Older and Boulder

As stated in a previous post, I’ve been bouldering regularly for just over a year now. As seems to be common, I’m finding that the early progress has slowed a little bit.

In order to try and understand what areas I might need to work on, I thought it would be worth doing some of the free assessments on the Lattice Training website.

The results of these were pretty interesting.

On the My Flex test, I was pretty much bang on average for each factor, except for hamstring flexibility in both ‘Sit and Reach’ and in ‘pancake’ flexibility. While I don’t feel like this has held me back, it’s definitely something I’m going to work on, as it won’t do any harm to improve.

On the pinch test, I was above average on the ‘wide shallow’ and ‘wide deep’ pinches. I was surprised by this, as I felt that my pinch was weak, and often gave up on boulders with pinches as I had thought I was weak on them. A couple of days after I found the result I sent a boulder problem in my local gym which had a pinch at the crux. It seems like i just had to to believe I could do it, and success followed.

The final free lattice assessment is the finger strength testing. I knew I wasn’t particularly strong in this area but was surprised to be well below average. To quote the result of the assessment.

Your score of 106.7% bodyweight held makes you much weaker than expected for your bouldering grade. We would expect people at your grade, weight and gender to be scoring significantly higher.

So, what to make of this? For me, this is very good news, there’s one glaring weakness, and one possible weakness. While this is not a full professional assessment, and there are likely to be technique and other factors which are limiting progress, finger strength and flexibility improvements are relatively easy to work towards, and also are not likely to require huge amounts of time investments. The next step is to get a bit more organised on a training schedule and stick with it.

One thing I have deliberately ignored in this post so far is the subject of injuries. I have been suffering from the dreaded golfers/climbers elbow for a wee while now, and while it’s not stopping me from climbing, there are some movements on the wall that are very painful, and seems to make things worse. I’ll cover the details in another post, but to summarise, I’ve tried a number of routes to rehab, with limited success. Recently though, I’ve consulted a new physio who specialises in climbing, and I’m about 3.5 weeks into the rehab program they’ve recommended. While it’s too early to get too excited, I have seen some progress, and I’m cautiously optimistic.

So, what’s the plan?

1. Rehab the elbow!
2. Finger strength
3. Flexibilty, hips and hamstrings in particular.

Now all I need to do is organise a training plan from the overwhelming amount of information that’s out there to address each of these, and then to stick with it.

Onwards and Upwards.