Thursday, December 4, 2008

Reductionism:

Firstly: The machine is now built and is recieving finishing touches and the wood has been ordered to make all you people kindly waiting for a board hopefully very happy.

there will likely be a bit of a delay for 1000s as we're going to make all the 2000's then all the 1000's as its more efficent this way.

Whilst your waiting i thought i'd explain some of the concepts of our boards further and why they should work so well.

Basically your hand is a series of pulleys that can counter weight (your body) These pulleys can take different stresses depending on training. most people only train full hand grips or at best 3 finger drags. (i myself used to be one of them) the problem with this is that your hand develops pulleys it prefers and pulleys it doesnt, unbeknownst to yee, your hand now has imbalances in. I.E. serial crimpers will likely develop strong index and middle fingers but neglect their ring and little fingers, hence they are more commonly injured in these digits.

This is early days with this work so i will mostly be using myself an Ned as examples, but we really do think we're onto something (apart from RSI)
Basically when i started climbing i dragged alot and 3 finger crimped alot, these are by far my strongest grips, from pocket and back 2 training i now seem to have disproportionally strong middle 2 fingers, my index is lagging significantly behind for my board grade and thanks to back 2 work over the past 2 years my pinky is acceptable.
The diagram shows a very rough analysis of my hand weighing in this position.

I'm now tackling my index finger weakness over the next 4 week block and hope to return to projects on my big board which helped identify this. I am aiming for a 10-15kg strength gain in my index finger over this time frame by doing index finger Encores with less and less weight being taken off.

Ned is doing the same with his pinkies as a main target, as our hands seem weighted to opposite sides, its also worth noting that i totally buggered my pinky (by being silly) this year in march and its back to 95% strength with correct Rehab.

So start thinking about your hands and hunting out your lazy digits so that all your fingers can crush, reductionism is the best way to find this out effectively, a good place to start is to stand on some scales and see how much weight you can take off on the different grips from the 321 article the ones where you under perform in relation to the others are your main focal points, but dont forget to train them all at some point.

start slowly, and dont jump into the deep end. Get rid of any stigma about 1 and 2 finger holds aswell, especially if your youger than 30 as your hand will love a change.
I reckon i can milk a grade of crush juice out my index finger in 3 months

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