Climbing as therapy for the brain

The other day I saw a big guy wearing a helmet climbing a relatively easy route in the indoor gym. He was making these horrendous screams as he was climbing. My boyfriend noted that he is probably someone with some mental issues, brought to the climbing gym to try out climbing as a therapy to help him to perhaps quiet some strongly intrusive (violent, abusive?) thoughts.

Normally I would not be able to help myself but to judge other people, but since some of the greatest climbers in the world also scream like they are giving birth to a baby without epidurals when they attempt really difficult climbs (eg. Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra), I knew pretty early on that screaming had a function.

Our guess was that this was his first time trying out climbing, and he insisted on wearing a helmet so it would help him feel more safe and secure about the activity. We didn't want to be impolite and stare at him too much, so we continued our own climbs on the other end of the wall. We could hear his torturous screaming, then there would be a break, then he would start screaming again. It was obviously pretty awkward for everyone else in the gym, but it kind of made me feel happy too, because I think he knows that the activity is helping him, so he must have made a second climb, or at least took a break and then kept going.

Again, I always find the most fascinating part about climbing to be the mental part more than the physical aspect. I also have racing, random, ruminating, and intrusive thoughts. When you are on the wall hanging on for dear life, those thoughts are forced to take a break. So for a few moments, the brain experiences fear (of heights, of the unfamiliarity with the body being in funny 3D positions), and simultaneously welcoming peace from nagging, wordy, annoying thoughts.

The thing is, if the climb is not intense enough, that is, when my body and brain start to feel quite comfortable hanging out or moving about on a route, the thoughts would come back. So basically, if I am experiencing nagging thoughts again, it's time to try a harder route. I'm at a stage where I feel like I have trouble finding Goldilock routes, that is, routes not so easy where my brain starts yapping at me about my daily worries, and routes not so tough that I need to take a break after every move I try. I need routes that a physically challenging, intense, but at the same time, allow me to perform some flowy movements. Not something easy to balance.

An interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, an expert on addiction, reminds me how fast brains adapts to chemicals and stimulants. It also reminds me how we are often unconsciously drawn to drugs and everyday activities that our brains inherently need. When we take drugs, either prescribed or illegal, our brains adapt to the normal dosages rather quickly, and we need to increase the dosage until the side effects do terrible things to our body. In the case of climbing and other sports, our brain and body also adapt quite quickly, but we just need to increase the intensity or difficulty of the activity.

For that man with the helmet, I hope climbing is helpful for him, and I hope he can keep doing it if he finds it helpful.

Climbing: working on the body vs. working on the nerves

The last few weeks, I have been working on getting used to lead climbing, which, as a reminder, works by bring a rope with me up the wall and clipping it to a metal draw located at evenly spaced out sections all the way up to the top of the wall. The pile of 40-60 m long rope lays on the ground, and your belay partner slowly gives out rope to the climber on the wall through a belaying device, so that when a fall occurs, the climber hangs off of the draw he/she last clipped. Such fall could happen any time, but a likely position when a fall happens would be when the climber attempts to slip the rope in a draw and fails to do so, in which case he/she falls all the way to below the previous metal draw where the rope was clipped on. This is quite a large fall that is quite scary for the climber, and the belayer also gets dragged some distance up and into the wall (the belayer should stick his/her foot out towards the wall to help control the fall). Here is a video of what this process looks like. The whole process is supposed to be relatively safe for the climber and the belayer.

So despite practice having practiced falling in a controlled manner, at this current stage of my climbing journey, my heart rate still goes way up even as soon as I don't have at least one secure footing and at least one secure handhold. This is why I am currently only climbing very easy routes, over gripping my handholds, and "cheating" -- ie. grab or stand on a handhold or foothold that do not belong to the designated route I am working on. On these easier routes, the handholds and footholds are pretty large and non-tricky, so simply climbing them isn't a work out for me. Well, I mean, they still tire me out since I am gripping them too hard, but it doesn't work my hands and my body the same way that a higher level route does.

My boyfriend, having stronger grips, better endurance, and less fear of heights, is on a different game. He is able to attempt routes that are way closer in difficult to what he normally climbs on top rope. He also hates falling, but he is able to overgrip trickier handholds for longer than I can. He likes to work on minimizing the number of hanging rests on a hard route so he can eventually "onsight" such routes, or get through an entire route upon first try without hang-resting or falling, having never watched another person climbing that same route.

To be strict, you should rather fall than to use holds that do not belong on your route, because on an outdoor wall of labelled level X, there are no additional holds other than all the ones available to you on that wall. However, currently I cannot play that game, because I have to first get over my psychological roadblocks. Otherwise the falls would not be fun (will be fall of tension), and I would lose my desire to continue climbing.

So anyways, my boyfriend and I had a conflict over the fact I sometimes place a foot or a hand between the rope and the wall. You should have your body parts over the rope, otherwise when you fall, your leg or hand can be jammed up by the rope and the resulting fall could be messy. I understand that intellectually, but I was so focused on not falling that when he yelled out at me from the below when I had a hand under the rope, I totally panicked and could not climb any more. His warnings were out for safety concerns, but the problem was that I reacted over the fact that I did something wrong and I didn't know how to fix it immediately.

The main thing is, what I did was dangerous if I fall. My main focus was not to fall. I would have grabbed all the things I was not supposed to grab (the rope, the draws, the bolt etc) in order to stay on the wall. So we were playing totally different games with totally different rules. This was why it was impossible to solve the conflict. I understand his game is how climbing should be. You are supposed to practice using the appropriate body movement to get up a route, falling as many times as necessary until you get the movement to work. But I needed to just get comfortable on the wall holding my body in uncomfortable positions until I feel comfortable enough to work on falling and then work on following the rules as well as more advanced climbing movements.

Being on the wall, standing on your toes and hanging by a rope, there are a million things to think about. One has totally different perspectives being on the wall than the person maintaining your safety from the bottom of the wall watching you climb. There are a lot of parallels between this activity and real life. I think I might have been failing certain things in life because while I know the rules of the game for career advancement, due to my own psychological shortcomings, I want to be given a break and be on my own terms, while being attached to other people. But the administrators, the boss, the colleagues do not see my perspective and are not willing to give me a break. If I really want to play my own games, then I need to be independent, belaying myself. Otherwise I have to play their games. It's something for me to contemplate further for sure. 

Neuromuscular recruitment in climbing part 2

In a previous post, I mentioned I knew next to nothing about neuromuscular recruitment. This article by Tom Randall lets me know that I do have some experience with this recruitment phenomenon.

So every time I go to a climbing gym, I have to start warming up by doing a little bit of stretching, then climbing the easiest boulders, then move on to the big walls, whereas my boyfriend can start on pretty challenging routes right away. I have attempted to go straight to a long climbing wall before, and I felt like crap. It feels like I can't reach as far as I'd like to, even though I could, because I stretched. Once I reach a high hand hold, I feel like I struggle to pull myself up (even though I should be using my legs more, like taking the stairs up rather than pulling up, but still). I feel tired half way through, even though it's a route that I would have no problem with if I do it 30 minutes into a climbing session. I always thought it's an issue that my muscles are not warm up enough. I never thought of it as a muscle recruitment issue.

Randall's article reminds me that it is totally a neuromuscular recruitment issue. If I go straight to an intermediate wall, probably only 50% of the nerves and muscles are awakened. No wonder the climb feels much harder than it does when I am fully warmed up on easy routes. In fact, at my current level, the best time to try a route that is at the limit of my level is on the 3rd or 4th long route after warm up on boulders. That is when I feel my performs at its peak. I feel a flow inside the body (blood circulation maybe); my movements are also more flowy. I can push my body's limits -- try a power move that I couldn't do previously, or hang on to that crimp for a little longer than I am comfortable with.

Every person's body works a bit differently than others. My boyfriend seems to be able to do hard stuff right away, and do a hard route at the end of the day when he's super tired. I guess that means he hasn't been climbing at his limits yet. He also recovers super quickly (0-1 day rest), whereas I need at least 2 days rest after a hard climbing day.  Higher testosterone levels and low body fat composition probably helps a lot in this regard. I have also seen beginners who try hard stuff right away without warm up, push as hard as they can the entire climbing session, and then wonder why they do not seem to improve much after a year.

I am sure my training routines are not yet optimized, but I am just enjoying the activity. I am at the stage where I have acquired a bit of endurance that I can "waste some energy" trying a few different things on the wall. I'm sure if I have to climb harder routes later on, I will need to learn to climb more efficiently, ie. clip ropes faster and hang less, and use my legs to hold more of my body weight than my arms.

Climbing -- mental models and perceived limits in my body

As I climb up a tall wall, I get scared by the heights. Being strong muscularly and positioning my body and limbs in steady positions help alleviate the feeling of anxiety. However, I get tired after so many moves. For climbing, often a "pump" is experienced in the forearms. A pump, or a feeling of tightness and burn in the forearm, is caused by gripping a handhold strongly for too long, where the long static contraction of the forearm finger flexor muscles results in restricted blood vessels, limiting blood flow (and thus oxygen + other chemical exchange) to where it's needed the most. 

So at this stage of my climbing career it's mostly caused by bad techniques. I'm gripping handholds for way longer than necessary because my rope clipping technique is atrocious, and I grip harder than needed because I am scared of heights. Nevertheless, when feeling pumped, my instinct is to just take a break (ask my belay partner to tighten the rope and I just hang out for awhile, shaking out both my arms and my calves, before moving on. However, when I climb a relatively easy overhangy route, even though I experience a pump and tiredness in my fingers, I find myself ignoring the pain, pushing through, and continuing to climb until the wall is straight again, because I have this big fear for hanging too far away from the wall (happens when you release your arms, you are hanging perpendicular to the ground, and the wall is tilted away from you).

So, it seems like my fear for hanging in midair combined with my fear of falling can overcome my feeling of tiredness, and my hands work fine. I can keep climbing with pumped arms and cramped fingers for several more moves than where I think my physical limits are. Given this is the case, should I push harder when I climb straight walls too? It's hard to say. There are several conflicting goals. I want to improve my endurance, but I don't want to overdo it and injure my body. I want to push myself hard, but I also don't want to promote bad habits (again, there are better ways of improving my techniques, such as positioning my feet and my body better). But climbing through the pump does help improve endurance.

I guess for people who injure themselves easily while doing sports, they should definitely take it easy. I am probably overly cautious and not pushing my body to its real limits. On the other hand, I am always totally sore the day after a climbing session, so I am not too easy on myself either. Being injury-free probably is a good thing, allowing me to climb more often. I do bang my knees and scrape my skin against holds on the wall too often though, due to carelessness. I hope I can get better at preventing such injuries.

I really enjoy how climbing challenges the nonthinking part of my brain. I feel pain in the head (probably imaginary, but it's the result of pushing it to its limits, given that it controls my body movement and seems to care about safety a whole lot) when I am struggling on the wall. I am unable to think about other things like what worries me in life. Climbing headspace can feel very peculiar. Rationally, I know I am "safe" because I am attached to a rope with a belayer holding on to me. But my perception is that I am in danger, because I haven't mastered stability, especially on walls with some cracks, some protrusions, or some corners.

Many people try climbing once and don't want to do it again. They believe they are just not strong enough to do this sport. But actually most of the fear comes from the brain not being used to operating in this funny vertical 3D space. Once the brain (the limbic system? Hippocampus?) forms a mental map (that the cognitive brain doesn't really understand at all) of vertical space, the inner car alarm will tone down. Then it's time to work on stronger fingers and techniques etc. to climb better.

Rock climbing and feet

For those of you not familiar with how climbing works, to keep yourself on the wall and to move upwards, you mostly stand on your toes (so you can rotate your feet and shift your body in all sorts of ways) and grip the wall with your fingers (could be as little as one finger for the advanced climbers). Hey, I didn't know how climbing worked when I started. I would use my whole hand and whole foot for maximum contact (= feeling of security) with the handholds and footholds.

So, what about the feet?

Well, one of the essential piece of climbing equipments is climbing shoes.  These shoes are made with a thick layer of sticky and relatively stiff rubber all around the shoe, encasing your foot such that all of the toes are squished together, acting as one unit, so you can push hard off of your big toe and generate a lot of force to propel yourself up the wall. The more advanced shoes also allows you you stand on tiny ledges on overhung terrain, and lets you heel hook or toe hook a ledge to balance yourself on the wall.

I have wide, flat feet; so called "fallen arches". I have bunions on both feet. Wearing climbing shoes feels a bit like Chinese foot binding. To be fair, even people with narrow feet don't feel great in climbing shoes, which are supposed to be worn pretty snug, with no deadspace in the shoes. I have purchased several pairs of climbing shoes. I blamed the first one for being too much of a beginner shoe (La Sportiva Tarantulace) that it didn't let me climb harder routes (though I have witness many other people climbing harder routes with the said shoe model). My second pair of climbing shoes, the Scarpa Vapor VS, is supposed to be "the most comfortable intermediate performance-based climbing shoe". It's true that this pair is made with stickier rubber and squeezes my toes more, so I did have more confidence standing on very small holds and climbing climbing harder routes. However, it also was super uncomfortable. It's partly that I have long toes that are weak and can't handle my body weight for very long. So I got another pair of shoes with a flatter profile but is not a total beginner shoe (La Sportiva Finale Women's). It squeezes my foot in a different way. I could keep the shoes on my feet for longer periods of time, but it also isn't as precise on small footholds as the Vapor VS. My toes would still hurt after a period of climbing. With my toes so long, I'm not sure how much stronger they will get, but I will keep trying.

To be honest, I think I'm a bit too heavy for my toes to handle, but I have never been good at losing weight. My feet cramp a lot, sometimes they cramp just from me trying to put the Vapor VS shoes on.  The cramming effect of the shoes can't be good for my feet. When I try to do yoga (feet flat on the ground), I can feel different parts of the foot clicking to try to clear the tension and cramps caused by rock climbing. But at the same time, climbing must strengthen parts of my feet somehow, as I do put a lot of body weight on the toes, and I do feel I can push off of each foot more than I did a year ago. I don't know what are the overall effects of climbing on my feet. Do they make the bunions worse? I'm not entirely sure. I think I should try to do other activities to balance out the effects of climbing shoes on my feet. I should also look into foot reflexology. Someone suggested that I get orthopedics foot inserts for my shoes. I think I would try barefoot footwear first actually, to try to strengthen my foot muscles and tendons.

Lead climbing -- a beginner again

So I feel like a beginner again, climbing route with big, juggy holds. I panic when I can't figure out where to place my feet and one hand comfortably. The rope from below pulls me in funny/scary ways (partly because bf is belaying quite tightly).

When I first got to 6b, the biggest challenge was to be able to do the power moves to reach the next hold, which can be quite far away. Now that I am doing all easy routes (5b's and 5c's), I never imagined the simple act of clipping the rope into a metal draw could cause so much soreness in the shoulder of the hand holding a handhold on the wall for stabilizing the body. I also don't seem to trust my new shoes: La Sportiva Finale on artificial rock footholds. I thought my footwork have gotten a lot better, but turns out they could use a lot more work. It's going back to the foundations:

- Better foot placement needed, better body positioning, arms should hang rather than kept bent, better breathing, keep movements slow and smooth, don't panic (breath!!), and remind myself that I am strong enough to get through these "easy" routes.

Through climbing, I'm noticing I have a ton of self doubt and self-distrust. Even though I end up topping all the routes I have tried so far, I had a lot of negative self talks while doing it, such as "I'm not going to make it", " I'm going to fall", "This route I chose is way too hard for me", etc. I panic super easy the moment I come to a spot where I'm not totally sure what to do next. The thing is, I usually end up resolving the problem. It's my brain's default mode for everything that I do. I'm not a good cheerleader for myself. I need to start believing in myself more.

I really think climbing is a good way to examine how my thinking habits work and try to change it to a more positive tune, or at a minimum, recognize all the self doubts and negative talks I do normally. Hopefully I learn to nip the negative self talk in the butt and feel more confidence about my capabilities.

Rock climbing progress after 1 year

The activity of climbing is like being on a hamster wheel or an angled treadmill -- you have to keep doing it to just move up in levels, or even just to stay at the same level. The moment you stop doing it (for more than a week), you slide back down in the amount of power, strength and endurance.

First I went on vacation for 3 weeks and did zero climbing. When I came back, even the simplest route (5b/5c) felt difficult. I guess that was somewhat understandable, given I wasn't exercising my body (especially upper body) much for like 20 days. But then, when I spent a month only bouldering, which emphasizes short bursts power moves, I also felt weak on the rope climbing wall, which consists of a series of moves requiring less power but more endurance. My wrists were really feeling it after a few routes. Climbing at my highest level (6b/5.10c) felt impossible.

Then when I started training for lead climbing (bringing the rope up the wall as one climbs, instead of having it set up at the top anchor, known as top rope), I picked the easiest routes on the wall (4 to 5bs). It felt super awkward to have the rope in between my legs instead of hanging from above. I also did not know exactly where to place my body to minimize energy usage. As a total chicken about slipping and falling to my death, I gripped the handholds super hard. One year of climbing seems to have provided me enough endurance to do a lot of over-gripping (read: waste more energy than necessary to keep me on the wall) the holds while still completing several easy routes. I would be sore the next day, feeling like I have trained pretty hard. Unfortunately, when I went back to the bouldering wall, I could no longer boulder at my highest level at bouldering (6a+/6b). 

So the situation for the last 3 months is somewhat frustrating, but also kind of illuminating about this activity. Even though I have been climbing every single week, I have been slipping back because I haven't been consistently pushing my limits. It's not like I feel I climb worse every week. In fact, I have been feeling better about being in a lot of awkward body positions. It's just that, specifically, hand/wrist strengths and power moves require consistent training. I can already see that by starting so late in life, I will not get super far in this sport. However, I am still hoping to build a foundation such that I can still climb 6A-6B when I am 50-60 years old.