Blog

Recovery

• August 2012
• Climb Training

Hi Steph,

You have been an inspiration of mine dating back to when I was first introduced to climbing 5 years ago. This past week, I took a fall about 50 feet from the base of our climb in Ratikon, Switzerland (you can read about it here if you are interested http://thrillseekersanonymous.com/2012/05/29/self-rescue/). Needless to say, the most PC way to describe the descent is that it was less than pleasant.

Now that the dust has settled and I have a lovely hard cast accessory for the next 4-6 weeks, the bummer of not climbing is setting in. Do you have any advice, being a climber yourself, as to how to stay strong mentally and physically during the recovery process? Training tips would be much appreciated 🙂

Cheers,
ilana

Hi Ilana,
The Ratikon is such an impressive place: I got to do a couple of routes there a few years ago, and I really liked it.
I hope you are recovering well: good job taking yourself down….

The advantage of hurting a leg is you can still do upper body training. If you have access to a weight room, you can do just about every upper body exercise you might want to do, especially lat pull downs, military presses and dumbbell flies. You can probably do core work too on the floor, mini-crunches with your legs straight and leg raises. The cast will add weight, but actually that is good for the exercise.

If you have a fingerboard and don’t mind rigging, you can set up a harness so that when you let go, you hang in the harness rather than jump or stand down from the board.

Though in the past I have not been a huge fan of lap swimming (due to the fact that you can’t avoid getting wet and I have had no success with those waterproof headphones and ishuffle cases), I’ve found it to be somewhat addictive when recovering from injury. In fact, lap swimming has made me come back stronger from injury…I think it’s really good for shoulder, back and core strength.
Good luck!
Steph