Mechanics in Action:
Why Resting When You Hurt
Will Only Hurt You
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Ross Bodine, PT, DPT, FAAOMPT is a fellowship trained physical therapist that works at ALTA Physical Therapy & Pilates in Boulder, Colorado. He specializes in identifying and correcting aberrant movement patterns in climbers before and after injury.
Mechanics Focused Climbing and Training
Working as a physical therapist, I generally see two kinds of climbers with overuse injuries. There are those who eventually come in to see me after climbing through pain for months on end (or they see me after an acute incident and then report the injuries that have plagued them for years). More commonly, there are the climbers who get an injury, take a significant amount of time off (weeks to months), try climbing again only to notice the pain is still there, and then try taking more time off before they seek help. In both cases, these climbers would benefit from continuing to climb with renewed focus.
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The main point of this article is to emphasize the importance of mechanics when training. Mechanics is how your joints are positioned, and how your muscles are used to stabilize the joints as you are hanging, pulling, or positioning yourself on the wall. I’ll start by talking about the shoulder since its use determines how the rest of the upper extremity is used, and how well your body is positioned. Most of how well the shoulder is used boils down to proper recruitment of the rotator cuff. The rotator cuff’s primary function, despite its name, is to apply compression to the joint and hold it in place as the larger, more powerful muscles (pecs, lats, and deltoid) move the arm. The scapula’s position will also determine how the rotator cuff works. Ensuring the rotator cuff is engaged and the scapula is well positioned will help prevent injury. Or if a little niggle already exists anywhere in the upper extremity (including finger pulleys), proper shoulder mechanics allow you to continue climbing without pain and without worsening your injury.
Utilizing proper mechanics while training will maximize the stress on the active joint stabilizers (to strengthen the rotator cuff), minimize the stress on passive stabilizers (the shoulder joints, labrum, biceps tendon), and reinforce proper movement patterns to climb more efficiently. I personally appreciate this mode of training, because my brain works much better and is more interested in a mechanical problem-solving standpoint (as in “how can I position my body better so I don’t have to work so hard?”) rather than a physiological-adaptation one (“I’m going to train for at least 6 weeks until my body starts building muscle, and then probably train much longer to get huge muscles”). I think climbers, in general, appreciate the problem-solving aspect of whole-body positioning when climbing (or there would just be ladder climbing gyms). The focus is to position individual joints which in turn help position the body appropriately.
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Proper Hanging Position
Starting off by finding the correct hanging position is super important, because it engages the scapular stabilizers and rotator cuff. Training the rotator cuff and scapular stabilizers in a hanging position will teach you how to use them during a more functional activity comparable to climbing. Have you ever done those shoulder external/internal rotation exercises to strengthen the rotator cuff? Does that teach you to engage your rotator cuff when climbing?
No.
Okay, maybe if you were awkwardly clipping a bolt, you could rotate your arm that way. But climbing is a closed kinetic chain activity, meaning you move your body around your contact to the wall (your hands). The traditional rotator cuff exercises are performed in an open kinetic chain, meaning you move your hand on a stable body, and would be more applicable to throwing, lifting, or reaching. Just because you train your body in one kinetic chain doesn’t mean your brain has the ability to transfer it to the other (it usually doesn’t). So, starting off by activating and then training the rotator cuff and scapular stabilizers in hanging is more appropriate for climbers.
The most common advice I have read about hanging position is to pull your shoulder blades down and back to engage the lower trap. But pulling your shoulders down and back may also recruit the rhomboids (which downwardly rotate the scapula, leaving less room for the humerus) - and the lats (which can pull the head of the humerus forward in the joint if there is insufficient cuff activation).
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A downwardly rotated scapula and a forward humeral head put the rotator cuff at a mechanical disadvantage. The lats and rhomboids are more commonly the dominant muscles in climbers, because they pull you up the wall, and I usually don’t see them as the weak link. If you feel your pelvis gets pulled backwards and underneath you when hanging, your lats are working harder than the shoulder stabilizers and the core has disengaged.
There has also been debate on whether to avoid hanging with bent elbows, but from what I have found, the climber's rotator cuff and core tend to disengage when elbows straighten (even when the shoulder blades are pulled down and back). Furthermore, as the proximal stability disengages and the elbows straighten, more rotational stress is put on the wrist and fingers which can lead to injury down the chain. Focusing solely on bending your elbows when hanging may just engage your bicep/brachialis and compromise shoulder stability so the humeral head drifts up and forward. It is better to think about keeping the elbows directly underneath the hands’ line of pull, and allow the elbow to passively bend as the shoulder does the work.
What I tell people is to pull the bottom tip of your scapula up towards your elbow, while keeping your elbows in, in order to lift your chest up. The elbow bend will then come from your shoulders getting pulled back as your scapula tilts back.
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2955 Baseline Road,
Boulder, CO 80303
303.444.8707
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