HangBoard Crimp

I know this has been discussed before, but there still seems to be a lot of ambiguity (at least in my mind) about the various crimp grips for hangboarding (i.e open crimp, half crimp, full crimp etc.).

I'm curious as to how many people are hangboarding with a bend in all four fingers at the DIP joint (resulting in an angle great than 180 degrees, if you were to measure from the bottom of the finger)?

I have always avoided this, but I have recently begun experimenting with the position as I feel it will greatly improve crimp strength. I've been 'boarding for several years now and thought that I was doing a half crimp position, but it was really just a four finger open-handed edge. Now I feel that I am almost stronger in an open-hand position than a closed crimp. This may not seem like a bad thing but when you really need to bear down and crimp hard I feel like I just don't have the gusto.

I've read a few training articles mentioning that strength gains translate to about +/- 15-20 degrees from position being trained. What this means is that training open hand is going to do almost nothing for your crimps. Personally, I train for outdoor areas that feature lots of small crimps, so I make sure to hit crimps in my hangboarding sessions.

With that said, I spare my pulleys by never closing my crimps on the hangboard, but I do make sure to go just a bit beyond the half crimp position. Essentially, all my finger joints are just a bit below 90 degrees.

If you do this, make sure to warm up thoroughly. Do a few reps on smaller crimps before doing any working sets on them. If you end a set and feel sore in the fingers, they are either not ready for the stress because you didn't warm up enough or because they need more time to be put under that kind of stress.

Around 1 minute in on this video Chris Webb Parsons explains how to crimp on a hangboard pretty well
Chris Webb Parsons Hangboard Program from Climblox.com on Vimeo.

Does anybody out there bend at the DIP joint?