My climbing injuries book is up for pre-order

Readers of this blog will of course know that I have been working on a book on climbing injuries for some years. It has turned out to be a much bigger book than I originally envisaged. It has been a huge project, but in a few weeks I will reach the finish line. The book is currently with the printers and some time in the next few weeks, many boxes of copies will arrive at my house. The final stages were a rather exhausting process, but I’m excited to release it and potentially help healthy climbers stay healthy and injured climbers to get back to the fray.

I’ll write a more detailed post about the content of the book when the stock arrives in early February. If you want to make sure you get a copy as soon as you can, we’ve put it up for pre-order in the shop here, and it’ll be in the post to you as soon as it arrives. I’ve also added the table of contents below so you have an idea of the breadth of the areas covered.

My aim was to write the manual on how to stay healthy as a climbing athlete that I wished I’d had when I was 16. The first priority was to base my writing on the cutting edge of sports medicine research, wherever it was available. The second was to include all the diverse aspects of injury prevention and recovery, and then present them in a way that allows you to see them in the whole context of your efforts to stay injury free. As with the world of training, too many injury texts focus on or overplay the importance of just one aspect of sports medicine.

Having spent around 4 years researching, thinking and writing the book, I do feel that if I’d had access to the information contained in it when I was a teenager, my health and climbing achievements over the past 20 years would have been significantly better. I hope the book can make this difference both for both youngsters who have yet to experience injury, and battle scarred climbers like myself.

Below is the table of contents, so you can get idea of the scope of the book. You’ll find the book in the shop here. 

Section 1: Make or break

Why the treatments you have tried aren’t working, and what to do about it.

How to use this book

The real reasons you are injured

Stress and injury

The reason you are still injured

The language problem

The practitioner problem

The sports medicine problem

The missing link

Exceptional use: the luxury of doing your sport badly

Prevention

Your visit to the doctor’s

Summary

Section 2: Know pain, or no gain

Pain and how to read it

Seeing the patterns in your pain

What is healthy soreness?

Understanding your pain

Going beyond reading only pain

Summary

Section 3: Removing the causes of injury for prevention and treatment

Are you only treating symptoms?

What was the real cause?

The big four: technique, posture, activity, rest

Correcting technique

Correcting posture

Activity

How to rest

Warm-up and injury

Lifestyle

Nutrition

Section 4: Rehabilitation of climbing injuries - treating both causes and symptoms

Acute rehabilitation

When to move beyond acute care

Goals of mid-late rehabilitation

Modern understanding of tendon injuries and recovery

Therapeutic activity - basic exercises

Therapeutic activity - climbing

Proprioceptive training

Walking the line of rehab ups and downs

Therapeutic modalities

Surgery

Drug and other emerging treatments

When to stop rehab?

Summary

Section 5: Psychology of injuries: dealing with the anguish of injury

Face it: it really is that bad!

Take heart

Finding motivation

Section 6: Young climbers

What young climbers should know

Too much, too young: a warning

What parents and coaches should do

Section 7: The elbow

Golfer’s and tennis elbow

Brachioradialis/brachialis strain

Other elbow injuries

Section 8: The fingers

Different grips in climbing and consequences for injury

Pulley injuries

When and how to tape the fingers

Painful finger joints

Flexor unit strains

Dupuytren’s contracture

Ganglions

Other finger injuries

Section 9: The wrist

Triangular fibrocartilage injury

Carpal tunnel syndrome

De Quervain’s tenosynovitis

Other wrist injuries

Section 10: The shoulder

Shoulder impingement/rotator cuff tears

Biceps tendon insertion tears

Labral tears

Shoulder dislocation

Frozen shoulder

Thoracic outlet syndrome 

Shoulder and neck trigger points

Section 11: Lower body injuries

Foot pain in climbers

Plantar fasciitis

Heel pad bruising

Ingrown toenails

Sesamoid injuries

Hallux valgus

Morton’s neuroma

Ankle injuries in climbers

Cartilage/joint injuries

Ankle impingement syndrome

Achilles tendon pain

Knee injuries in climbers

Meniscus tears

Anterior cruciate ligament tears

Medial collateral ligament tears

Hamstrings tear

Hernia

Section 12: Further reading

Further reading and references

Getting access to good care

The author’s tale of woe and hope

Glossary of key terms

Thanks

References

Mid-winter lockdown

Apart from a brief break with my family over Christmas, I have been on something of a lockdown to get my climbing injuries book ready to send to the printers. No distractions, no messing about, just getting down to serious work. Such is the way with big projects, both on the rock and off. It can be relatively easy to get to the nearly there stage. But exponentially harder to see off all those hurdles that jump up between ‘close’ and ‘done’.

So long as you don’t look at your email inbox, living in the highlands does make it easier to pile drive through work tasks of this nature. I’m desperate to finish them all, stone dead, and then move on and go back to the rock and ice in time for the good conditions arriving.

I spent Hogmanay in PDF print settings hell, and since then have tidied up countless other loose ends that need to be sorted to get it there. Although the little things keep coming, it will be off to the printers imminently, and I will post up more information about it then.

I’ve also just finished three climbing related films, all of a very different nature which will be online soon to show you. As the January gales and rain have raged outside here, I’ve been dashing between the house and the board for training.

Two or three little mid-winter tasks remain on my list, most of which ought to be crushed by some time next week. And then it will be time to climb.