Warming Up 101
(photo: Charlie Fowler, a cold start after a snow cave bivy, high on Fitzroy)
Hi,
I am Mohammad Faisal Halim (please call me Faissal), and I have a question about exertion. When you are camping out, and wake up to climb, do you just climb while your muscles are still cold (I do not see how you could do warm up exercises out in the field)? I am asking because I have not been able to leave my lab much the last few months, and since I have been waking up with my body cold, from catching a few hours of sleep on the lab floor, I have not exercised for fear of hurting myself. I have only been able to do push ups sporadically (and pull ups, when nobody is looking at the elevator door frame) throughout the day, but I am gaining a truck tire around my belly, and I fear this will hurt my climbing ability. Now, I cannot risk hurting my upper body, because I cannot exercise my lower body too much as I have not completely recovered from my snowboarding injury from last December. Being unable to exercise either parts will just leave me getting fatter, and EXTREMELY unhappy (I have to feel my world in motion, as one does when climbing, trying cartwheels, vaulting over railings, or doing parkour rolls, in order to be content).
So, I need to know what techniques you use to avoid strain injuries in the field, when you are climbing for days, and have to climb as soon as you get off your sleeping perch (maybe you are using some form of warm up that I do not know of). This knowledge will be invaluable to me whenever the pressure keeps me from going home and waking up warm in my bed. Of course, such knowledge will be useful to me in the lab, too.
Thank you so much!
~Faissal
P.S. Thank you for all the information that you have put up; especially the “How to Start Jumping” article. You see, I decided to try climbing because I had read that climbing skills can make more jump sites accessible, and being a rather conservative risk taker (compared to the friends whom I go skiing with, anyway), I feel that your article will help me greatly. Of course, a BASE number is still a long, long way away, since I am a poor graduate student, and I chose this goal deliberately because it was going to be very, very hard.
Dear Faissal,
Well, truck tires are no good. Unless you are a truck. And I encourage you to start doing your pullups when other people ARE looking, and start a pullup team in your lab! You may think I’m joking, but it could be a lot of fun for all of you…..
I tend to be always too cold, so I have a lot of warmup tricks. First of all, if you are sleeping in an uncomfortably cold bivouac (i.e., on the floor of your lab or on a small ledge on Cerro Torre), make yourself a hot water bottle. I drink out of stainless steel bottles (Kleen Kanteens), and if it’s a cold night, I boil some water and fill my bottle. It’s amazing how much warmer you feel with a hot water bottle between your feet or on your stomach….if it’s very cold, two are even better.
If you wake up cold and need to get moving, drink hot liquids. This will make you immediately feel warm. Swinging your arms like a windmill, doing deep knee bends and even running in place will also warm you up really fast.
Above all, don’t forget that warm legs will really increase your overall feeling of warmth, since your legs represent a lot of surface area in your overall body mass. A pair of long johns under your pants dramatically increases your warmth. That sounds basic, but a lot of us are used to adding a layer on top when we’re cold, which doesn’t help as much as warm legs.
I hope this helps!
🙂 Steph
Hi Steph,
It’s great to hear from you. You’ll be happy to know that I had been doing pull ups with two of my lab mates — I used to go with one to the local parks, last summer. It’s a little unfortunate that they will be away on other projects, this summer, but I shall hope to hang around with them (literally) when they get back. Thanks for the hot water tip (I hadn’t figured that I was being kept warm by the temperature of my hot coffee, rather than the caffeine, itself), and the warm up and insulation advice (the warm ups have helped me today, already).
On a different topic, I did mention that I had hurt myself while snowboarding. The reason that (I think) I got injured during my snowboarding trip was that I was putting equal pressure on both my legs, whereas my right side is significantly weaker than my left, leading to my straining my right lower back muscles, my right hip flexor (the one that I use to lift my leg sideways), and my right Achilles tendon. Perhaps the reason for this asymmetricity is that I have spent much of my life slightly tilted, at the waist, towards the left (thus inadvertently concentrating most of the effort of my bodyweight exercises on my left side — even push ups) — this, of course, left my right leg free to kick the ball during soccer matches. Right now, I am essentially teaching myself to walk again (don’t panic, I can walk as well as I used to), in that I am consciously trying to counteract the leftwards tilt and monitoring the negation by how much extra work my right side has to do.
Now, if you can shed any light on countering asymmetricities of this sort then I would definitely appreciate it. Ideally I would like to see my right side equally as strong as my left, as this would prevent not just snowboarding injuries, but also climbing injuries which I have previously recovered from (right hip flexor strain a year ago, and right shoulder strain at the tendon, on the back side, two years ago).
Cheers!
~Faissal
I’m glad I could help a little! I’m also working on asymmetries, since I was without a left ACL for 2 years, and now 7 months out from the replacement. I have been using my right side a lot more for almost 3 years. Interestingly, I had a bone density scan, and the bones on the right side of my body are almost twice as dense, due to bearing the impact of everything I do for all those years! So being out of balance has dramatic effects, even into your bones. Now that my knee is fixed, I try to focus on not favoring it when I hike or go upstairs, etc, and when I do that, I notice I use it harder. I think you develop lots of habits, and the body has an amazing tendency to compensate for any weakness. Being conscious of it seems to help a lot. Good luck 🙂
Thank you so much! Funny how it had not occurred to me that bone density would be affecting why I always feel that I am putting more weight on my left foot than on my right. I was thinking about getting ankle weights (so as to work my right calf muscles more) but now I think I’ll try to figure out where I can put an additional weight higher on my body, so that the right side of my skeletal structure is more stressed. I’m probably so obsessed with my asymmetricity that I am not even thinking straight: I entertain the thought of standing on my right side for hours on end, like in “The Karate Kid” movies. I have also started doing a variation of the side planche exercise, where my body is bent at the hips, so that I exercise the right side of my front abdominals and my right gluteus medius and gluteus maximus more (they are noticably weaker than those on my left). At least now I know another reason why my right side gets injured so easily, why I got injured on my first trip to the climbing gym (Feb 2009, though that has not stopped me from going back) and why I have not been able to get rid of this asymmetricity that causes discomfort when I am sitting. Thanks for enlightening me on body asymmetry through bone density, and good luck treating yours. Cheers.
~Faissal