Introduction
People have been taking portable hangboards to the crag for years. A few hangs on a wooden edge to wake up the fingers and notify the body that you will be climbing soon. Since climbers began this practice, the methodology has always been to start slow then gradually ramp up the intensity, but what is slow, how fast should the intensity increase, and what should the peak intensity be?
Collin McGee from Camp 4 Human Performance (C4HP) has taken a stab at answering these questions using the latest exercise science tools. Collin spent months testing athletes using the PitchSix Force Board and a NNOXX muscle oxygen sensor to bring you a two-part warmup protocol in the Force Board app. Read on to learn more about Collin’s research or watch the YouTube video above.
About Collin McGee
Collin is the Fitness Director at the Alliance Fitness Center in Reading, PA and a 2016 graduate of Cornell University. He currently works as a coach for C4HP and tours the country training climbing coaches in the C4HP Coaching Certifications. His passion for improving health, athletic performance, and career-changing injuries led Collin to where he is today.
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Background
Due to customer demand for a Force Board Warmup routine, PitchSix asked Collin for his thoughts on warming up using a Force Board. Collin subscribes to method-based warm ups utilizing progressive overload. With metrics available such as force progression relative to past performance and Rate of Force Development (RFD), you can quantify your warmup like never before.
Collin is careful to say that there is no single best warmup routine for all climbers, but there are themes that a good warmup should follow.
To discover these themes, Collin did extensive testing with the Force Board, but he also wanted to see inside of the muscles. For that, he used a NNOXX muscle oxygen sensor. Armed with data from both of these devices, Collin spent months testing his ideas on himself and other climbers. The results are outlined below.
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The Warm Up Protocols in the Force Board App
In the Force Board app, we divided Collin’s warm-up routine into two parts. Part 1 tackles warming up your tendons and muscles. Part 2 gets you prepared for endurance. Each are defined as a separate routine in the Pro Templates section.
Warmup 1: Recruitment Prep
The Recruitment Prep is designed to gradually increase intensity to the fingers preparing them to tolerate the high physical demand from your climbing. You will be utilizing two different efforts to engage isometrically with the edge you choose (ideally a 25mm+ unlevel edge to comprehensively engage all the fingers): an overcoming isometric (OISO) effort and a yielding isometric (YISO) effort.
During the OISO you will be trying to isolate only the fingers. You are trying to squeeze the edge or curl into the edge. No range of motion is occurring. The intended grip position is a slightly open, half crimp (90-degree angle in fingers).
During the YISO you will be holding your half crimp as your larger muscle groups generate force on your fingers. A common way to do this is to pull with your arms with the edge setup overhead. The fingers here are resisting being opened as the larger muscle groups of the arms or legs act on them. In comparison to a squeeze where the fingers are the only thing working.
There are 6 sets in the Recruitment Prep warmup:
- Set 1: 50% of your maximal OISO @ 5s pull for 2 reps
- Set 2: 70% of your maximal OISO @ 5s pull for 2 reps
- Set 3: 80% of your maximal OISO @ 5s pull for 2 reps
- Set 4: 90% of your maximal OISO @ 5s pull for 2 reps
- Set 5: 60% of your maximal YISO @ 5s pull for 2 reps
- Set 6: 80% of your maximal YISO @ 5s pull for 2 reps
Knowing each individual max is helpful for optimizing the warmup, but the key principles are
- How you engage (OISO/YISO) and create the effort in your fingers.
- A general feel for intensity. Giving a perceived 5/10 effort instead of an objective 50% of measured max for this hold is acceptable
The goal for the end of this warmup is to feel physically strong. You may need to spend some time on the relevant edges you will be climbing on (pockets, full crimps, etc), or proceed to the Endurance Prep warmup if you plan on rope climbing or climbing more sustained climbs.
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Warmup 2: Endurance Prep
The goal of the Endurance Prep warmup is to stimulate blood flow to the fingers and forearms to let the muscles know that endurance work is ahead. The goal is a slight pump. The difference between this pump and a detrimental one is that we are trying to stimulate moderate blood flow at the lowest fatigue level possible. That is why the OISO is the contraction type of choice. This OISO active grip forces the muscle to work more purely without the help of passive tension aids from the surrounding connective tissue. This makes for a more stimulating muscle effort with less intensity needed to and with less accumulation of sustained fatigue.
The goal is to perform 15 reps of low/moderate effort repeaters, at ~50-60% of your maximum OISO. You can think of this as performing a pre-climb to better prepare the durational aspects of our fingers and forearms.
A slight pump should be felt but nothing painful or lasting longer than 10 minutes. Rest 10-15 minutes after the conclusion of the repeaters to recover and allow your baseline endurance to rise to a higher level than when you started.
Watch the YouTube Video for more detailed information!
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To use these protocols, start with Warmup 1. You can stop there if you are bouldering. If you’re route climbing or otherwise training endurance, we recommend that you progress to Warmup 2. You can save them from the Pro Routine Templates and customize them based on your own needs and experience.
Figure 1. Recruitment prep: 12 sets of increasing intensity. This is with separate right and left hands.
Figure 2. Endurance prep is 15 reps at a similar intensity level. You should feel a slight pump after.
Figure 3.Dylan getting recruited the Tension training facility.
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The Path to the Warm Up Protocol
Here are some of Collin’s research notes as he developed the protocol:
Figure 4. Warmup protocol summary on a single board.
Contraction Types
There are two main contraction types talked about in the warm up: an overcoming isometric and a yielding isometric.
An overcoming isometric (OISO) is an effort in which the muscles are trying to overcome, or move, an immovable object. Imagine grabbing your own wrist with your hand and squeezing. Your hand is creating effort but your fingers can’t pass through your arm like a ghost. The OSIO force is generated by the specified muscles in an active effort.
For climbers, an OISO is you grabbing a hold and attempting to grasp or curl into it using your finger flexors exclusively. On the climbing wall, we often call this “latching” the hold after you first touch it.
A yielding isometric (YISO) is an effort in which the muscle is holding its position and not yielding against an outside force. If the force becomes large enough, the muscle will lose the fight and lengthen in position, or “yield.” Imagine holding a jug of water out in front of you. It is not going anywhere, but it takes effort. Eventually, you will lower your arm due to fatigue.
The YISO has elastic properties. Think about pulling on a rubber band: when you stretch a rubber band it wants to pull back. It is not alive, nor active, but its material is designed to return to its natural shape. It also only wants to do this when it is stretched, and not when it is just sitting on a table.
This passive force can be observed in yielding isometrics too. So, the muscles are working, but not as hard. They don’t have too when the elastic properties, in and around the muscle, are helping out. This leads the yielding isometric to be a less active muscle contraction.
For climbers, a YISO is grabbing a hold and not letting go while the external force of gravity acts on your fingers, trying to make them yield, or elongate and let go from the hold. If you are pulling up on a floor plate, you can perform a YISO contraction by grabbing a hold with your fingers while your legs are in a squat, or mid-thigh pull position. Then push up with your legs, creating an external force on your finger flexors.
Fatigue
We will accumulate more fatigue from the YISO’s on average as compared to the OISO’s.
When tissue stretches, even the tiny bit that is hard to see in an isometric, extra fatigue is produced (stretch- induced calcium- ion channels, among other things for you nerds). This is not necessarily a bad thing. We NEED to learn how to build up tolerance to this fatigue over time to get better at handling it.
Do you remember how you felt after your first day climbing ever? You probably could barely hold a glass of water the next day. Now look at you! It takes 3 days of climbing in a row to feel like that.
That is an example of increased fatigue tolerance, accomplished by engaging with OISO’s and YISO’s progressively over time.
Warmup 1: Recruitment Prep
The main idea here is not the seconds, the rest, or the reps. It is that you want to start off easy with your effort then slowly ramp them up to 90-100% of your max pull force. We start slow so that the body and brain can catch up and eventually ramp up into a state of high recruitment.
During recruitment, I recommend using an OISO contraction type to primarily focus on the muscle and getting it primed. We do include some YISO work to prepare the “total system” to be ready to go, but in a small dose to save on fatigue!
Warmup 2: Endurance Prep
“Avoid the flash pump!” is a common sentiment to hear when you are at the gym or out at the crag. We certainly do not want to seek out a pump so painful to the point our arms feel like they are going to explode early on in our climbing session, and especially not during the warm-up.
However, a slight pump is worth seeking out as a sign that your circulatory system is ready to perform.
To get pumped is to feel the effects of blood flow in and out of our muscles. We want to stimulate blood flow to our muscles because it widens the roads that blood cells travel to go from our heart to muscles. This is important because blood carries energy to our muscles. The wider the roads, and the more efficient the travel; the more energy we potentially have to use!
We can fill up our muscular “gas tanks” a little more if we can get our muscle oxygen levels to rise before our performance effort. Oxygen is a necessary energy currency our bodies use. The more we can have before we hop on a climb, the more fuel we have to use! We fill up this tank by moderately stimulating the muscles with effort. This uses the muscle to tell the brain: “Hey! Something is about to happen and we need more energy down here!”
Figure 5. Muscular oxygen levels act as fuel for your muscles.
Properly preparing your body for endurance performance takes care. Use too little effort, and the body won’t be able to tell the difference between you watching Netflix or preparing to climb. Too much effort in the warm up, and you will jump into performance mode causing you to fatigue rapidly in the session.
That is why there is no perfect protocol for warming up. The definition of moderate will change from person-to-person and from day-to-day for any one individual.
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NNOXX Studies on Recruitment (Part 1) and Endurance (Part 2) Warmups
Figure 6. NNOXX output showing muscle oxygen levels during the full warmup cycle. Purple represents SmO2 which helps fuel muscles.
Figure 6 shows what’s going on under the skin with my muscle oxygen levels while I perform the warm-up. The graphs are all provided from the amazing NNOXX devices. NNOXX is the first non-invasive (not inside you) way to measure nitric oxide (NO). The form of nitric oxide NNOXX captures details blood flow of the active and working muscles in real time. So, the more purple you see, the more blood flow!
It also measures that fuel we mentioned before, muscle oxygen (SmO2). You can follow along the line graph and see when I am using fuel when the graph drops. I am recovering and gaining more fuel when the SmO2 line rises. The amount of purple that comes along with the efforts tells us how much blood flow is being stimulated by the effort.
The most noticeable difference is in the blood flow stimulation between sets 1-6 (warmup part 1) and 7 (warmup part 2). This is the defining difference between the two protocols: one is really good at getting the fingers ready to work hard and the other at getting the fingers to endure.
Figure 7. Warmup part 1 is excellent for recruiting fingers. Warmup part 2 helps prepare for endurance with higher SmO2 levels.
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NNOXX Studies on Contraction Type
One of the experiments was to test the exact same warm-up but use a different method of contracting the fingers.
The top graph is the normal warm up with the mix of contraction types. Only yielding isometrics were used in the bottom graph. Putting them against each other in the photo below illuminates some interesting findings: Less blood flow stimulation from the yielding isometrics only.
Figure 8. Effects of YISO and OISO on blood flow. Using only YISO contractions lowers blood flow, so use both OISO and YISO.
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Review:
Here are the 5 key points for the new Force Board Warmup Pro Routines:
- The goal of a warm up is to work in moderation to alert your physiology that something bigger is coming and it needs to get ready. Start off easy. Slowly progress the intensity upwards!
- In Warmup 1, start off at 50% RPE and progress to 90% RPE. Use mostly OISOs and some YISOs.
- In Warmup 2, you should get a little pumped. Use OISOs.
- We are warming up, not sending. So, think about the cost/benefit of the things you choose. This is why it makes sense to choose more overcoming isometrics in the warm up and sprinkle in the appropriate amount of yielding isometrics.
- Muscle needs blood. Muscle pumps blood. Muscle calls for blood. So, when we are trying to stimulate blood flow choose the more muscle active option (overcoming isometric). And save some fatigue while doing so!
- Stay open minded and curious! By no means would this paper, my mini-studies, or population size pass in official research. We are still in the infancy of understanding these concepts. Hopefully I have made a decent case, with some science about what direction we should consider when building a warm up.