should we take away ad weight or pick ups better from it and also from from a um physiotherapy and injury prevention point of view like would a period of time of finger boarding before somebody started board climbing help their fingers become more resilient or would it help their fingers become stronger and then they would just then go into board climbing harder and then they would still get the joint issues and things like that so yeah it'd be cool for us to um pick apart finger boarding at some point I reckon people would be interested to hear our thoughts about that because you know is why you know the history of it and why we do it and the methodologies of it I just yeah I'm I'm not convinced that um the reason people are doing it and the sets and reps they're doing is got any sort of major sort of um but basis behind it really you know could have opened a podcast that could open a catalog of one so be a great podcast that yeah yeah let's let's have that for for the next one I think that and we also touched on like yes stiff joints and also like the more soft tissue based PIP things like the central slip and the lateral bands which I know you you worked a lot with the office so it's a bit uh unexplored territory for for me so that would be great for me to hear more about and I think we could like mix that into to finger boarding so maybe that could be like the subject for the next episode um I am I am one hour ahead of you and I have a dog to walk and a kid to go to put to bed so I'm gonna have to shoot off at this point but it was uh really cool to have you on coffee um like I said this is a study group in a good place to exchange ideas and thoughts so I'm really looking forward to to do the things to come yeah nice one yeah it's really cool but I've always wanted to do something like this and it's funny because I got in touch with you saying where's your next episode coming out and off the back of that because I was sitting there thinking I might start a podcast and do something um like this where we can just exchange ideas talk to people have had perhaps along journey through an injury just to try and understand how that journey went for them but then you know this just came to be organically it's really cool um yeah super psyched so and dip it it nice cool great well that was uh yeah that was really interesting that sort of flew by guys so that's always good sign um awesome right well let's wrap it up there and um we'll get enough one of these organise soon nice I'm gonna put my kids to bed as well James you can go on the counter board because you have a chance to do anything James says when he says that he he can't have time to do things as I wild I need to feed I need to feed my cats on a daily basis and I drop dead and someone else and they they wouldn't care yeah I'm not showing my kids would care sometimes you know well that's right yeah from that bombshell all right I have a good night last oh awesome oh guys it's you all the same yes yes