"Limits of Fingerboard..."

https://www.trainingbeta.com/fingerboard-limits/

What do you guys think about this? 

One part I thought was interesting was the discussion of increasing the load and decreasing rep length to 3 seconds... that's essentially the entire argument of TuT vs load... but 3 seconds is pretty short...

when i read that part, it sounded like he was saying that a 10 second hang and 3 x 3 second hangs with 5 second rests with equal load would be equivalent(?), which is obviously not correct...  maybe i was reading it wrong(?).

kind of an interesting article, but it seems pretty contradictory to most modern weight training that i have heard lately (ie recruitment gains are pretty limited and quick, to consistently get stronger over long periods you need hypertrophy, which is much more dependent on TUT).  who knows...

I found his interview with Neely on Training Beta even more confusing.
Ha kept referring to hang boarding as eccentric exercise, but I’ve always thought of it as isometric. Have I been missing something?

I thought his suggestion of replacing HB with board climbing might be worthwhile  

It’s interesting that his suggestion of 40-60 second sets on small holds on a board basically replicates repeaters, albeit with more specificity to climbing.

i think he is right about the eccentric versus isometric thing.  you always hear people saying that fingers are used isometrically when climbing, and this really isn't true.  even when you are hangboarding your fingers aren't really motionless the entire time.  typically you grab the hold and the sag.  

when climbing you are constantly latching holds and sagging, rolling half-crimps up into crimps, and when you perform the actual climbing movements your fingers are constantly moving - they don't have infinitely stiff connections that remain perfectly rigid.

The article (interview transcript?) is a bit hard to follow, with broken sentences and such.

I do follow Tyler Nelson on Instagram, and enjoy reading his deep-dive into all things training.

At one point I had tried his hangboard protocol. No tracking added weights, or hanging, really, instead you try to do a “fast” rate-of-force application, one hand at a time. Basically pulling “fast” with one hand as much as I could. And other times it was slow, more like the usual hang where you carefully place fingers just-so, and carefully weigh them.

I don’t remember the exact timing/reps. It was too confusing, and I wasn’t sure I was doing it right. It was also hard to track improvement. He’s doing these things with a scale, but I don’t have one. I didn’t stick with it bc it felt too uncontrolled/variable.

I do like the idea of one-the-wall finger training using small handholds, and open feet. It is interesting that his suggested timing on those is a lot more like a repeater-type hanging protocol.

slim wrote:

i think he is right about the eccentric versus isometric thing.  you always hear people saying that fingers are used isometrically when climbing, and this really isn't true.  even when you are hangboarding your fingers aren't really motionless the entire time.  typically you grab the hold and the sag.  

when climbing you are constantly latching holds and sagging, rolling half-crimps up into crimps, and when you perform the actual climbing movements your fingers are constantly moving - they don't have infinitely stiff connections that remain perfectly rigid.

I agree that one's finger muscles are not rigid. There's some small (or large) degree of flexion and extension when trying to hold a grip. 

But that seems markedly different from a true eccentric contraction where the muscles are continuously lengthening under load. 

slim wrote:

i think he is right about the eccentric versus isometric thing.  you always hear people saying that fingers are used isometrically when climbing, and this really isn't true.  even when you are hangboarding your fingers aren't really motionless the entire time.  typically you grab the hold and the sag.  

when climbing you are constantly latching holds and sagging, rolling half-crimps up into crimps, and when you perform the actual climbing movements your fingers are constantly moving - they don't have infinitely stiff connections that remain perfectly rigid.

All of this (other than maybe rolling half-crimps up into crimps) could also be said about what we traditionally call isometric training in gymnastics - I think we still refer to this as isometric training since we are trying to hold a position vs repping out movements.

Have a look at some of these critiques at ukbouldering

https://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/topic,32106.msg665623.html#msg665623

Peter Beal wrote:

Have a look at some of these critiques at ukbouldering

https://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/topic,32106.msg665623.html#msg665623

Yes, indeed. 

Well hell, Mountain Project just ate my longer and more well-reasoned post.

My thoughts:

• I think Lattice-style finger strength tests are hot garbage. There is way too much variability in form, which is why they're not particularly predictive. Form used also tends to be pretty different from how people actually grip holds outside (especially the wrist and MCP joint angles, and how the fingertip engages the edge). A really good example of this is Aidan Roberts, one of the best crimpers in the history of bouldering, who apparently performs badly on their finger strength tests: whatever that test is measuring, it's not "crimp strength".
• I suspect that Tyler's "isolated active strength" method is more reliable (consistent across subjects / test sites) and also more predictive of climbing performance. This is an entirely empirical question that could be proven with a pretty simple study.
• Splitting up long sets into multiple short ones is pretty standard and known to work in other sports. The reverse juggernaut method is a good example of this (ten sets of five vs. five sets of ten). You get the same number of reps (or TUT), but higher average quality. The trick here is that "quality" is harder to assess with isometrics, as you can't use something like bar velocity like you can with powerlifting exercises.
• The scientistic reasoning is mostly just speculation; it's the basis of a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. This stuff is complicated and needs to be tested. That said, having talked to Tyler (who I like, and whose contributions I appreciate), I mentally prefix "here are some ideas to improve your climbing…" to everything he writes, so it doesn't trigger me the way it does a lot of people.
• On that note, Yves Gravelle and Matt Fultz come to mind as very, very strong crimpers who've improved over the past few years using off-the-wall methods similar to what Tyler recommends. The main difference is that they're deadlifting weight from the ground rather than using a force meter. That's also what I do, and I think it's great. It's easier to warm up for, requires minimal equipment, can be done at any gym, and easier to monitor form in. There's no "right way", but it's definitely a method that works and I personally prefer it.
• Training on-the-wall is great. IME the problem is that it can be hard to actually train the desired grip. You see this with some of the people Tyler reposts, who claim to be "crimping" when clearly they're open handing. Supplemental training might be especially helpful for them, if only as a stepping stone to improve proprioception. 

Dan Schmidt wrote:

• Splitting up long sets into multiple short ones is pretty standard and known to work in other sports. The reverse juggernaut method is a good example of this (ten sets of five vs. five sets of ten). You get the same number of reps (or TUT), but higher average quality. The trick here is that "quality" is harder to assess with isometrics, as you can't use something like bar velocity like you can with powerlifting exercises.

In this context, does it really make sense to break up a 10 second max hang into 3x 3 second hangs? That level of effort seems more in line with doing a max weight single rep....

Tyler Nelson's "stuff" is not well researched, often quoting articles from obscure "scientific" journals that hardly are ever peer reviewed, cited or the results repeated, and hardly relevant. His "theories" are in fact conjectures and hypotheses. His "stuff" is akin to a running coach looking at a client trying to break his 6-min mile, and say "look, if you do your squats with this fancy strap-on monitor, and if you change your striking angle 1 degree this way, I think we are really gonna have a good shot at breaking that 6 minutes." 

Does his "stuff" help? Sure, I don't see why it wouldn't. Variation in training always helps. Doing something different while trying really hard safely will help. But you are also looking at developing a new obsessive compulsive disorder with staring at monitor screens while pulling down a wooden edge, turning your simple straight-forward hour-long board session into a 3-hr ordeal, and spending needless money on gadgets that you will inevitably tire of by the next season. 

Over the last two weeks, I've been trying out Tyler's overcoming iso pulls technique.  Few notes:

• I just attach my portable hangboard (think Tension Block like device) to a fixed point (2x4 with a D-ring; about $2 to set up) and then do the set/rep schemes he suggested (3 seconds on, 5 off, 5 reps; do this 4-5 times).  I should note that I usually just do three sets.  
• Since I incorporate any finger stuff into my warm-up, I only do 2-3 sets.  I prefer to get my "training" done by just climbing hard board problems.  I use a home wall and a community spray wall.  I prefer the bad feet and bad holds; Moonboard and other boards just have too big of feet, too jumpy of moves.  
• Anyway, regarding Tyler's protocol, so far, so good. I like not having to hang a lot of weight for two arm hangs.  I also prefer not having to use my shoulders to do one arm hangs.  I don't mind that I don't have a gauge or monitor.  I just try hard.  Not being able to see a number or what not doesn't bother me.  I can totally see how that could annoy other folks, tho.  Back to the weigh piece again. With Tyler's system, you use no weight.  So it's really easy to get up and going.  I find Tyler's system -- like Matt Fultz off the ground -- is real nice on your skin.  Sometimes traditional hang boarding, especially one arm hangs, can do a number not he skin.  My pinky and index take the most wear and tear.  No such issues with the Tyler / Fultz methods. 
• This is not all to say I am always gonna do this system.  I'll try Tyler's method for a couple more weeks then I'll switch things up.  I'll do the off the ground Matt Fultz method, or I'll do traditional hangs, etc.  As has been stated above, just seems like the key is variety, trying hard and listening to your body.  
• Last note, I do not like the on the wall suggestions made by Tyler (45 seconds of slow moves on bad holds).  Seems more efficient to just do board climbs of all styles.  Do short boulders, do long.  Do fingers boulders, do jump boulders.  Do undercling blocks, do shoulder boulders.  And so on.  Again, key is variety, try hard and listen to your body.  

I commented on a recent Instagram post of Tyler's to ask some questions in regards to his new recruitment-focused finger training ideas. I brought up a few questions that I consider to be pretty central to his suggestion that recruitment-focused finger training is a preferable replacement for standard high-load hangboarding protocols, and I don't think I got very good answers to those questions. My opinion is that Tyler has not yet sufficiently demonstrated that recruitment-focused finger training is generally preferable over standard hangboarding protocols. The ideas are certainly interesting though, and I do believe that they have their place. Here is the comment thread, copied and pasted:

Me: 

Hey Tyler, I have a couple questions on recruitment-focused finger training.
.
First, when hanging with weight, are we maxing out our muscular recruitment, and then the remaining force required to stay on comes from passive tension? Or are we somehow not achieving the same level of muscular recruitment that we would with your suggested protocol?
.
Second, are there benefits to the passive tension associated with hangboarding? Intuitively it seems like it could make the connective tissues in your fingers stronger, since they’re directly undergoing more load.

Tyler:

check out the article if you haven’t already

Me:

thanks, Tyler. I just went back to reread it.
.
From what I can tell, it seems like you’re saying that we are maxing out muscular recruitment when hanging with weight, so the muscular recruitment benefits would be the same for both protocols.
.
As for the benefit of undergoing more passive tension when hanging with weight, I wasn’t able to find an answer to that in the article.
.
It seems to me like your recruitment-focused protocol has the advantage of maxing out muscular recruitment while minimizing fatigue to achieve that recruitment. However, it has the potential disadvantage of not loading the connective tissues as much, thereby not making them as strong/resilient as a weighted hangboard routine would. Is that fair?

Tyler:

that was a good synopsis. Loading the ct more with weighted hangs though would only be actionable with the weight. Once that weight is removed, the adaptation goes away. So, more load isn’t better necessarily, but it has some downsides as well (pulley stress, fatigue, joints etc). I still like hanging to warmup and rehab actually. But certainly not with added load.

Me:

it sounds to me like you’re saying there isn’t a benefit from the passive tension that would come from a standard hangboard protocol.
.
You’ve demonstrated that one can hang with more weight than one could produce solely through muscular recruitment. When the weight goes away, the muscles alone are unable to produce the same amount of force that was used to hang on the edge with that weight. That makes sense to me.
.
What I’m still unclear on is the idea that there is no benefit to the passive tension associated with weighted/one arm max hangs. Is it correct to say that you’re claiming the extra passive tension that comes from a standard max hang protocol does not produce positive adaptations for the connective tissues?

Tyler:

you could be confused because you are referencing Max weighted hang adaptations on an RFD post. To answer your question regarding Max weighted hangs and additional adaptation I would say, if the adaptation cannot be used in the sport, then, yes, it is not worth gaining. Risk> reward

Me:

I just used this post to ask more generally about your recruitment-focused finger training approach since it gets at some of the same principles and was your most recent post.
.
You seem to be saying that the passive tension adaptations that would come from a standard max hang protocol would not transfer to climbing.
.
My understanding is that a standard max hang protocol would have the benefit of increasing muscular recruitment while also strengthening the connective tissues, which would have transfer to climbing in the form of tissue resiliency.
.
For me this brings up two questions:
.
1. How often does one undergo passive tension in the connective tissues of the fingers when climbing?
.
2. If the answer to question 1 is very rarely, could the connective tissue adaptations that come from passive tension in a standard max hang protocol still be beneficial in the resiliency of the connective tissues?
.
I think your suggestion of a recruitment-focused finger training protocol is really interesting. I’m just trying to critically evaluate it and get to the bottom of precisely what its benefits and drawbacks are as compared to a standard max hang protocol, and if it can truly be thought of as a complete replacement.

Tyler:

question limit reached

Me:

haha that’s totally fair. However, I do think you should consider addressing those questions at some point if you want to adequately defend the idea that your suggested recruitment-focused finger training is a preferable replacement for the standard high-load hangboarding protocols.

Joel, thanks for posting this. Anyone who makes claims like Tyler's should be able to defend them without resort to excessively technical terminology or methodological splitting of hairs. Using phrases like "question limit reached" or blocking people on IG when they respectfully question what is being proposed is a major red flag IMO. His "recruitment-focused" approach needs some serious testing beyond the current n=1 "data" I have seen. I'm not saying it can't work but I would argue there are considerable sport-specific advantages to standard weighted finger board hangs that his methods are passing over.

Seems to me the guy spreads himself a bit thin.  Short of the "inch deep but mile wide" phenomenon.  Best he just chill a bit, make fewer proclamations, fewer IG vids, and, like you said, saying "question limit reached" is a very bad look, indeed. 

From the article…

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying. I am not suggesting that a heavy fingerboard protocol won’t increase high-threshold motor unit recruitment and strength because it can. What I am suggesting is that it does not reflect it very well. At some point, your recruitment levels will plateau, and loads beyond that represent the addition of passive tension, not more recruitment.

What exactly is wrong about this?

He is basically saying that people experienced with hangboarding inevitably end up using loads far in excess of what their muscles can produce on their own. That is certainly true, verified by comparing individual athletes' strength on the hangboard (high) vs. in isolation (far, far lower). Those loads also tend to be far higher than you encounter in climbing, which I also think is true—even catching an edge one-handed doesn't feel close to the BW+120lbs intensity I've added on a fingerboard. The implication is that adding to already-high hangboard loads doesn't correspond to increasing muscular recruitment due to compensation by passive tension, which makes it hard to judge the actual load applied in the session—also true!

The most important thing to consider is that your supramaximal strength goes away with those heavy loads. That’s the whole point.

Again, true — neither your muscles nor the sport produce the kind of loads you get with really heavy max hangs, so that "passive strength" is inaccessible during actual climbing. It has a protective effect, but one of the points of the article is that there's a cost to increasing the sport/training capacity gap (time, fatigue, and injury risk) and that beyond a certain range it's probably not helpful anymore.

To Joel's question:

To answer your question regarding Max weighted hangs and additional adaptation I would say, if the adaptation cannot be used in the sport, then, yes, it is not worth gaining. Risk> reward

This is basically my point above: there's probably a protective effect to hanging more load than you experience in climbing, but beyond a certain point you are "strong enough" and should shift focus elsewhere.

Dan, I believe that you’re making some of the same assumptions as Tyler, which I don’t think are warranted.

First is that our fingers don’t see as high of loads while climbing as they do on the fingerboard. This is certainly true for particular climbs, but I don’t think we can abstract it out to climbing in general. There are plenty of big, burly moves, hard crimpy moves, etc. where my fingers feel like they’re under very high load. I don’t think we can say just from subjective experience that we are or are not experiencing a lot of passive tension beyond the level of muscular recruitment while we’re climbing, like we would when doing max hangs. This is something that would need to be legitimately studied.

Second is the claim in your last paragraph, which I suppose ties into the first assumption. When you say “strong enough”, I assume you’re referring to the connective tissues in our fingers? Why would we conclude that these connective tissues are strong enough, but our muscular recruitment isn’t? Climbers are constantly plagued by finger injuries. I’d argue that they’re one of the main things that keeps climbers from progressing long-term. I would never consider the connective tissues in my fingers to be “strong enough”. If a standard hangboard protocol has the added benefit of strengthening the connective tissues in your fingers, that’s a big plus to me. 

@Joel — Over the coming years we'll get data on the actual distribution of forces in different types of climbing (cf. MACLoC). I'm really skeptical that the actual force through a given hand's fingertips ever exceeds about 150% bodyweight, but that's an empirical question. Realistically, you'd have to be dropping down onto a hold one-armed to come anywhere near that; just physically, I don't see how you get that much force through one arm, even on an upwards one-arm dyno. Forces through larger holds aren't really relevant, since while those might injure the shoulders or elbows, they don't typically result in finger injuries.

FWIW I seemed to recall that, in their Nugget Interview, The Climbing Bible guys (Stian and Martin) mentioned testing Malcom Smith that way, and being surprised by how little force actually went through his hands on hard problems, but I couldn't easily find a link to it. Might be worth digging up the source but I don't know that I want to bother tbqh.

Injury-proofing soft tissues is a big part of most sports, usually targeting the ankles, knees, and shoulders. I don't know of any sports that use very heavy isometrics for that purpose. I just scanned my various Bompa and other sports science books, and all recommended low load, high volume metabolic training over a long period of time in order to condition the soft tissue. So, I don't think your assumption that very-heavy hangs helpfully condition the soft tissue is necessarily true. That underpins basically your entire argument.

I am actually not that invested in the "muscular recruitment" side of this. To me, the big problem with how people hangboard (and not necessarily the hangboard itself) is that their form doesn't match how they actually grip and pull on bad holds in climbing. They eke out every last drop of hangboard performance because they're actually learning how to hangboard, not how to crimp harder. Tyler's recruitment stuff just seems like one way, a bit complicated for my taste, to avoid that trap. Matt Fultz's OTG's seem to me a much more practical method that accomplishes basically the same thing. 

My theory on Dr Tyler Nelson is he makes these articles, and his podcasts, somewhat confusing to the general audience with the end result being more clients. Having said that, I appreciate his efforts in the field no doubt 

Hey Dan,

Yeah, I think the question of how often we undergo forces through our fingers that exceed levels of muscular recruitment is really pertinent to this debate, and it's just hard to say. I would love to see some legitimate data on it.

That's interesting about conditioning soft tissues. Intuitively, it just makes sense to me that undergoing heavy loads is the thing that is going to condition your tissues to be able to handle heavy loads. However, I'm sure it's specific to which structures we're talking about and what the demands of the sport are. I just don't see how low load, high volume finger training would be the best way to prepare the connective tissues in your fingers to pull as hard as possible on small holds. I agree that if it could be shown that max hangs don't condition the soft tissues well for climbing, Tyler's muscular-recruitment protocol would be much more appealing. However, I'm very doubtful of that.