Blog

Climbing on Crutches

• March 2014
• Climb Training

Hi Steph,
First I want to say that you are such an inspiration! I recently got back into climbing and it just takes me to a place that I have never been. When I feel my entire body improving on a move that was previously super challenging I gain a whole new level of trust within myself. It is such an unbelievable feeling. I don’t want to lose what upper body strength I gained while I’m out of commission. Do you have any suggestions for maintaining and working on the upper body (climbing style) while being laid up on crutches? Thankfully I have good friends who will take me to the gym 🙂

Thank you for putting yourself out there.
And of course I am so sorry you have lost your best-friend, your love, your husband.

Much love,
Lori
“Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think.”
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hi Lori,
My good friend Beth Rodden has a lot of experience with training while on crutches, so I asked her if she could answer your question. Here’s what she had to say (thanks Beth!!):

Hi Lori –
I’m so sorry to hear that you are laid up crutches! That is no fun at all. I’ve had two stints on crutches in my climbing career – one for 8 months with a broken foot (I turned a 3 month injury into an 8 month injury because I was an awful patient) and then one for a month with a broken/sprained ankle.

With my first injury I was in the gym ALL the time. I even put sticky rubber on my boot (hence the horrible patient part) to climb. After seeing that I was prolonging my injury I switched to only one footed climbing and belaying sitting down.

Another thing I did was pull ups on the Metolius Rock Rings. I would do different sets to equal 100 pull ups every other day, or do the pull ups two days on, one day off. For me (and remember, all I was doing was pull ups, so I got good at them) my sets looked like this:
10 on the jugs, 4 on the medium edges, 2 on the small edges, 4 on the medium edges, 10 on the slopers – all x 3 sets. If I really wanted to work on fingers, I would reduce the jug pull ups and increase the small edges pull ups.

Another thing to keep up forearm endurance is if you have a campus board at your gym that is close to the wall? Sometimes they put a rung on the wall for your feet. I was able to put my good foot on that rung, dangle my injured one, and then do sets where I moved up and down from rung #1 to #2 to #3 and back down til I got pumped. Perhaps about 10 minutes divided into 4 sets.

I’m not sure if you can stand very well or not? But if you can, then I also tried to do opposition weight lifting – bench press and shoulder exercises.

I hope that helps and I hope that you have a successful and speedy recovery!
All my best,
Beth