Finger Pulp

[Lundy]

Fascinating study:

www.climbing.com/news/why-finger-pulp-not-tendon-strength-makes-for-better-crimping/

I seem to remember Mark talking about finger pulp on here somewhere a while back...

[MarkAnderson]

There are so many things wrong with the article that it's hard to know where to start, but I'll go with the title, which has nothing to do with the content. The study shows "meatier tips are an advantage for crimping." That's it. The study has nothing to do with "tendon strength". Interestingly, subsequent studies have shown that strength training on small edges increases finger pulp (and bone density in your tips). So if you take this article at face value and want to maximize crimping ability, your choices are to make yourself a female infant*, or strength train on small edges.

[*This assertion is particularly absurd. Even if softer skin is better for a single rep in a lab on a smooth sculpted edge, millions of person-years of experience tell us that thicker skin is better in real life. Why? Because in real life you have to do it more than once (generally many times), on sharp-ass holds, made of rock.]

I'm curious if they evaluated/considered bone length in the study. The fact is smaller hands are better for pulling on small holds. Without accounting for that I don't see how you could draw any conclusions about anything else.

Anyway, thanks for sharing!

[jetjackson]

Mark - do you have a link to that study regarding finger tip pulp and hangboard training leading to increased finger tip pulp and bone density?

I recall this conversation on reddit after your second beta podcast interview where this came up.

The only digging brought up this study, also referenced by Eva Lopez. Is this the one? From the summary it seems to conclude - increased finger tip pulp aids in edge strength, but doesn't seem to make any reference to increased finger tip pulp being the result of adaptations from training.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21451181

[MarkAnderson]

I don't know the study off hand. It was referenced during the IRCRA Congress in August 2016 during a mini-debate about whether crimping on a hangboard actually made you stronger, or just increased your pain tolerance. IIRC the study was conducted in Austria?

[jetjackson]

Thanks, yeah, this is part of the reason why I train the closed crimp on the Forge, even though I don't get on a whole lot of 1/4 pad edge problems/routes.

I think it's pretty important to clarify, as it would IMO justify training very low weight on a 1/4 pad edge from very early on in a person's climbing career, so they can get a head start the bone/tissue adaptations required for hard crimping later in their climbing career.

[MarkAnderson]

A study would provide a nice confirmation, but would a single study on a handful of participants be more compelling than the hundreds of person-years the people on this forum have accumulated in practical experience demonstrating that hangboarding on crimps improves crimping ability? And that is ignoring individuality. If you want to know if a training activity is beneficial, just try it yourself and see what happens. Not only is it the simplest path to an answer, it's also the most reliable, since you are experimenting on yourself, you don't have to wonder if another person's approach will work for you.

[RobF]

I'll try to not be too boring with this one as it's a bit of a niche area :-)

I was always under the impression that finger pulp was mainly made up of fatty tissue. Anecdotally several of my friends who have intentionally lost weight have had issues with 'bad skin' when crimping lots on rough rock. Correctly or incorrectly they put it down to a deflation in finger pulp correlated to reduction in total fat mass causing slippage on the holds. Had a quick browse and found this-

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/14758214/

I haven't read the full article but there's also nerve endings and sweat glands that will also influence things as a climber. It appears though there's a collagen structure that runs from the inside of your skin to the bone holding things together. I wonder if this could be disrupted with sheering forces e.g. holding slopers etc over time.

The concept of adaptability is interesting. Skin thickness is definitely altered through external stressors (positively through climbing / negatively through washing the dishes). I feel that my skin is definitely thinner over the years and have to sooner stop a session due to pink tips compared to when I was younger.

[MarkAnderson]

Interesting theory about fat loss, but I would guess you'd need to be insanely thin, for a long period of time, before your body started sucking fat out of your finger tips. I think it's pretty well established that wounds heal more slowly, nails grow more slowly, etc when you are under-nourished for an extended period of time (especially if you are deficient in nutrients key to those processes). So I would guess the bigger contributor to poor-skin-while-dieting is a general impairement to skin healing rather than a loss of fingertip fat.

I can say for myself personally, I can crimp like a motherfucker when I'm super skinny. But if I eat a well-balanced diet with lots of veggies, etc, my skin holds up just as well as it ever does.  Kinda hard to say though, since periods of extended MF-er crimping almost always coincide with periods of dieting.