Climbing Dad

This video is ace: Aside from the copious ads, I really enjoyed watching it and it has some great info that kind of ties in with my finger strength goals. The leader board shows that some of the numbers in my last post were a little off. Oops. Oh well - don't quote me! From what I gleaned watching this video the blogger (Andrew) climbs V7 and he tested the two arm hang with 36kg. They mention that is approximately 50% of body weight, which would give a strength/weight of ~75% per hand. Then they say that he is strong enough to climb V9-V10 and needs to work on using momentum to get there. What!!?? He is also fit enough to climb 7c (5.12d) after doing 106 moves on the lattice board at 20 degree angle. Another stat that I can use to see if I am physically 5.13 ready. If I ever get around to actually climbing routes outside. Maybe I just need to sign up and do the Lattice Test...! Anyway, for now, I'm sticking with my 80% target for sending V8 as it is a nice ro...

Are my fingers strong enough to climb V8? There isn't a ton of information out there to be honest. Lattice have the biggest database and occasionally drip feed some nuggets of info such as Alex Megos can hold 130% of his body weight on one hand. Wow!! BEAST! Steve McClure posted on his facebook that he can 'only' do body weight or slightly less. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he can do 100% on a Rainman 9b day. The best info I have found is a study conducted by Beast Fingers Climbing Research - "Optimising Muscular Strength to Weight Ratios in Rock Climbing" by Aman Anderson, published March 2018. TrainingBeta put the link up on their instagram a while back and I downloaded it. They actually include all of the test results in the paper Appendix. So I did my own analysis, with the hope that it would shed some light on where I need to be to reach my goals. Here are some stats from the paper: So young and light! They tested on a 19mm ...

Just a few weeks after getting back in to climbing I developed pain/inflammation in the pads of both my pinkie fingers (left and right). My first of many comeback climbing injuries. The location of the inflammation is shown below, it was in the region of the A4 pulley. I 'managed' the injury by taping up both fingers using the H-taping technique and continued climbing. It didn't clear up but it didn't get worse. This continued for a couple of months. Then after buying the book "Climb - Injury Free" by Dr. Jared Vagy I read about resisted finger expansions as a strengthening exercise for pulley sprains. The book prescribes 3 sets of 15 repetitions with a 5-second isometric hold once per day. So, I dug out some elastic bands from the stationary room at work and started doing a few reps at random times throughout the day. Now, I didn't do this with any specific plan to rehabilitate my pinky problems. I just saw it in the book and had separately read...