Finger strains or sprains are usually caused by a few things: climbing too hard moves while fatigued, lack of finish position control, too much repetition on a certain hold type or the level of effort required to hold a hold exceeds the level of condition of your fingers. We cannot eliminate the accidents but we can do a lot to reduce all the overuse injuries that are common. If pain persists then we recommend getting your fingers checked out by a qualified professional. We suggest Lee Cossey, Ben Cossey or Chris Flowers from Move Clinic. Video assessments are available if needed.
Project while you are feeling fresh, this is when you need to be able to give it your all, do a warm up specific to your project then as soon as you are warm start trying moves on your project.
If you only project, have a variety of different projects in different styles and different hold types and limit your time to each one. 20 minutes is about right, maybe up to 30 minutes per project if you are utilising good rest times of 3-5 minutes per attempt.
Climbing on a project is like doing a 1 rep max effort for your fingers every move. Say you hold each hold for 3 seconds on average; over 5 moves that is 15 seconds of time for hand under tension at the limit for your fingers in a specific hand position. This is not a lot of time. Tendons respond to load and time under tension. If we want healthy tendons we need to extend the time under tension. A system that has had a lot of benefit for our athletes is Cold No- Hangs, being cold means that your pain tolerance is lower, this reduces your maximum effort and it only takes 4 minutes per day.
4 rounds of 5 seconds on 5 seconds off hangs in the following hand positions:
Full Crimp without wrapping your thumb over.
Half Crimp
3 Front Finger Open Handed hang
3 Back fingers half crimp
The rules
Feet don’t leave the ground
This is not a strength exercise, it's to learn to understand these hand positions well and to be able to apply them with some time under tension.
Keep the discomfort level low.
Do it daily
If it’s morning time, you may drink coffee while you hang (much more enjoyable and same time limit)
If you want to, take some collagen and vitamin C about 45 minutes before completing the above. Do your own research to find the appropriate information on this to suit your needs. This can help with improving tendon tissue quality.
Focus on controlling finish position better.
Lunging to holds is a valuable skill but we also need to be able to latch the next hold with our body under control. Drills like 3 second lock offs are great for learning this skill. You can find a video here: https://youtu.be/ZgqdaIkvWjc
And last but not least, regular deloading, this is split across 2 avenues, taking a break from hard climbing every 3 weeks or so for a week and also tracking how often per week you are climbing, 6 days in a row is s sure fire way to get injured if you have spent years building up to that level of work capacity.
