Maintaining Pulley Tendon Health While Board Climbing

Board climbing veterans,

What are your suggestions for maintaining healthy finger tendons while regularly training on systems boards?

Background: I've been climbing outdoors for 13 years, warm up religiously, consume ~0.8g of protein per bodyweight including collagen, utilize trigger point massage (not after an injury though), engage in regular antagonist muscle training, etshitera.

However, I am a Moonboard gumby who just built a Mini and has been hitting it three days a week (~45 V-points per sesh on V3-4).

Many thanks.

Don't jump straight from 0 board climbing to 3x per week. It's a potent training tool, and you need to phase it in slowly.

Rice bucket exercises and alternating hot/cold immersion, ideally up to your elbows, after your workouts. Typically climbers have very developed flexors, but not extensors, keep it balanced. 

To add to what JCM said, what you really care about is total volume. 3x a week isn't necessarily bad but if you are new to board climbing, I'd keep those sessions short or do fewer sessions for the first few weeks until you have a better feel for how your fingers are handling the board. It's easy to develop an overuse injury by going too hard at first because it feels like you aren't climbing very much.

I don't think there's anything special that you have to do for your fingers other than listening to your body and planning your volume on the board accordingly. Anything low intensity that gets blood flow to the fingers will help with recovery.

Andrew Reed wrote:

Rice bucket exercises and alternating hot/cold immersion, ideally up to your elbows, after your workouts. Typically climbers have very developed flexors, but not extensors, keep it balanced. 

Good info. I maintain a pretty good regimen of antagonist muscle training, plus prehab work with flexbar / finger extension bands / Armaid : massage gun.

I use contrast therapy to recover from hard mtb and trail running days; perhaps I'll give it a go from the elbows down as well.

Re: volume, I recently completed a 12-week Power Company plan. What I'm doing now feels like a pretty level transition into similar volume, but perhaps the Mini is much more fingery and less foot-supported than the gym boulder problems I was using.

Totally agree with the comments regarding managing the volume. Part of that is also taking rest weeks from the board. Take a week and just climb on normal gym problems or outside. You can even not even climb at all and just lift weights and run. Just give your fingers a break. You’ll come back even stronger.

I think starting board climbing is similar to starting climbing in general. Muscles get stronger faster than tendons so you need to be careful to not overdo it. So yeah, don't overdo it, 2x per week is plenty especially when starting out.

There really isn't any magic to it — just manage your volume, especially of high velocity moves, stop sessions when you're still relatively well coordinated and before major power loss, and watch your around-session nutrition (especially hydration). Pretty much everything else is just window dressing. E.g. I would be genuinely astonished if rice bucket exercises did anything physiologically (though I readily admit they feel good). 

How do your fingers feel now? If your having no problems your volume is probably fine. 

Victor Creazzi wrote:

How do your fingers feel now? If your having no problems your volume is probably fine. 

I’m hesitant to back this advice. When I built my first homewall in 2021 (8’x8’ at 40°), I was using it 3-4 times a week for about 4 months, at a higher intensity than the local college wall could provide. I was getting really strong really quickly, and my fingers had never felt better. Unfortunately I was acquiring a sub-symptomatic injury in my left ring finger A4, which culminated in a pulley rupture on the very first move of a sport climb. My big takeaway from that was a volume increase has to be paced out carefully across a long period, with appropriate deloads built in. I know that a common line of PT advice for injury recovery is “let pain be your guide”, but I’ve found that to not work in the realm of overall workload management. 

F r i t z wrote:

Good info. I maintain a pretty good regimen of antagonist muscle training, plus prehab work with flexbar / finger extension bands / Armaid : massage gun.

I use contrast therapy to recover from hard mtb and trail running days; perhaps I'll give it a go from the elbows down as well.

Re: volume, I recently completed a 12-week Power Company plan. What I'm doing now feels like a pretty level transition into similar volume, but perhaps the Mini is much more fingery and less foot-supported than the gym boulder problems I was using.

Not to hijack, but what were your thoughts on the PC plan? Did you feel like you wanted a board to continue power development? 

Dan Schmidt wrote:

high velocity moves

This is a really helpful paradigm to assess moves, thanks. Even though my current volume is similar to my last training cycle, the number of high-velocity moves is quite a bit higher. 

Victor, I've got a sore right ring A4 and left middle DIP. Not as bad a a proper tear, but noticeable pain upon palpation in daily life and while climbing.

SteveZ wrote:

Not to hijack, but what were your thoughts on the PC plan? Did you feel like you wanted a board to continue power development? 

Significant gains, very pleased with the plan, no injuries either during or after the cycle. I spent seven hours a week training, plus my normal mtb race training. 

My main rationale for the board was gestational in nature ;-)

Dump the collagen and switch to whey, it's complete(collagen isn't), and is way better digesting. 

Ramping the volume while maintaining diet is correct, it's hard but doing once a week to start may be all you can tolerate, then sprinkle in 2, and up. I can handle about 4 2-hour sessions a week in a 3/4 week period before deloading again, not for pain but because my strength will dip from the fatigue. It took a couple years to get there especially being a bit heavier than your average climber ~185 pounds.

How long has the finger been hurting? It's hard being a new proud owner of a mini, but you'd probably be better served rehabbing that first to subvert any forthcoming disasters.

For me, one board training day a week is what works best. I ensure I am well rested, and once I start powering down I immediately call it. That is usually after ~15 limit level attempts with ~5 minutes rest between each. These things differ so much person to person based on age, training age, injury history, etc. I would stick to basic principles of erring on the side of too little in the beginning, progressively loading, and not doing more than 2 days a week of intense board training (unless you have a comp kid background of training and load, and then can maybe handle non-normal person loads and intensity)

SteveZ wrote:

Not to hijack, but what were your thoughts on the PC plan? Did you feel like you wanted a board to continue power development? 

I’ll preface this post with a few things: I really like Power Company and am generally a fan of their work, my training age was not super mature when this happened, (had been climbing off and on for ~4 years, but not consistently across that time), and I don’t blame Power Company or the plan for the injury. I was the one that personally chose to follow the plan without alterations, therefore I consider myself responsible for the outcome.

The pulley rupture that I described in my post above I can pretty concretely ascribe to following the Climb 5.12 (Boulders Only) plan from Power Company without accounting for my personal volume tolerance. I think that the base of the plan is generally good, but I found that the volume + intensity was drastically more than I could recover from even with adequate nutrition and rest. I’ve had friends following PC plans (some the exact same one) give similar feedback, minus the full rupture, but still injured to some degree. 

In hindsight, I should have been able to identify that the intensity and volume were both far too high for where I was training-age wise, however I will say that part of the appeal to a plan like that is that I don’t feel like I should have to drastically alter the content and pacing of sessions right out the gate. Particularly with a 5.12 training plan, where it’s very likely that someone who’s only been climbing a handful of years, perhaps even sub-year, would be looking to follow the plan. 

If I were to try the plan again, I would substantially alter it. I would entirely cut out the max hang sessions, remove a portion of the technique drills (and likely drop an entire workout A), and have a deload week every 3 weeks tops. 

I now tend to look at climbing training from the perspective of “Do the least amount possible to get results”, and with hindsight I find the PC plans to pretty much be the antithesis of that philosophy. I won’t outright say I don’t recommend the plans, but I will say be extremely cautious with the volume + intensity from the onset. Unless you’re extremely adapted to training, do an initial block with far less intensity and volume and adjust after that. 

F r i t z wrote:

Victor, I've got a sore right ring A4 and left middle DIP. Not as bad a a proper tear, but noticeable pain upon palpation in daily life and while climbing.

It sounds like 'maintaining pully tendon health' is a bit optimistic to me. 'Rehabbing Pully Tendon Health While Board Climbing' may have been a more appropriate thread title. I'd say back way off at least in the short term and get those fingers feeling better. Dave MacLeod had a recent video about rehabbing mild finger injury. I was surprised at how much climbing he was doing to rehab his injury.

Noah Betz wrote:

The pulley rupture that I described in my post above I can pretty concretely ascribe to following the Climb 5.12 (Boulders Only) plan from Power Company without accounting for my personal volume tolerance. I think that the base of the plan is generally good, but I found that the volume + intensity was drastically more than I could recover from even with adequate nutrition and rest. I’ve had friends following PC plans (some the exact same one) give similar feedback, minus the full rupture, but still injured to some degree. 

I think most people dramatically overestimate the volume of hard training they're capable of recovering from. I can climb V5 on the Moon Board 3–4x/week and be basically fine, because that's the level where I can almost always slow down and control moves. Add just a few powerful boulders into the mix with moves I can't fully control and I'm down to 2–3x/week, because I'll need a full rest day after each session to recover my strength. Bump the level again to project-level and I'm down to 1–2x/week, because that's how much time I need to fully recover my speed and power.

I haven't found many non-parents, or at least people who are really forced to drop their volume, who are willing to try sessioning hard only once or twice per week. People just want to do more, more, more. But regardless of your training or calendar age, I think it's worth seriously trying the minimal / low dose model for at least one training cycle. For me, it taught me that I can still improve climbing only twice per week.

(FWIW this is all in a bouldering context. I am not a sport climber, but my limited sport climbing experience and more substantial endurance-oriented training experience suggests that you can do A LOT, like A LOT A LOT A LOT, more of that style of climbing per week. The lower velocity / relative intensity are no doubt why. When I did some Lattice "anaerobic capacity" cycles I was really shocked at how quickly I recovered from the flash-level circuit workouts. I'd go super hard, then be basically fully recovered the next day. Not so with hard bouldering!)

Thanks for everyone's input so far. With your feedback in mind, I reduced today's total volume by 33%. When selecting problems, I paid a bit more attention to the impact of big, high-velocity moves. I'll try to stay on a more conservative trajectory until my fingers have acclimated to the new type of stress. It's tough though, a total kid-in-a-candy-shop situation with the shiny new build staring at me in the basement.

Anyone have a method of tracking training load that they prefer more than V-points (average V, density, as articulated by Steve Bechtel and others)? I'm sure after years of training, you have a better sense of intuition and listening to your body. Until then, anyone have any suggestions for collecting and interpreting data to show how much wear and tear you're putting on the fingers?

Biggest pitfall I see (and fall into myself) is not cutting your session soon enough, regardless of weekly volume.  For strength/power sessions (moonboard) the big dawgs all say to stop when you start feeling about 80%, not when you feel real tired or noticably weaker.

The time under tension to get you there will likely change as you spend more time on the board or adjust intensity of the session but getting a feel for when to call it while you still feel "pretty good" is helpful.

I've also been doing a lot of really easy finger curls on an edge just as a recovery intervention on my rest days and I think it's helping with fluid exchange in the tendon, but that's anecdotal and likely erroneous.

edit to address calvin and hobbes - There's no simple way to go about it honestly.  You can climb longer at a lower intensity (onsight grade, capacity sessions, on the minute boulders, etc), than a project boulder session that might even just be 45 min after you're warmed up.  I also vary a ton day to day and have had to ignore the v points recipe and make up for it later in the week. 

I haven't spent as much time on the moonboard as the other boards, but once I notice I'm starting to slow down at all on the punchy moves, it's a good indicator I'm powered down and it's time to call it quits.  Your speed will drop before you strength does usually and it can be an almost decent gauge if that makes any sense.

maybe give this a listen, lots of good info here: thenuggetclimbing.com/episo…