Written By: Dr. Marina Mangano

Published in Oklahoma Sports & Fitness Magazine. February, 2020

I’m sitting cross legged on gray mats, acutely aware of good music playing overhead and the large fans that stir up chalk in the air. Lounging in a line next to me, is a rowdy group of strangers, all yelling encouragements up to the person climbing in front of us, “You’ve got it man” and “Come on!” I see their smiling faces, ranging from early forties to barely four years old, and I can’t help but ask myself, “what all brought you here?”

Rock climbing is certainly not a new activity, but thanks to social media, active clothing sponsorship, and popular film documentaries, the thrilling sport has recently been exposed to a world of new enthusiasts. As a result, indoor climbing gyms are launching all over the world, making the sport accessible to anyone willing to train and push themselves out of their comfort zone. This spike in popularity has even infiltrated the Olympics; this summer marks the first Olympic games to include rock climbing as an official event. While the Olympians are amazing to watch, most indoor rock climbing gyms are full of casual athletes using this activity as a new adventure to supplement their existing exercise routine. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of cross-training (not CrossFit), it is a method of blending simultaneous activities into a training program so that the athlete benefits from multiple modes of exercise which enhances performance in one particular sport, usually their primary sport. I believe the most appropriate cross-training activities should help maintain your strengths, improve your weaknesses, and allow you to have fun in a social setting. My goal is to introduce foundational movement patterns found in rock climbing and how improving strength in those motions can benefit any sport. The strong physical challenge, mentally daring excitement, empowering demonstration of quick progress, and communal encouragement makes rock climbing an excellent cross-training modality. But be warned, those are the same reasons that it may convert you into a full-time enthusiast.

Maintain your strengths

Grip Strength for Life

This past December, I entered a fundraiser hosted by our local climbing gym, Climb Tulsa. Divided into a physically grueling four weeks, the goal was to climb 5,280 vertical feet while raising awareness for the charity, and it offered all the participants a small glimpse of the endurance required to be a rock climber. World class climbers have now scaled the most difficult walls of up to 3,000 feet in only a few hours and I struggled to complete it in three weeks! Most climbing gyms offer top rope options on walls ranging from 25-50 feet tall and are filled with a brilliant variety of colorful holds. A novice climber, at any age, will feel overwhelming fatigue after only a few attempts of that distance. The first part of the body to protest while rock climbing, are the hand and forearm muscles; a throbbing, burning feeling from compressed capillaries and lactic acid build up. These underdeveloped gripping muscles are often excluded from popular cardiovascular or lifting routines and cannot withstand sustained pressure for long.

Why is it so important to have a developed grip strength? In addition to an improved ability to perform repetitive, daily activities, strong hands are indicative of overall health and strength. A 2015 study proved that “grip strength was a better predictor of death or cardiovascular disease than blood pressure” (1). A healthy hand represents an active lifestyle because they are a portal of information for the brain; constant feedback comes from the fingers, sensing changes in texture, temperature, spatial awareness, etc. Senses from the hand are sent to the brain with a request of how the body should respond to the stimuli. The brain then shoots back an answer using movement, an appropriate emotional response, and all the chemicals that those functions require. The hands are only one example of this feedback. Image 3, the homunculus map, illustrates why they can be considered our most valuable tool. This distorted depiction of a human is drawn to show proportionally how much sensory information can come from a region of the body (2). The bigger the body part is on the illustration, the more information it can offer to the brain. As you can see, the hands are the winner with no close runner up.

Climbers Are Big Babies

Most of this “brain talk” happens without our conscious awareness and has been perfected by repetitive movements. With more practice, the body can assess and respond to challenge effortlessly, like Alex Honnold climbed “El Cap” without ropes. Healthy motion becomes second nature and gets programmed into the permanent parts of our brain, upgrading the original movement patterns that have been cataloged as permanent files since birth. Early files, called primitive movement, create the foundation of activity that our lives are built from. Deep belly breathing, crawling one hand forward at the same time as the opposite knee, opening the fingers to grab something desirable, lifting the head to look up at the world that is taller than us, and depending on a ledge to help us balance, are all primitive movements that we take for granted in training but are major components of rock climbing. As a movement specialist, I love watching people of all ages climb the wall. Neurologically, children are closer in age to primitive development than adults, so they have had less time in unnatural daily postures to “mess up” the movement patterns of a healthy infant. Kids are amazing at rock climbing and can easily recruit groups of muscles often neglected by adults, such as shoulders stabilizers and hip rotation initiators. Luckily, with proper treatment and controlled training patterns, our deep brain can return to default and will call healthy movement files back to the surface.

Using primitive development as the gold standard, the adult brain should train and reboot its automatic stimulation of stabilizing muscles by working the body in a developmental position (3). With rock climbing you are guaranteed to recreate some of these principle positions. Looking at the wall, the climber pushes off a stance leg to reach up with the opposite arm (See Image 4). This pattern closely relates to an airborne, high kneeling pattern of an eleven-month-old. In Image 5, we see a climber hanging from a cave-styled wall. The overhanging position would not be possible for an infant but the ability to upright the spine while pulling the core forward corresponds to a natural position of an infant at 10 months of developing age. When a 10 month-old baby perfects sitting upright, internal stabilizing patterns are created as the body learns how to breath, balance, use the limbs, and build endurance simultaneously. This core coordination allows for mobile limbs and stable joint positioning, two areas which advanced climbers excel.

Improve Your Weaknesses

Movement Patterns Unique to Climbing that fill the void

Most of my seasoned athletes have hit a plateau in their endurance or power output and now dedicate most of their training routine to maintaining fitness or nursing injuries back to “normal” athletic success. To help them build new standards of athleticism, I recommend mindful movement activities such as yoga and rock climbing as a cross-training supplement to their current skill set. As a clinician, I recommend rock climbing as a cross-training option because of how heavily the sport trains joint range of motion in multiple planes. Planes of motion are categories of movement that depict how the spine (axial midline) is being used as the central focal point (Image 6). Sports like swimming, running, and cycling mostly train in a midsagittal plane because the body creates muscular movement in a forward direction. Climbing requires a mix of endurance and dynamic strength in multiple planes, often simultaneously at different joints. For example,while climbing a slab wall (no overhang), the core can pull forward toward the wall in a sagittal plane while the hips externally rotate to stabilize the transverse plane all while the shoulders are retracting in downward rotation to pull in the frontal plane. Mechanically, each movement is wildly complex. How can you learn to create such intricate movements?

Climbers tend to progress in what’s known as an S-Curve (Image 7). Initially, new climbers use inefficient but familiar movement patterns until strength and coordination improves, allowing muscle asymmetries to balance and the brain to benefit from primitive positions. Once that healthy, efficient baseline is restored, climbing skills develop quickly. Due to the lack of overhead pulling or prolonged endurance grips in daily activity and sports training, rock climbing skills progress rapidly with only a brief introduction of stress on the stagnant muscles. The climber then internalizes advanced movement patterns to conquer previously impossible actions until, eventually, progression slows as climbing specific training is required to master certain obstacles. Rock climbing prepares us to pull, press, and grip against gravity instead of training while resting on it; it’s like learning another language. The translation from climbing isn’t a guarantee, but the compliment is always positive.

Prevent Injuries While Training

Cross-training is its own science, including both the proper time to apply it and when steering away from primary, technical training does not benefit the athlete. As a former college athlete, I know how mentally damaging it is to be hurt and not able to participate. Regardless of being in or out of season, getting hurt feels like falling behind. Using that experience now as a sports chiropractor, I address injuries alongside ACTIVE recovery. I only ask patients to sit out and rest from a sport when it is our last resort. Clearing someone back to activity highly depends on where they are during their training cycle. The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) describes periodization as a process of following a time-sensitive training plan that will optimize athletic performance but minimize repetitive injuries caused by overtraining (4). This is a major component of picking which activities qualify as a cross-training sport for you. For example, a marathon runner starting a heavy weightlifting routine one month before a big race is counterproductive for the repetitive, weight bearing forces the joints are about to withstand (why tapering is so successful). Finding a personal trainer or experienced coach to guide you safely through training plans is key to determining which activities maintain your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

To prevent my love for rock climbing from skewing the data, I turned to Eric Hudgens, the director and head coach at Personal Best Athletics Track Club since 2006. This training phenom is everywhere in Tulsa, from leading a group of students on a distance run down Riverside to racing alongside his team at The Tulsa Run. Eric started rock climbing a year ago to find a different training outlet. At the climbing gym, he felt the same sense of self-accomplishment and rush of pushing himself as he did with running. This ability to connect to a new community while releasing tension encouraged him to bring his athletes along. “There was a break in competing, so I wanted to offer a new experience outside of more running and lifting, something fun.” Most of his athletes at the time were teenagers going through abrupt growth patterns and were struggling during routine training cycles. His club chose a comprehensive activity like rock climbing because, “During that transitional age, strength training can be irrelevant, almost counterintuitive in my opinion. If you can’t move your own body what’s the point of adding resistance or weight to it?” This outlook on training applies to all ages; rock climbing is an amazing way of implementing strength and coordination while learning to control simultaneous joints of the body. So, although a few of his athletes were hesitant to reach new heights, they had a lot of fun with this new routine and faced their fears head on. 

Safety

Is the sport safe? While rock climbing does have an inherent risk of falling, the safety training efforts of skilled staff members at climbing gyms minimizes the threat of injury. While occasionally falls can be scary, they are infrequently dangerous. The awareness of being able to fall at any moment demands the attention of every cell in the body. Learning to compose the body while under stress improves mental resilience and is highly rewarding. As a new climber, stay at a level (difficulty or height) that feels safe until self-confidence grows. According to Coach Eric, “Climbing should be safe because it is a personalized training plan. You get to choose your own routes and level of difficulty each day you step up to the wall.” The ideal cross-training activity should not be a distraction or detrimental to an athlete’s primary sport. Eric agreed that, “Climbing with good movement is key.” If an athlete can’t coordinate the body, it’s hard to use and maintain their strength with so many moving parts. If strength is forced, harmful tension is placed on a system not prepared to sustain that muscle or joint stress. He concluded, “I think climbing is a great activity to find weaknesses that could lead to movement injuries but depending on the priority time frame, you may have to sacrifice what is enjoyable and fun during race week or a heavy training cycle.” Ultimately, moving without negative tension in rock climbing shouldn’t overload the tissue or create a season altering injury. Like all activities, learn your normal response to training to detect early differences between soreness and strain.

Play & Socialize

Go with the Flow

Rock climbing gyms are notorious for bringing together seemingly unrelated people. All ages, sizes, and different levels of fitness are drawn to the satisfying challenge of rock climbing. Most people seek climbing because they are intrigued by the physical benefits but then wind up staying due to the mental and social rewards that follow. There’s a fulfillment that comes from watching someone else finish a “project” on the wall and we can’t help but relate to the internal battles that they conquered to keep climbing. In Eric’s words, “Athletes are wired with an intrinsic desire to move our bodies and share that passion with other people. I’ve implemented rock climbing outside of practice to develop rich relationships. It’s a fun place that we can all laugh at the mishaps and celebrate the wins together.” Climbing truly is an outlet for self-expression. The variety of dynamic or static movement that the routes require teaches each climber to get creative with their personal capabilities.

Between each of us, it’s amazing how many different solutions there are to the same problem.

I love watching an athlete who makes a challenging sport look effortless, when technical movement meets instinct. Eric’s goal for using a variety of cross-training techniques, is to teach that intuitive reaction. He hopes that his athletes will progress in their own self-trust by moving in a flow-like state of mind. “At the end of the day, no coach can help you run when the gun goes off. I give them the same autonomy at the climbing gym. I can offer them cues, but they have to be able to reach that next step themselves.” This effortless movement describes athletic intuition; how the body learns to move by feeling instead of overthinking. If you’ve ever watched an experienced climber, you’ll notice their graceful and spider man-like quality of movement immediately. While a bystander may not be able to explain the intricate mechanics, we all can share in imagining the sensations that such difficult precision takes. Eric admits, “It’s so rewarding to watch them respond with a sense of creativity that we can’t coach from a sideline or train in practice. Climbing is just a slowed down process of this epiphany developing.”

Get Started Today

The combination of its physical variety, mental stimulation, and social support suggests that rock climbing is the new cross-training activity that your performance has been looking for. Rock climbing is a wonderful plateau breaker that will introduce you to intuitive ways to address stagnant, imbalanced muscles of the body. Implementing this technical activity around your current training will accelerate upper body strength, hip mobility, and integrated core endurance. It is a sport that taps into many of the primitive motions and offers a unique, multi-planar challenge for the “re-developing adult.” When it comes to picking a cross-training activity, intuition will tell you if it’s right for you. To get started, visit your local climbing gym for an orientation and demonstration. Expect to be sore and embarrassed at how hard it is at first, but trust that everyone there is progressing alongside of you. Just walk up to the wall, tighten your harness, and bravely look up.

References:

1.      LeWine, Howard. Grip Strength May Provide Clues to Heart Health. Harvard Health Publishing. September 2016. Web accessed January 2020.  

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/grip-strength-may-provide-clues-to-heart-health-201505198022

2.      Catani, Marco. Dorsal Column; A little man of some importance. Brain; Journal of Neurology. 2017: 140; 3055–3061. Web accessed January 2020.

3. Kobesova, Dzvonik, Kolar et. Al. Effects of shoulder girdle dynamic stabilization exercise on hand muscle strength.  Isokinetic and Exercise Science, 23(2015) 21-32. Web accessed January 2020.

4.      Richey, Rick. The NASM-CPT Podcast: Exercise Programming and Periodization. Accessed online January 2020. https://blog.nasm.org/exercise-programming/the-nasm-cpt-podcast-ep-14/

Image References:

1.      Cover Photo by Dr. Dwayne Golbek. 2020.

2.      Photo by Dr. Dwayne Golbek. 2020.

3.      Homunculus. Brown University Virtual Lab. https://canvas.brown.edu/courses/851434/assignments/4953274?module_item_id=6841193

4.      Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization Poster by the Prague School of Rehabilitation. & Dr. Dwayne Golbek. 2020.

5.      Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization Poster by the Prague School of Rehabilitation. & Dr. Dwayne Golbek. 2020.

6.      Planes of Motion. http:www.anatomy.tv/studyguides/images/planes.jpg

7.      S-curve. Accessed online. https://ittybiz.com/s-curve/

8.      Photo by Dr. Chris Barnes. 2019.

9. Photo by Dr. Dwayne Golbek. 2019.