As Wolfgang Gullich said, getting strong is easy, getting strong without getting injured is hard. Sooner or later, nearly all climbers get injured and it will be injuries that ultimately dictate how far you get in climbing, if you let them, but famous Scottish E11 leader Dave MacLeod has some top tips to stop them happening in the first place.
Unfortunately, the data shows it takes over a decade just to get small proportions of medical research adopted in regular practice. Sourcing reliable and up to date advice on preventing and treating finger, elbow, shoulder and other climbing injuries is challenging to say the least. You need to be the expert, because there are so many strands of knowledge and practice to pull together to stay healthy as a climber, and no single source of advice to cover all of these.
The book draws together both the cutting edge of peer reviewed sports medicine research, and the subtle concepts of changing your climbing habits and routine to prevent and successfully recover from injuries. It is a handbook on how to take care of yourself as a lifelong climbing athlete. By spanning the fields of climbing coaching, physiotherapy, sports medicine and behavioural science, it goes beyond the general advice on treating symptoms offered by sports medicine textbooks and into much more detail on technique and habits specific to climbing than the existing climbing literature base.
You will learn how your current climbing habits are already causing your future injuries and what you can do to change that. If you are already injured, it will prevent you from prolonging your injury with the wrong climbing habits and rehabilitation choices. You will learn how the ingredients of prevention and good recovery come from wildly different sources and how you have been using only a fraction of them. Fully referenced throughout, the practical advice for diagnosis, rehabilitation and prevention of climbing injuries is drawn from up to date peer reviewed sports medicine research.
Section 1: Make or break
Why the treatments you have tried aren't working, and what to do about it.
How to use this book
The real reasons you are injured
Stress and injury
The reason you are still injured
The language problem
The practitioner problem
The sports medicine problem
The missing link
Exceptional use: the luxury of doing your sport badly
Prevention
Your visit to the doctor's
Summary
Section 2: Know pain, or no gain
Pain and how to read it
Seeing the patterns in your pain
What is healthy soreness?
Understanding your pain
Going beyond reading only pain
Summary
Section 3: Removing the causes of injury for prevention and treatment
Are you only treating symptoms?
What was the real cause?
The big four: technique, posture, activity, rest
Correcting technique
Correcting posture
Activity
How to rest
Warm-up and injury
Lifestyle
Nutrition
Section 4: Rehabilitation of climbing injuries - treating both causes and symptoms
Acute rehabilitation
When to move beyond acute care
Goals of mid-late rehabilitation
Modern understanding of tendon injuries and recovery
Therapeutic activity - basic exercises
Therapeutic activity - climbing
Proprioceptive training
Walking the line of rehab ups and downs
Therapeutic modalities
Surgery
Drug and other emerging treatments
When to stop rehab?
Summary
Section 5: Psychology of injuries: dealing with the anguish of injury
Face it: it really is that bad!
Take heart
Finding motivation
Section 6: Young climbers
What young climbers should know
Too much, too young: a warning
What parents and coaches should do
Section 7: The elbow
Golfer's and tennis elbow
Brachioradialis/brachialis strain
Other elbow injuries
Section 8: The fingers
Different grips in climbing and consequences for injury
Pulley injuries
When and how to tape the fingers
Painful finger joints
Flexor unit strains
Dupuytren's contracture
Ganglions
Other finger injuries
Section 9: The wrist
Triangular fibrocartilage injury
Carpal tunnel syndrome
De Quervain's tenosynovitis
Other wrist injuries
Section 10: The shoulder
Shoulder impingement/rotator cuff tears
Biceps tendon insertion tears
Labral tears
Shoulder dislocation
Frozen shoulder
Thoracic outlet syndrome
Shoulder and neck trigger points
Section 11: Lower body injuries
Foot pain in climbers
Plantar fasciitis
Heel pad bruising
Ingrown toenails
Sesamoid injuries
Hallux valgus
Morton's neuroma
Ankle injuries in climbers
Cartilage/joint injuries
Ankle impingement syndrome
Achilles tendon pain
Knee injuries in climbers
Meniscus tears
Anterior cruciate ligament tears
Medial collateral ligament tears
Hamstrings tear
Hernia
Section 12: Further reading
Further reading and references
Getting access to good care
Illustrated with line drawings and monochrome photographs.
By Dave MacLeod.
Card cover, 23.5cm x 19cm, 226 pages.
Published 2015.
ISBN: 978-0-9564281-3-4.