The Inconvenient Truth About Getting Good at Climbing

In today's Lattice Podcast, Coach Josh Hadley sits down with Dr Simon Fryer to discuss the challenges of testing rock climbers, highlighting the differences between climbing and other sports.

Dr Simon Fryer is a Senior Lecturer in Sport & Exercise Physiology at the University of Gloucestershire, with a PhD in biomedical science. His background is in sports, exercise, and biomedical science, with a specialist interest in cardiovascular and cardiometabolic physiology. As an exercise physiologist, he delivers a range of Sports and Exercise Science courses and his research focuses on the impact of exercise and physical activity on health, disease, and sports performance, specifically concerning the cardiovascular and cardiometabolic systems. He has also delivered many talks on the importance of physical activity and health, such as his TEDx Cheltenham talk "Are You Sitting Comfortably?"

Key topics include:

• Health benefits of climbing
• Misguided information in the climbing community
• The inconvenient truth about getting good at climbing
• Importance of base training and lower limb strength
• Advice for pursuing an academic or research route

We also cover:

• Importance of peripheral adaptations in climbing and the role of aerobic fitness
• Current best practices for testing climbers, including occlusion tests and near-infrared spectroscopy
• Vision for the future of climbing performance testing, including the use of big data and technology

So whether you’re a sports science advocate, or simply curious to hear more of the science behind climbing, take a seat and enjoy today’s podcast.

The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.

Transcript

Josh (00:18)
Hello and welcome to the Lattice Training Podcast. Today we are talking to a sports scientist and researcher called Simon Fryer. Simon's a researcher in the UK and back when I was doing my undergrad in sports science, his name was on all of the research papers. So it was really cool to get him on the podcast today and chat to him. His specialisation is in sports physiology. So we're going to be really nerding out on the physiology of rock climbing and what...

makes performance for us as rock climber. And of course, we're going to get into the implications of this when it comes to our training. Obviously, this one is very much research focused, so we're going to talk a lot about that kind of stuff. But if you're interested in the sports science of rock climbing, and how this can impact your training, this is definitely a good podcast to listen to. Let's get into it.

Josh (01:09)
let's start with, um, what you currently do, Simon. So I know you as a sports scientist and a researcher, but, uh, talk me through what you're doing at the minute.

Simon (01:19)
Yeah, OK. I guess I've got two things going on, I suppose. I've been a university academic, so I've been a university lecturer for probably the last 15 years, and that's in sport and exercise science. So, yeah, I've been working as a sport and exercise scientist, I guess professionally in academia. And in that time, I've done a lot of research, I guess.

I'm quite fortunate. I've enjoyed research, all different aspects of it. So, and a lot of that has been climbing focus. My PhD was in climbing, in physiology and climbing. And yeah, so I went into academia after that. You can normally go down like an applied route in industry. You know, like Dave Jarvis has done with you guys.

and then we can go back into academia, I guess. And I ended up going back in partly because I love the research. But I've also been teaching for 20 years as well. And I loved the combination of both, I guess, and using, I guess, all the research to inform the teaching that we do. I think that's really valuable for students of all levels, and also the general public to make sure that what you do.

teaching whether that is in university, whether public lectures, whatever is research informed. So yeah, so I do the lecturing thing. And then we've also started our own business, which is looking at high performance sport science testing effectively. So I guess a performance and health laboratory where we do a really wide number of physiological measures for performance, a whole range of different athletes, runners.

triathletes, some injury work in, I guess, sort of mainstream team sports. And then there's a climbing component to that as well, doing some physiology testing with climbers. And there's a health aspect to the stuff we do as well with, because a lot of my research is also in sort of cardiovascular health and metabolic health, which is kind of where my climbing stuff started. It was very cardiovascular function, but in climbers. So the two sort of oddly marry up really well together. Yes, we run the sprint lab as well.

which is sort of north Gloucestershire. Yeah that's what I'm up to at the minute.

Josh (03:44)
Yeah, okay. I want to know why climbing physiology then. So if you've kind of done a bit of everything and obviously you work with runners and cyclists a lot too, but why climbing? Is that taking an interest for you?

Simon (03:55)
Yeah, I've, I was, I guess I did, I did an undergraduate degree in adventure education quite a long time ago. And then I, I always got interested in, in anything climbing that was part of that. So obviously we did like a really wide range of sports, but everything that I did, I got really interested in the climbing and then I progressed and did a master's degree, like a classic sort of sport and exercise science master's degree.

And I was very much the odd one out. Everyone was doing running triathletes, general team sports, and I put everything into physiology, which I think probably upset most of my lecturers who knew nothing about climbing whatsoever. So if there was a lecture on your altitude function, we had to write an essay. Everyone would do a climatization. I'd be like, I'm going to look at mountaineering. So yeah, but I liked it because it completely challenges.

traditional physiology, like climbing almost defies what we really know and you pick up any classic sort of physiology textbook and it talks about even on the simplest of levels, it talks about like generally, there is a linear relationship, for example, between the amount of oxygen that we consume and your heart rate. So as intensity of exercise sort of increases, heart rate and oxygen consumption go up.

linearly together. And if you look at anything in climbing, like it's probably the only sport that it doesn't do that, like it completely challenges traditional notion that this is a thing. Because in climbing, for a given amount of oxygen cost, the heart rate is considerably higher. So as soon as you start climbing, your heart rate goes through the roof, and it goes through the roof very, very quickly, relative to quite a low whole body oxygen cost. And I suppose,

That was almost a thing in itself to start with, to be like, why would you do that? Like, this is completely, this is completely alien. Like that's, that's not what all these textbooks say. So I really liked the fact that I guess it was early on, even if it was physiologically different. And then I guess a lot of the early research in climate as well was, and not all of it, but a lot of it was written by kind of non -climates who were just trying to do something a little bit different. And so I go back to that example.

the early research would say, well, well, that that's obvious, like a high heart rate for a low oxygen is because they're nervous, like they're on a rope, you know, that they're climbing, they've obviously got really high levels of anxiety. And we know that that influences something called the hypothalamic pituitary gland axis, but basically, like our heart rate goes up through the roof because of because of anxiety, adrenaline, noradrenaline, etc. And it was like, well, no, that that's probably not right, because

Generally speaking, people certainly that are good at climbing, have been climbing for a long time, they really have an anxiety response. I mean, okay, maybe like pre -competition, that sort of thing, but in the more general senses, that's not really a thing. And you can cut so, I guess that's where was like, well, it's got to be a physiological response. It's not going to be an anxiety -based one, you know? And you get it in bouldering as well. We get a really similar sort of thing. So yeah, I guess it was a really nice opportunity to go.

josh (06:57)
Hmm.

Simon (07:16)
Well, he could rewrite the rules a little bit here. Having, I guess, a bit of an understanding of that climbing and an understanding of that physiology. So, yeah, I think that's why I probably got into it, to be honest, because it challenged the rules and a lot of the things I read, it was like, that seems really interesting. It challenges physiology 101 and your explanation of it, I'm not entirely sure is right. Yeah. Yeah.

josh (07:39)
Yeah. So why is our heart rate? Because I think I did my undergrad in sports science and I remember, I probably read a lot of your research as well back in the day. Is it a metabolic reflex to do with our forearms, just the metabolites building up and our heart rate basically responds to it by going really high. But we can fail in our sport before, you know, our cardiovascular system is even a limiting factor. Yeah.

Simon (07:53)
Yeah!

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you've hit the nail on the head really, and you get this response called the sort of, people pronounce it differently, the Metabo reflex or the Metaboreflex or whatever. But yeah, it's this like really big, sort of central cardiovascular drive effectively. So, I mean, obviously, when you climb, you get a lot of isometric loading. So your forearms contract obviously isometrically, similar in your core, you know, everywhere really, there's not this...

And it's obviously dynamic, but we hold these periods for, you know, these isometric contractions for periods of time. I realize obviously moving between things is dynamic, but in those periods of time, as you say, we build up a lot of metabolites within the muscle and we also use a lot of oxygen. And, you know, we can't continue to hold a contraction unless there is a supply of oxygen been delivered into the muscle. So heart rate goes up, blood pressure, systolic pressure.

particularly goes up through the roof in order to effectively like try and force, you know, blood through these isometrically contracted muscles in order to, like you say, wash out metabolites like lactic acid, you know, clear out CO2. Yeah, and so we get this really, really big response. Yeah, so yeah, you've got them down the head, yeah, the top of your reflexor. Yeah.

josh (09:25)
Good, I still remember some stuff. Actually, you kind of already started, but one of the questions I had is what are the challenges we face as sports scientists or coaches when it comes to testing rock climbers? Because I think we're always coming up with quite novel ideas, but what are the main challenges we face?

Simon (09:42)
Yeah, it is really difficult. It's difficult, I guess, for a number of reasons. A lot of traditional research studies always have kind of control groups, people that don't engage in a sport. And that's really easy if you're doing, you know, like a running study or a cycling study, because everyone knows the basics of like, I want you to get on a bike and do this or people can run to an extent or so it's really easy to have this like control comparison to.

to generate a true sort of what we call randomized control trial. But that isn't really the case in climbing. You can mimic things like, you know, everyone can climb a ladder. So you can do things that are fairly similar -ish, but even the environment in itself is challenging. So yeah, it's really difficult to generate proper, just well -controlled studies because it's really hard to find a sort of true control group, both environmentally and physically in terms of what they do.

Um, I think the other challenge is, is that, uh, again, when you, when you look at sort of particularly running and cycling, I guess, almost like uni -dimensional sports, that they are that, whereas climbing is, is so multifaceted. It's so multi -dimensional, arguably more, I think, than, than almost anything else. Uh, that, that, that makes it really difficult to kind of quantify and get a good understanding of even like.

what makes a good climate and like what makes a different ability climate. It's so hard, yeah, it's so difficult. And then there's even the, you know, even in terms of people's anthropometric style, makeup, which influences then the style in which they climb, which, you know, physiologically has a huge effect then on things like, you know, energy expenditure and, you know, the way that...

josh (11:17)
Hmm. It's really hard to get the variables out, isn't it?

Simon (11:40)
the way that we move in something called geometric entropy and how that relates to like efficiency. And then there's the cognitive element in terms of how everyone approaches and just simply problem solves things differently. And you add all of that together. And it's, I don't want to say it's impossible maybe, but it's certainly going to take a long time.

to create almost like a model which you can use to inform, for sports artists to understand, to help coaches and athletes really understand a lot of those things. So it's really, really difficult. And then I think also even in a broader context of that, there's a lot of money associated with traditional sports. When we look at what Nike do, we look at...

all the other big brands, you know, there's a lot of money therefore thrown into the research behind those things. People love to get on the bandwagon of things like super shoes, you know, putting carbon plates in a shoe and suddenly there's millions of pounds thrown at this thing for research and climbing doesn't have that really in the same way. And so like anything, you know, that lack of funding behind the research also makes it a real slow burner like a lot of the research that's done in climbing.

of done off people's back because they enjoy it and they love it versus they're able to get lots of money to drive this because there's a big market. So yeah, I think all those things are challenging. Obviously, they're quite wildly different, but I think they're all challenging for the sports scientists, coaches, and ultimately the athlete themselves. I think it's changing as climate is becoming much more popular. There is obviously, even if we go back sort of 15

20 years, 15 years when I did my PhD, there wasn't anywhere near the popularity that there is now. It's really sort of exponentially rising. So that is helping, don't get me wrong. But you know, we're still way off the metric in terms of other sports. So yeah, it's challenging.

josh (13:51)
Yeah, I think the style thing you mentioned there is, is quite interesting one. Cause I think if you were to, to look at running or cycling, and maybe I'm a little bit naive because I don't know that much about running or cycling. But my understanding is that when you get into biomechanics, you can almost solve the efficiency problem by saying like, this is the perfect gate or this is, this is how you should be moving on a bike in a certain situation. But when it comes to

Simon (14:11)
I see.

josh (14:17)
when it comes to, in running you see someone like Usain Bolt who like breaks the mould and everyone's like, well, he's not the right height for this, this kind of like running thing. But in climbing, take just a handful of any of the top athletes and they all have different styles. They're all completely different. Like, and you'd assume when you get to the very, very top of a sport, things start to become more similar because like you, you kind of put, you know, you weed out all the things which don't make a perfect athlete, but even right at the top of the game in climbing, they're still.

Simon (14:42)
Yeah.

I completely agree. And that makes it incredibly hard. You look at your example with your same bolt, you're right. He challenges a lot of, I guess, the traditional biomechanics and physiology. If you break down his 100 -metre sprint into 10 -metre segments, you see this mass acceleration at the end.

josh (14:46)
absolutely different. I think that's what's amazing about climbing is are they.

Simon (15:06)
you know, arguably, you know, relatively good off the board, but it just gets faster and faster, you know, which is very different to other people. But even the notion to go and go, all right, we're going to look at this 10 meter segments, because that's the thing, you know, you imagine looking at a sport climbing rig and go, right, we're going to break this down into 10 meter segments, but you're like, yeah, but where's the bolt? Like, where's the clip? Like, so like, well, that doesn't make sense, because they're going to have to be above that to get that one. Like, you just, you just can't do it. Because it's just so...

so diverse, it makes it, yeah, it's really challenging. It's really challenging.

josh (15:45)
Yeah. So you've done a lot of work in other sports like running and cycling, which are maybe a little bit simpler to research. I've kind of got two sides to this question. The first is what really separates rock climbing physiologically from say like a team sport like running, which might be maybe a little bit similar in the fact that you are sprinting and then you're stopping and resting.

Simon (16:11)
I think there's a couple of things. One, I think is cardiovascular function. The cardiovascular response to climbing is really different. There is also such a heavy reliance on very, arguably very small muscle groups versus some of these more traditional team -based orientations where we've got a much more

josh (16:12)
but also just cycling and running where they're continuous. What really separates us as a sport.

Simon (16:41)
whole body constant dynamic load form of exercise versus this very intermittent small muscle group exercise. And the role that each of those little muscle groups has in climbing is really big. So I think that's, you know, cardiovascular, that's a really big difference. And that has a knock on effect for things like.

energy expenditure, the ability of the mitochondria to be able to function and respire oxygen delivery in order to make sure that happens. Yeah, I think that's a really important one.

josh (17:25)
So there's the, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but there's two sides to, I guess, endurance. And one is the central side, which is when we say cardiovascular, it's like the heart and lungs ability. And then there's the peripheral side, which is more at the level of the muscle itself to take on oxygen and create energy. And so with rock climbing, it's very much the peripheral side, isn't it, that we're really concerned with. And...

Simon (17:51)
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. There is this, there is this big central cardiovascular response, like you say, this kind of cardio respiratory, the pulmonary system working together to, you know, ultimately to maintain whole body blood flow delivery of nutrients, and then there's this peripheral muscular nervous component as well. And I mean, you're right, you're right. That's, that's the linchpin effectively in climbing.

josh (17:54)
Would you say rarely were limited by the central side? Like at least for bouldering for sure.

Simon (18:21)
The adaptations that we see within climbers in that periphery is really important and it's really key in terms of performance. Some of our first studies, I guess, that looked at muscle oxygen consumption versus whole body oxygen consumption during climbing really showed that that's a thing. We did a study.

a while back where we used gas analysis mask, a face mask during tread wall climbing. So we took people a little bit like, you know, like a traditional VO2 max test. So we had, you know, you get somebody to run on a treadmill effectively, eight to 12 minutes. And by the end of that sort of eight to 12 minutes, they're absolutely spent, you know, they run until they just cannot go anymore. It gets quicker and quicker and quicker. And you measure the amount of oxygen that they...

consuming their body, their body and the greater the amount, so we talk about it as millilitres per kilogram per minute, the greater the amount that the more aerobically trained they are, the better their whole aerobic system is at metabolizing oxygen. And we did this in climbers, except we did on a treadmill and we did on a treadmill. But then we also used a technology called neurofread spectroscopy, which we've done quite a lot of work with that looks inside individual peripheral muscles and it looks at the amount of oxygen that they're consuming.

and what happens when they get to the point of fatigue. So we did this on, we've done it in a number of different ways, but one of the ones studies we did with Iotrebinol, and what we found is that actually, the ability of the muscle to consume and perfuse oxygen was far more important in terms of predicting people's ability levels than anything whole body was. So as you say, that central cardiovascular system, whilst it's incredibly important,

it's not anywhere near as important as this peripheral ability to be able to consume and use oxygen. So yeah, when we look at the sort of relationship between things like treadmill, VO2 max, climbing ability, it's non -existent. It doesn't exist. People that have a greater level of aerobic fitness have equally are not good at climbing or are really good at climbing.

it makes no difference. And we did these studies in quite a lot of people, so they're fairly robust. When we look at the whole body oxygen consumption in climbers during a maximal tread wall test, yes, there's a relationship, albeit a fairly weak one. When we look at the ability of the muscles to consume and perfuse oxygen, that predicts ability far better than any of the other tests. So the periphery is super important and what happens in terms of...

josh (20:51)
Mm -mm.

Simon (21:12)
the structural adaptations that we get within those peripheral muscles and the biochemical adaptations that we get are really important.

josh (21:29)
What's the oxygen uptake of a good climber then? Is it the kind of thing we can build from just climbing or is it high enough that you think running or some sort of cardiovascular exercise would be a recommendation for climbers?

Simon (21:36)
So that when people max out on a treadmill, where in a gas analysis, we try and remake this traditional running VO2 max deaths on a treadmill, people are anywhere between sort of 35 and low 40 milliliters of oxygen per kilo of mass. And if we compare that for a second to, let's say, a good high quality,

So someone who is a really good quality runner, marathon runner, you would see values up in the source 70 plus, milliliters per kilogram. So it's quite a lot lower in climbing. So is there any use in, I guess, firstly, increasing that aerobic base on a tread wall? I think there's definitely mileage in that. But it's very muscle specific.

It's very specific to that to the action in which we do the activity. So if if is there any benefit in doing traditional running based cardiovascular? I would say like yes and no, and I realize that's a really terrible answer, but. Is there going to be a direct benefit in terms of that, you know, one off performance from from being good runner? No, probably not. Are there other?

I guess, peripheral benefits of running that would that will help with climbing. Absolutely. I think that there are from a mental perspective in terms of time outdoors, you know, and anything that isn't sedentary is going to be a good thing. But I think I think that also when we think about energy systems for a second, one of the.

good things about training in not the type of thing that you're trying to do is that our muscles which aren't exercising when we climb, for example, are able to use lactic acid. They are able to buffer lactic acid and they're able to use it as an energy source as well. And that's actually really important. So the only if we can improve our aerobic capacity of other muscles which aren't used as much during climbing, well, we know that we can.

a few things like lactic acid from the forearms, we can transport it around the body very, very quickly and get it to those non -exercising muscles, which can help to consume it, utilize it, buffer it. So there is some benefit, don't get me wrong, but there are probably more beneficial things that you could do. Equally, I think it depends on the type of climbing. I think we underestimate how much a big walk -in

can take out of us. If we look at some of the Yosemite routes, where you've got a pretty savage walk in for a number of hours till you get to climbing, well, you've got to have a pretty decent aerobic base from a general whole cardiovascular sense to be able to deal with that before you start climbing. Because ultimately, the hour and a half that it takes you to get there.

we're going to have a really heightened energy expenditure. We're going to be consuming glucose, we're going to be burning fats, all of which is going to be lowering our glycogen stores, the stores of glucose in the liver and in the muscles for use later on in climbing. So the more efficient we can be, the more we can rely on fats as a fuel source so that when you get to those difficult moves where your climbing specific energy expenditure is going up, you've got that bank of

of glucose there ready for those moves. So I think, yeah, there is an, I know if I'll explain that very well. I think there's a number of useful benefits to it.

Yeah.

josh (25:50)
Yeah, I think no, I think you what you said, you explained it very well. It is definitely a it depends answer for that one. And I think you kind of covered all of the important points of where it does come in useful. I think the idea of also like shuttling that lactate to other parts of the body is such a cool concept, which is maybe not considered as much. And just that it's interesting to hear you say that the VO2

Simon (26:01)
Yeah.

josh (26:18)
Max in a climbing specific situation was about 35 or so. I'm thinking back in uni I did loads of VAT max tests, generally just like getting involved in studies and spending time in the lab. I think just as a relatively active individual that didn't really do any cardio, my VAT max was like 45 or something, which was like quite good. And it gives me confidence to know that I probably was fit enough because I wasn't sedentary.

that it was unlikely to be a limiting factor. And I think that's the coaching advice I often give to people that ask me if they should start running. And I'm like, well, it depends what you do now. How sedentary are you? And obviously if they don't do any and they enjoy doing a bit of it, then absolutely. But there's probably a tipping point where you say it's probably actually just not doing much for you now. Maybe you're spending a bit too much time where you could be spending it doing or energy elsewhere in your climbing.

Simon (27:04)
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, it's definitely an independent answer. For sure, I think, like you say, you know, as a coach, it's got its time and it's got its place. Absolutely. But unless it's likely to be a limiting factor, unless, like you say, you're pretty sedentary the whole time, it's probably unlikely to have a performance, you know, that mileage in terms of just climbing more is going to make a much bigger difference.

josh (27:40)
So this is, we kind of talked about the big differences, the peripheral versus central adaptations when it comes to training and climbing. What have you seen, what can we take away from these other sports? Are there any similarities you've seen or lessons we should learn?

Simon (27:48)
Yeah, there are there are some. I think, you know, I've been very interested in the peripheral muscular function and measures of things like oxidative capacity and that sort of oxygen consumption at the level of the muscle. But there are, you know, yeah, there are there are some things certainly. I think even in terms of probably base training is probably one of the most most similar, I would think, you know, in terms of if we look at

to take a runner as an example, you you can't underestimate the value of base training in terms of those sort of long, fairly low intensity runs because that's where a lot of the adaptation happens. It's where a lot of the adaptations within the muscle and broadly speaking, the central cardiovascular system and the peripheral one have those adaptations. We increased the number of capillaries.

within the muscle during that type of training. So that's capillary density. We shorten the delivery pathway of that so that oxygen can be offloaded quicker within the muscle. We're able to buffer lactate more readily so we can clear it out. And like I said, we get that from those long -based training runs. And I think that's probably the big similarity between that and climbing. Having those big, I guess,

that climbing specific mileage and having those longer time spent on easier climbs, we will see those similar adaptations in terms of capillarity, in terms of things like mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the rapid sort of multiplication of the mitochondria in the muscle cells so that we can create more energy from oxygen and we can deliver it more rapidly into the muscle fibers.

So we get a lot of those adaptations from there. It's been called the shear stress, the stress that's placed on the capillary wall, which over time increases the number of them so that we can, like I say, increase that density we see in high level climates. And I think a lot of that is to do with that sort of time spent doing base training. You probably underestimate the usefulness of that as well, I think, potentially in climbing. So I think there's a similarity.

sure but I think we also probably sometimes underestimate that the usefulness of lower level climbing but over a period of time.

josh (30:26)
Mm.

Simon (30:31)
Yeah.

josh (30:31)
Yeah, I think that's something we try to encourage. It's really quite practically hard to get that mileage in because as climbers, we suffer from sore hands from a lot of times not on the wall. I think there will be some advancements in technology in the coming years, which will help us put in that volume of work at a low enough intensity. The other thing is if you've got a climber, you know, of like, you know, 7A sport climbing ability and you want them to do a lot of mileage,

Simon (30:53)
is.

josh (31:01)
quite hard to get them to do that much mileage on an easy enough terrain. You know, like, so we're talking about runners going out for two, three hours. It's, you know, they just keep the pace really low or it's like a fast walk, basically, I think, but it's quite hard to get climbers in that low enough intensity zone.

Simon (31:04)
Yeah, it is. Yeah, I think, you know, you can some places have got tread walls, you know, there's the odd places in there, but they're few and far between, I think, really. And, you know, tread walls are a really good way of doing that. I don't know if that's something that we'll see appear more and more maybe at gyms or at calming walls. But yeah, they are a fairly useful way of doing it. But even then, there's a number of logistic difficulties with those, you know, put one of that one, they're expensive, and two, you can only really have one person climb at a time. So,

they're never really going to stick them in climbing gyms. It's not particularly useful.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. So yeah, there is a number of issues. I mean, one of the things we're trying to do at the minute is get an understanding of what might be. So we've been looking at muscle oxygenation kinetics for a while, so the different oxygen levels within muscles and how they're consumed when we climb within the muscles, we're trying to kind of find a balance or almost like a threshold effectively.

josh (31:49)
Yeah, the commercial viability of that will probably limit which gyms buy it and which don't.

Simon (32:10)
In traditional physiology, we get something called the anaerobic threshold, this point at which we start working more predominantly anaerobically than we do aerobically. And we're trying to use near -fledged spectroscopy to work out what that is in climbers, in the forearms particularly, so that we could better prescribe that sort of endurance -based level training. And that's one of the things we're trying to work on at the minute, is to be able to put this...

small device on your arm, you know, we want you to do some baseline and we want you to keep your muscle oxygenation within the forearms at about 44 % saturated with oxygen. We're trying to kind of work out what that threshold is in a minute, because I think that would really help to move us on in terms of taking some of this physiology into more applied physiology where we can actually be more prescriptive in terms of training and coaching as well. But it's a challenge.

No, in terms of how much oxygen you're consuming. So we can put a device that uses near infrared light that penetrates the muscle. And if we have a known concentration of infrared light that's going into the muscle and we know the concentration coming out, in near infrared spectroscopy, one light is sensitive to oxygenated hemoglobin and the other sensitive to deoxygenated hemoglobin. So we can see how much oxygen is being consumed within the muscle.

josh (33:21)
So you would work out what this is in terms of force that needs to be applied to sustain that threshold.

Simon (33:42)
And these things sample about 50 times a second. So you effectively get like a live trace of constant oxygen change. It's a little bit like breath by breath analysis that you might have heard of when you did running tests at uni. But we're looking at it directly in the muscle. And so as soon as you contract to the muscle, we see the concentration of oxygen go down. We're offloading it for energy expenditure within the muscle. And of course, when we relax that grip, we see it reperfuse back up very, very quickly. And we're trying to track that over time.

progressive increasing intensities of exercise to understand what does that threshold look like over time? And can we determine the point where we're actually working more anaerobically? And then can we say, right, actually, is this the optimum pace intensity that you need to sustain to shift that curve of performance to the right to make sure that we can.

we can be better, we can be more efficient and economical with the oxygen that we are consuming in the muscle. Can we be more reliant on fats rather than carbohydrates to really optimise that sort of base level of training?

Yeah.

josh (35:07)
So when you work out this threshold, you can then prescribe an intensity. Would you prescribe the intensity of exercise at or below that threshold? Is that what the science says in more traditional endurance sports?

Simon (35:07)
Yeah, good question. If we go to more traditional sports, we would prescribe below it, just below it. But the honest answer is we just don't know in climbing and we would need another series of studies to actually answer that question, if I'm brutally honest. We need to start trying to prescribe just below it, just above it, quite a bit below it, in the way that we would do those base runs to increase capillarity.

we get in running you get what's called the lactate turning point one and two. One is the rise above baseline levels and two is an exponential shift in lactate concentration. So we would then have to try and further calculate those two and get people to perform at those levels as well. So we're definitely a little way off answering those questions. We're probably a few years away, but I mean, if, if...

know it's possible to do that giving what we were talking about earlier in terms of the differences in the way that people approach climbing it's going to be it's going to be challenging that's a challenging environment.

It's really hard, yeah. It is hard.

josh (36:30)
Yeah, for sure. I think going back to my question about the challenges we face when it comes to research as well, getting climbers to participate in an intervention -based study is quite hard as well. You ask them to step away from the idea of doing any performance, because it just adds an aspect of variability into the study, like going out climbing on the weekends and stuff. You ask them to stop doing that for eight to 12 weeks. They still aren't going to adhere to that. Yeah, yeah.

Simon (36:41)
It's a big chunk, isn't it? Yeah, it's a really big chunk. That's why we often end up, we got sucked into doing nutritional studies a little bit sometimes because it's easier to recruit because you'd be like, well, I'd like to try and give you this supplement, you know, and you can do it alongside your training. So it's almost like less of a gamble and there's less time out and they're easier to recruit to. But yeah, it is definitely a challenge. It's definitely a challenge. It's also one of the reasons why we end up trying to predict things in climbing rather than taking...

actual samples sometimes. So for example, we talk about this increase in capillarity and actually read with what's the fairly confident that's happening. Or isn't a study that's taken biopsies out of climbers forearms yet? To prove that, you know, unequivocally that is the case because we're going to take this viral size chunk out of your one of your flexor muscles. Most people are going to go, no, thanks. It's only a little muscle anyway.

Good luck. So yeah, there's big challenges like that. Yeah.

josh (37:51)
Yeah, good luck getting it. Yeah.

Simon (37:56)
Honest answer? I don't think we're there yet in terms of, well that's true, maybe we've got current best practice. I don't think we have a best practice yet, current best practice. I think it goes back to muscle specificity. I think what we know about even the work looking at whole body training versus climbing specific training, ultimately that's it, isn't it? It has to be.

josh (37:58)
Yeah. So we're on the topic of testing and stuff. What's the current best practice or the gold standard tests you think are available for testing rock climbers and understanding their performance?

Simon (38:27)
specific. I don't think some of the current best practices are available to a lot of people. So for example, in order to work out how aerobically trained a muscle is, really the current best practice is to do a test of oxidative capacity, which is one of the things that we offer. We put a blood pressure cuff, a rapid pneumatic inflation cuff effectively around the upper arm over the bicep. And then we get near infrared spectroscopy meters, we place them on

muscles in the forearms, we rapidly inflate this cuff to what we call a supra -systolic pressure, so pressure that's about 220 millimetres of mercury. We leave that inflated for about five minutes onto the arm and we effectively consume as much of the available oxygen as possible within the peripheral muscles. And then we rapidly release the cuff with a special device and we measure the reperfusion of the oxygen into that muscle.

And that gives us, it tells us basically the overall oxidative capacity of the muscle. It tells us how big the main brachial arteries, how quickly and how big can they dilate? Can we increase their dilation in response to that hyperemia and that starving of oxygen effectively? And then it tells us about some of the smaller arteries in terms of radial artery, ulnar arteries, and then also the capillary bed. How quickly can we get that?

oxygen delivered into the muscle and rapidly reperfused. And the faster that you can do that, the healthier the vessels are, but the more trained those vessels are, the greater their aerobic capacity. The reason why we know that is because if we measure that rate of recovery after the release of that curve, we measure the rate of oxygen that is paid back effectively to the muscle. And

there's been validation studies where we've looked at phosphocreatine read synthesis. So measuring phosphocreatine read synthesis as well after this. And they're identical, they're the same. And the reason why they're the same is because the only way in which we can pay back anaerobic energy which has been used is with the efficiency of the aerobic system. So the more efficient the aerobic system is, the quicker we can repay back this debt, this anaerobic debt, this phosphocreatine read synthesis. So...

That's why the gold standard measure, for example, aerobic fitness of the forearms is this occlusion test really, because we get this whole body understanding of the macrovascular vessels and what's happening in the microvascular. And of course, it's dependent on things like the number of mitochondria there to be able to reap a few or to consume oxygen in order to make the energy as well. So it gives us a really nice whole body systems approach within the limb.

And again, those studies that we published previously show that you can explain for all part 40 % of the variance in performance purely based on this assessment. So I think that is probably the best practice in terms of assessing aerobic performance. Certainly, it takes a lot of the psychological element out that we get as well when we ask people to do some of these tests, the ability for people to...

to really push themselves, you know, so we can remove that as well by doing this. So I think that's probably it in terms of aerobic best practices, certainly. I mean, there's obvious other ones that you guys do really well in terms of flexibility assessments as well, which I think you're certainly at and all over. I think there's some really interesting assessments in terms of...

the research has shown that this kind of geometric entropy in terms of energy expenditure is good to assessing people's center of mass and how it deviates effectively from the optimum line in climbing and because that creates an additional energy expenditure which we don't need. So you can calculate geometric entropy as well with video analysis. But again these things like they're great but they're not available to everybody in terms of the...

time, the people, the skill set, the equipment. Yeah, so I think everything else is almost like a sort of sub predictor of that, if that makes sense. But it would be great if we could, you know, be at the point where we could have these things more readily available, it would be great. And it's the same for sort of more biomechanical things, you know, we look at EMG analysis, you know, looking at, you know, well, ideally, we want to look at how many muscle fibers have you got recruiting when you do your rate of force development test, and we look at RFD, you know, how quickly can we...

how quickly can you turn on these muscle fibers? What does that mean in terms of power? Well, if we can do AMG analysis and we can look at the amount of fibers which are being recruited, I think these are all sort of the gold standard sort of current practices, but I think it will be a while until they make it down into the implied environment. Although I do think that rapid advances in technology are really helping that filter through.

So some of the near infrared spectroscopy things that we talked about, you know, if we go back 10 years and the unit was about 50 ,000 pounds, you know, for one now that they're down to about a thousand pounds, you know, so we're, we're, we're seeing, and that, you know, it used to be on a massive trolley that you would have to cart around. You know, now it's a small portable wireless thing, which you can connect to your Garmin watch like.

we are making massive advances in terms of taking some of these current best practices, which we know work in, I'd also say lab -based environments, because that makes it sound really clinical, but on climbing walls with lab -based equipment that we know works really well. And using some clinical measures as well, we're getting there in terms of being able to have that more readily available for coaches, for athletes, et cetera, in the way that we've seen happen in running and cycling and everything else.

Yeah, we are getting there.

josh (44:38)
Hmm.

Simon (44:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

josh (44:57)
Yeah, when something like that comes down to a thousand pounds, you're getting closer to your local coach at your climbing wall being able to afford this kind of thing and do that kind of profiling. I really like the idea of especially the occlusionary perfusion test being able to take out some of those psychological or like technique errors that you get. So, I mean, if you're listening to this, you've probably seen the critical force test we do on our YouTube channel or something in

And then yeah, people, you can hold back in the beginning, you can kind of pace yourself. And I've seen people like start power screaming towards the end and then the force go up. But from a physiological perspective, you shouldn't be able to apply more force than you were in the previous attempts, because everything's supposed to be at your maximum voluntary contraction. So yeah, people do cheat these things a little bit. So removing those variables.

Simon (45:31)
That's it.

Yeah, I completely agree. You like that influence, like you say, you start shouting at somebody and you can see it come back up. It's a bit like the same with like the classic sort of wing get tested on a bike in 30 seconds of maximum. You start screaming and then power goes back up. You know, I'm not sure. Yeah, same with the critical force test, isn't it? It's yeah, you can manipulate these things. And it is a brutal test. It's I mean, it's a brutal test.

josh (46:17)
Yeah, I mean, back in the day, I was like, oh, this is amazing. You can get thresholds, you get maximum force, you get it all in just four or five minutes. But it's not the nicest four or five minutes. And yeah, the environment changes things. I remember being at Union. You'd get all your mates around you when you're doing, because I was trying out this critical force test back in Union. When I managed to get a few people all in at the same day, and people would all be shouting at you, like, go, go, go, go. It just changes the environment, and suddenly you PB.

Simon (46:30)
Yeah, yeah, it makes a big difference doesn't it? You kind of help with human nature, you kind of help.

josh (46:47)
because you've got people shouting at you, which is just introducing more variables. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, it kind of sounds like we're definitely in the right direction, but like you started this with, we're not quite, we don't currently have the gold standards yet. Where do you see us in the next five or 10 years? What do you think will change, which will put us ahead? What would you like to see change?

Simon (46:56)
I think we will get to the point where I'm going to switch to traditional sports for a second. And if you take companies like Strava and Garmin, we have huge databases. So you can punch into a Garmin app or whatever, like a number of different of your known variables, your threshold test variable, you can put in your height, your weight.

the frequency in which you train all the rest of it and it will and it will be able to give you a whole range of different predictions of things that you need to be able to do. I suspect that in time we will get to a point which probably with the influence of things like AI and big data effectively, you know, we are in sports sciences, there is a massive move into big data and into sports technology particularly. And I think we will get to the point where all the things we saw started off and talked about in terms of.

the way in which we approach a client. Obviously, maybe the disciplines in which we client, the way that we approach those clients, our AP index is our sort of key anthropometric variables, our flexibility margins, we can put them all in and I suspect we will be able to go actually, given the volume of data that we're gonna be able to generate in the future, we will be able to better profile athletes and I think it will go that way.

when I don't know, and I guess when more of these things are optimized and they're able to be rolled out en masse. So when things like thresholds, we talked about earlier, that data will be no doubt be fed back into databases like the ones you have at Lattice, and they will grow and grow and grow exponentially. And I suspect that we will then be able to do much better sort of statistical modeling on those data sets.

And kind of what we call machine learning in which we have large multiple regression analysis where we're able to much better predict people's weaknesses and performances. I suspect, you know, it will go that way and we'll be able to be much more informative depending on the type of person, the type of climate, the type of anthropometric makeup that you have. Yeah, so slightly controversial maybe, but I think that's the way it might go. I hate to say it.

josh (49:40)
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think in a way, it also kind of skips a step in terms of the frontline stuff, like the research you're doing on the co -phase of it. When it comes to big data, I mean, like you probably have these social media companies basically doing cutting edge psychology and behavioural research without ever consulting any researchers, but they've just got machine learning doing it for you. Yeah.

Simon (49:46)
That's it. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, will our apps will will Europe will the last apps in the future, you know, will they be putting all of that data that they received that people put into the into big databases that then use they've used to predict their what was my best climb in the last three months? Or was it on a slab was on a vert? What does it look like? And yeah, I think that will be a game changer. If I'm honest.

Yeah.

josh (50:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got a couple of questions about research, which kind of feels like we're moving into anyways, or talking about skipping research trials and just learning about data. But first one is like, if I could give you a million pounds or a million dollars to spend on researching anything in rock climbing, what would you like to find out?

Simon (50:34)
I love this question, it's really good. Can I have two things? I can't, I think I can narrow it down to one. I think the first one is, and I am massively guilty of this, so for anyone that's listening that's sort of research focused, this isn't aimed at you, this is also aimed at me. We have all, broadly speaking in the sports sciences, but massively in climbing, focused on men in sport for the last two decades.

josh (51:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go on.

Simon (51:04)
And actually, you know, one of the things I would do is kick pick out, you know, the most well, many of the research papers have done and repeated in females and spend money and time really getting to understand the the differences, you know, the way that the menstrual cycle affects performance, the way that it affects rate of force development, the way that that is influenced.

over each cycle, between cycles, they're rarely consistent in their cycle. Understanding those aspects, I think, have been overlooked. We've done a terrible job of making excuses and a terrible job of

of doing more research in women, it's still massively underrepresented. So, yeah, that's one of the things that I would definitely go back and do in challenges is redo all of the stuff in female -only studies to allow us to get a better understanding of performance sport in female athletes, right through from, you know, beginners through to the elite level athletes. So I think that's the first thing I'd do. And I think it's a really important point.

And then the other one, I've done some research previously on the effects of climbing on health as well. And I genuinely believe that climbing is an incredibly healthy sport, not just in the sense of it's exercise and it's physical activity and the known benefits of that. I think it goes well beyond that. I did a study quite a long time ago.

where we looked at, we gave really high -end mountain climbers mental arithmetic tests. So we gave them like, it's effectively like, it's called a mental stress test. We gave them this mental stress test in response. We measured something called arterial stiffness. And so it's, they measures effectively kind of endothelial health. So endothelium cells are these,

single layer of cells which line all of our vascular system, you know, from the blood vessels in the brain through to the capillary bed in the arm. We measure the stiffness of these in different portions. One of the most important portions is what we call the carotid to the femoral. So the main carotid pulse and the femoral pulse and the time taken between to get to the two is the transit time. And if we know the distance, we can calculate the velocity. And that tells us about the stiffness of the vessel. The more different it is.

the more unhealthy this vessel is. And we collected some data looking at, like I say, people's response to a mental stress task is their stiffness normally goes up. So it goes up, their vessels become more unhealthy. And even on an acute level, yeah, yeah, it can be elevated for hours afterwards. So if you're driving home from work and you get a blink of road rage, you know, that's

that stress, that stiffness within your cardiovascular system is not only acute, but it's maintained for up to four hours after that stress. So for four hours, even when you get home, you're like, oh God, I'm over it. You're not because your vascular system is still stiff, it's stiffer and that puts more pressure on the heart ultimately without you knowing about it. And when we looked at this in these top level mountain climbers and we looked at it in them,

josh (54:31)
On like an acute level, like within the space of the test. Oh wow, okay.

Simon (54:50)
compared to highly trained aerobic athletes, cyclists, and then we had a pretty sedentary group. What we saw in the mountain climbers was that, yes, there was a massive acute response, but their recovery from that was unbelievable. Their cardiovascular system recovered very quickly in terms of distress, something which we didn't see with aerobically trained athletes only, and we didn't see it with a sedentary group, which we kind of know about anyway.

And so that is likely down. We talked earlier about that potable reflex, you know, that constant sort of isometric stress of the peripheral muscles. But I also, and I think that's a key thing that we see here that we don't, there's been other non -climbing studies that have shown that isometric contractions that are held for prolonged periods of time are really good for long -term mortality risk. There was a study that came out looking at, you know, like if you do the plank every day, which is this constant isometric hold.

you're more likely to live, I forget it was like four or five years longer, you know, compared to traditional exercise. So I think that is really important. But I also think there's a really strong cognitive element here in terms of maybe it's a personality trait of climbers generally, I don't know, or is it a cognitive adaptation to deal with those stresses, you know, to be, I guess, on the sharp end multiple times.

josh (55:52)
Hmm.

Simon (56:19)
And that's normalized, you know, and there's a healthy cognitive adaptation there that when blended with that healthy muscular adaptation that we talked about earlier on, is that the mechanism behind that? And if we looked at that in a much greater range of climates against other populations, does that exist? Because I really think that there's a real health benefit that we

that we actually don't know exists yet, but long -dutifully, I suspect we'll find in time that it's incredibly beneficial for our cardiovascular health.

Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's it, that ability to offset it, yeah, I think it's super important. Yeah, so I mean, there are two studies that I want, two genres of studies, I guess, that I would love to get into properly. Yeah.

josh (57:20)
Yeah, that's amazing. It's really cool. For a minute, you got me worried as being, ah, I need to stop getting so stressed. Me and my wife, we had our first kid about three months ago. And I noticed like, when she's crying and I'm holding him like, oh my God, I'm sure my blood pressure's through the roof right now. But luckily I climbed. So I'm probably good at recovering from that stress, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. So I've kind of got one on the similar lines. And I spoke to Dave Giles about this actually, I asked him this question because obviously he comes from a background of research. So I'll give an insight to what he said. It's more of a research method that he would want to use. But this is the Magic 1 study. So if you could perform any research study, again, let's say money is not a...

Simon (58:09)
Yeah, I do. It's really difficult that one. I think it's probably tied to my previous one about health, I think, and the health of climbers in terms of I would probably look at something called years lost to disability. It's not that exciting, though. It's about seeing sort of, you know, like, well, whilst their age might go, they might live for longer. They may spend many of those latter years disabled, whereas I would look at that. But.

josh (58:19)
not a barrier here, but you don't have to get it passed an ethics board. And then maybe it doesn't need to be in climbing, but I'd like to know climbing answer as well. What would your magic one study be? No ethics board approval needed for this one.

Simon (58:38)
That's not that exciting in terms of removing the ethics perspective. Is it inappropriate to say, oh, I would really like to do some cadaver studies of dead climates to look at, you know, some of the true physiological guesstimations that we have? I think that would be absolutely brilliant to look at some of those. I also think even, you know,

josh (58:51)
Hehehe.

Simon (59:05)
Biopsies, I'd love to get climbers to do biopsies to validate a lot of the things that we've done. So I guess without ethics, you know, somehow jumping people and getting biopsies from them without them, without their consent, just committing to it would be really useful. Wasn't it?

josh (59:07)
Yes.

Simon (59:37)
No, no, unfortunately not. Maybe we can use this as a recruitment drive. If you're listening to this and you don't mind us taking a bi -row sized sample out of your forearm, drop us an email. For the greater good. All of your climbing peers will appreciate it. I'll appreciate it. So Dave.

josh (59:46)
Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what Dave said. He said, I reckon that there will be something about muscle biopsies in there. Dave said it's the one thing that like, like you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, it's you're not really going to get many climbers agreeing to have a muscle biopsy taken from their forearm, but it could. Yeah.

Simon (1:00:09)
Yeah.

josh (1:00:15)
Yeah, it's for the greater good really at the end of the day. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that the Kadabba study stuff is really interesting as well. I think it also maybe go to dispel some myths about like wearing out our fingers and hands. So I don't, I can't really speak so much to it because I don't know the science behind it. But I hear a lot of people concerned about developing like arthritis in their fingers or just wearing out, wearing out their fingers and hands. But at the same time, exercise is all about adaptation. And if it's done in an appropriate manner,

Simon (1:00:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and there are some that have been done in fairness, where they've looked at police of climate. So the guy called Andreas Weizer, I think he's Swiss. He's one of a few people that have done some of these studies as well. And they have had a look at some of them, and there's some really interesting stuff. But I do think, you know, I think...

josh (1:00:52)
Surely it's still a lifelong sport, but it'd be good to see cadaver studies to kind of actually say what is happening to our hands at later life if we've climbed for 40 years.

Simon (1:01:08)
But as you say, it's doing things in an appropriate way in order to enable that lifelong performance ability. And I think that comes from load management, I guess, as we go through aging. I know. I think you've had him on before, actually. I think Eric Horst is really up on this. I he's a, I don't want to say, I think he's a plus 60 climber. But you know, the guy's a machine.

what he'll always tell you is that he's had to adjust that volume, that load, the number of real intense bouts, you know, have probably come down quite dramatically. So it's about doing those things in a safe and an appropriate way. But I think like you say, you know, exercise is good for us, you know, loading the bones, you know, is we know is really good for osteoarthritis, you know, for osteopenia. So, yeah, I think there's a number of

structural functional benefits to climbing. They go certainly beyond the muscular level.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think. No, I can't remember them. I'm unfortunately I should I should have read them. I really before I came on. But yeah, that and various vices studies that did that. They loaded him. I think I think he did them with Peter Wolf, who's a colleague of his. Both both hand surgeons, but also to do research in the area. So but I can't remember from what the load was. Yeah, it's quite a lot, though. I think it's a fair it's a fair amount.

josh (1:02:41)
Yeah, yeah. Do you know what these cadaver studies looked like? I'm just remembering, I'm sure there was a study done trying to load the pulleys to a maximum extent to see how much force they could withstand before they ruptured. But I don't know the...

Simon (1:02:59)
they did it in different positions I think from memory. They were looking at different crimps and how much load you could get through it. It was a great podcaster.

Come on.

Yeah, absolutely.

josh (1:03:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon (1:03:28)
And...

Yeah, what? Uh, I think...

josh (1:03:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll have to dig that up, get them on. Yeah, see if we can find some B -rolls to get that on YouTube as well. One for the one for the squeamish. Do you think there's any information or anything in the climbing community that is misguided or anything we're getting wrong? Something you might fix?

Simon (1:03:36)
I think it's, whether it's logistics or misguided, maybe, I don't know, we sort of touched on it earlier, I think, in terms of the, you know, that base training. You know, I think having a good volume of that base training is really important. And we probably don't see benefit in that, in the way that maybe we should. But then, as you say, logistically, you know, it's very difficult to do that.

And I think the other one probably, I think we under, I mean, this is very discipline specific arguably and the climbing type specific, but I do think we probably underestimate that the usefulness of our lower body. I think we overlook the usefulness, the explosive power. I think we probably have a good focus on lower limb flexibility for sure. But do we have as much of a focus on explosive lower limb power?

You know, things such as eccentric utilization ratio trying to how much more additional load can we get from sort of the stretch shortening cycle, the elastic potential within the muscle to generate force rapidly. And I think given maybe the changes, certainly in terms of competition climbing, more dynamic nature of climbing, we probably under under appreciate and overlook. I would say you know, you chat to coaches.

And you chat to climbers, it's the thing that they probably would not mention. Certain climbers, you know, if I want, when have you ever heard a climber say, I really want to include the explosive power of my jump or my lower limb. So I think that is probably underestimated. So I think it's far more important, I think.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm tired, I'm done now. Yeah. Yeah.

josh (1:05:48)
Yeah, it's kind of like, if you've got a climber hanging from a bar, the focus is a top down approach. It's like fingers first, then forearms, then we're going to look at shoulders and maybe core. And then when you're, by the time you get to your legs, you're like, wow, do we need to work on this anymore? But I think it is changing. Yeah. I mean, you've got people like Adebondra talking about how he's trained his calves to get good at knee bars. And that was the...

Simon (1:05:51)
Yeah, that's it. You know, absolutely. You know, you look at the role that the, that the cast and the hamstrings, you know, that like, you know, hamstring loading. I mean, you know, that savage heel hook that you, you don't want to put yourself in. Um, you know, having the strength to hold in those positions, you know, to offload your forearms, to give you that recovery, to allow that reperfusion to take place is, it's super important. You know, a lot of our studies showed the importance of being able to rest and shake out.

josh (1:06:15)
defining factor of sending like as hard as three of us. So.

Simon (1:06:21)
was is massive. And so focusing on that lower limb, I think to be able to deweight to some extent, even micro differences make a difference to the forearms as well. So by training the lower legs, you're arguably given your arms in many times, quite often more time to recover. Plus, we talked about the ability of lactate shuttling. They're on if we train those, we're also able to, you know, consume lactate that's been produced in the forearms and the shoulders.

So they're big muscles that can consume a lot of metabolite in the lower limbs. There's benefit in draining them for sure, even if they're not direct.

josh (1:07:19)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah. I kind of think like the, our community's understanding of training or performance for rock climbing in general is, is maybe just more based on our culture than it is our understanding of sports performance. So like, I think if you go back and you look at Wolfgang's training, like campersing on monos and stuff, and, and like you look at Ben and Jerry just like, uh, on their 50 degree board in a basement, always cutting their feet on every move like that.

Simon (1:07:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

really important yeah yeah absolutely.

josh (1:07:57)
that set a precedent for what training looked like, what culture was. And I think we're at a point now where because you see comp climbers that are ridiculously flexible, now people are going, oh, yeah, actually you do need to be flexible for rock climbing. And that's driven more by the culture of climbing more than it is like sports scientists or coaches going, look, lower body strength and flexibility is really helpful for this sport, but they weren't really.

Simon (1:08:00)
And I think something that you don't see when you watch pro climbers, you know, like you say, you see, oh, there's the value of flexibility. It's what you don't see from that is, but it's all one, maybe not so overtly is you've got to have the strength to hold that flexibility. You know, there's one thing, you know, being able to get your foot next to the air and there's another thing being able to use it to rock over on it. And like it's being able to use it when you get it there as well.

josh (1:08:25)
acknowledge it until they see a pro -climate doing it or like a community doing it.

Simon (1:08:27)
know, so to use the full length of those muscle fibers in order to be able to create that movement from it. So, yeah, I think I mean, I agree with it's multifaceted. And I think you're probably right. I think there is probably a big, big cultural shift that I hope is beneficial to performance. Yeah.

I think an inconvenient truth. I feel like I've hammered mileage on this.

Yeah, I think it is that. I think you can get OK at climbing fairly quickly. But I guess maybe none of us ever get to the level of mastery. Maybe that's probably a bit strong. But to really be able to master it, I just think it takes time. It takes time in terms of mileage because that mileage underpins those long term adaptations that we get in the muscles.

josh (1:09:15)
Yeah, yeah. This next question I had actually kind of leads on from what we're talking about now, but what is one inconvenient truth about getting good at climbing?

I was going to say, I think we kind of just discussed this as well, but you've a good job of covering it in advance.

Simon (1:09:37)
you know, and then long term working on those key core things we talked about, you know, such as flexibility. And in order to do that, you also particularly as you get older, and I guess like I'm speaking from the 40 plus camp now that you have to be able to maintain your strength in order to be able to stay injury free. And again, to do all of these things collectively and together in a

safe and appropriate way, it takes a lot of time. Yes, we want to be powerful, probably more powerful than we want to be strong, but we have to stay strong in order to stay injury free. And balancing all of those things together is really time consuming. And so I guess it boils down to, it just takes time. It takes time to get good and to stay good and to stay safe.

Yeah, so multiple things, I think.

josh (1:11:08)
Yeah, no, I think it's a good answer. I definitely agree. I think there's an emphasis on intensity over volume in general in climbing. Maybe there's two camps to this. You'll see a lot of people saying, particularly in your first two or three years, like, just climb loads, don't worry about strength training or anything. And I think there's an argument to say actually, well, you're probably going to do too much climbing in your first two to three years if you've given them a bit of time.

Simon (1:11:14)
Yeah, and I totally, I completely agree. And it goes back to the first one we talked about earlier, you know, it's that kind of, it's all of that other things that are going on, the other allostatic loads that happen, where people are in their cycles, like, you know, it's multifaceted. And like you say, you know, in that first year, if you can climb, you know, the more you can climb, people will say, well, you know, just do that. But then I think, you know, early on, they're also more likely to get injured just doing that.

josh (1:11:38)
And there's a benefit to doing some conditioning to keep your body healthy as well.

Simon (1:11:43)
because they don't have some of those other adaptations. And so actually is having a focus on that early on beneficial, you know, get for that for that longer term level of potential mastery that you're going to get. It varies between athletes and what they want, I guess. And it's wildly age dependent, I think.

Yeah.

That's it.

josh (1:12:33)
I was going to say, if you just start climbing, I remember when I went to university, basically lived in the climbing wall. It was on campus and we spent like, I was probably in there five, six days a week. I'd take a textbook to the climbing wall and read it in between doing like laps on the circuit board. There were just loads of mileage, but it was probably, you know, we used to this term junk mileage. I did a lot of that, I'm sure of it. But I just got away with it. But if I think of, I did that now.

Simon (1:12:38)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess the answer is you probably wouldn't get away with it. You know, like we were the same, you know, I mean, when I was in the we had a pretty decent boulder wall, but all the sport routes were outside and generally it rained. So we did, like you say, tons of junk mileage all on pretty hard, like, you know, constantly near the limit day after day after day for hours and hours and hours and then.

josh (1:13:01)
I just don't know how I would do it. Three days in the climbing wall plus some other stuff, I need time to rest.

Simon (1:13:03)
I mean, I actually got away with it, we were the same, but I completely, you just wouldn't get away with that now, because of many of those aging factors and other things that go on in life. I would definitely get injured. I don't climb anywhere near as much as I used to with kids and research and other sports as well now. If I was to jump back onto...

you know, five, six days of the week, I would at 40 plus, I would adapt. I would get injured pretty quick. Pretty quick.

Yeah, we didn't we didn't know a lot of this stuff then, you know, we and I think that's where Latin does a very good job, you know, now of being able to work with people to go, oh, hang on a minute. Look, we know a lot more about this than we did. Don't don't do that. You're going to get injured. You know, actually, this is the way we need to build up to that. Yeah, we were lucky.

josh (1:14:06)
Yeah, I look back on those days and still wish I'd done more to set a foundation of the strength work I did. I did so much climbing that it probably wasn't beneficial. Like, you know, I'd leave sessions exhausted. And I don't think maybe there's some value in just like getting the movement in there. But I don't think it was all deliberate practice. It was just climbing for the sake of enjoying it, which... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon (1:14:23)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, exactly. Getting in that manager at a low intensity is hugely beneficial, definitely. Like I say, in terms of movement, in terms of technique, time on rock, as well as all the physiological adaptations, the cognitive adaptations that you would get, you know, the ability to process even is really important. Yeah.

josh (1:14:44)
Yeah. But this isn't to say that there's also benefit in climbing a lot, but at a very low intensity, you know, getting in that mileage.

Yeah. Yeah.

Simon (1:15:12)
I think two things. One I won't go into because I've already talked about it and that's some of the stress stuff that we talked about in terms of the health benefits of farming. I think that's probably one of the coolest, most interesting studies, if I'm honest, that we found. And the other one, I really enjoy a lot of nutrition stuff and we did some work and actually did it in conjunction with lattice, some of the stuff.

josh (1:15:19)
I've got, so I think you've already touched on a few of these things already in this question. So I'm going to reframe it a little bit, because I think we might revisit something we already talked about, but you've done a lot of research in climbing. So what are some of the most interesting finding or conclusions you've made, which isn't to do with volume of work, sheer stress and reperfusion, that kind of stuff.

Simon (1:15:41)
a few years back where we looked at the effect of black current supplementation on climates. We looked at, I am going to go back to muscles a little bit, sorry, and oxygenation. But we looked at whether supplements of black current can improve that. So early on we'd worked out that this oxidative capacity was really important. It related to performance really well. And then we started to look at how can we improve that? And we gave supplements and we did tread wall laps as well, actually.

in terms of time to exhaustion, and we supplemented for a week. And what we found was that blackcurrant was able to increase the perfusion of oxygen within the muscle, but not the blood flow in the main arteries themselves. Blackcurrant is high in something called anthracyanins, and anthracyanins are

a powerful sort of vasodilator. So the idea is that things like blackcurrant, and you'd have seen the same thing with beetroot juice is probably a more common one. Some people use like cherry tart juice, but they're high in anthracyanins, which are important in terms of nitrate and nitric oxide availability in the blood. And they're dilators that allow the blood vessels to dilate to a greater extent over each cardiac cycle and contract to get afterwards.

And that increases the, supposedly increases the flow of blood. And yeah, we found that after supplementation of that, we can increase time to exhaustion on the climbing wall with this supplementation. We increased the delivery of oxygen within the muscles. But when we use an isolated limb model, so we just took forearm flexors to failure, basically, and we did that multiple times. We didn't see any performance benefits there.

So I think there's benefit to this in terms of a whole body response. And we saw that with time to exhaustion, but as opposed to enough to see an isolated liminal. But I think, yeah, some of the nutritional supplement stuff is really interesting, particularly around, like they say, these anthracyanin -based products like blackcurrant, New Zealand blackcurrant extract, which is very high in anthracyanins. Yeah, I really, I think they're quite cool studies.

Yeah, that's it. That whole body work. And I think that's where you see the benefits. And if we look at the research that's been done in this whole body in other whole body sports, that's where we've seen those benefits as well, you know, in running in repeated running bouts in cycling performance in 5k time, there's a really whole body responses. And we saw that with that time to failure on the tread wall. And so, yeah, I think when you're doing that real long whole body routes, there's there's there's advantage to that.

josh (1:18:32)
Do you think in theory then you would see a performance increase in the style of route, which is a lot more full body, maybe less just on the fingers. I'm thinking back to some trips I've had to Spain where you're on a 40 meter two foot route and your whole body's just like absolutely gassed.

Simon (1:18:42)
There's certainly never been anything as well that shows that it's bad, you know, so it's worth it. It's almost worth the gamble. But yeah, I do think there's some value in those supplements for sure.

Oh, thanks.

I was a bit worried people might be like, I'm not sure about science.

josh (1:19:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah. So this has actually been like one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever done, even listened to. I absolutely love the science on it. And it's been a little while since I've been here.

I think I think most climbers are relatively geeky when it comes to this stuff, at least our little like our echo chamber of people that are interested in like lattice data and stuff. We definitely see a lot of people really nerding out on this stuff. So just in case we've got someone listening that's doing a sports science degree or interested in like starting a study, what advice would you give to someone that wants to pursue the kind of academic or research route?

Simon (1:19:52)
I wonder whose work this is. Yeah, I think, you know, I think the thing that's benefited me the most, hands down, has been working with good people. And certainly in academia and in research, there is a sort of old school mentality, I guess, of, you know, do work, do it alone, be proud of what you've done.

josh (1:20:12)
And any advice specific to climbing? Because I know I did the same thing as you in uni. I tried to do as much of that dedicated work to climbing. I think my lecturers probably just read it like, oh, another climbing one. But yeah, yeah, exactly.

Simon (1:20:21)
that you stake in the ground and say, this is me. And actually, you know, in a world where we're becoming much more specific, I just think that's probably the worst thing that people could do actually. And having good quality mentors that believe in really strong collaborations allows you to be very multidisciplinary from a research perspective. And those collaborations are super important. They're the thing that helped me out the most.

is having really good people to talk to, to bounce ideas from. And that often comes from the way that other people, I guess, were supervised. My PhD, which was now a good while ago, I think I finished 10 or 11 years ago, the thing that my supervisor was brilliant at was collaborating.

josh (1:21:47)
Simon's connection cut out for a minute, but we're back in. I'll just, you know, give you my...

my thoughts on this question as well, what you're saying about collaborating or working with other people. I think I did a similar thing with my dissertation in uni and I, in fact, I'll throw him in this one. I contacted Tom Randall when I was at uni and asked for advice on it. I didn't hear anything back. So don't contact Tom. He's normally too busy, but for sure, if you want Lathister's opinion on this, drop the inbox in email or somewhere.

Simon (1:22:16)
Yeah.

josh (1:22:23)
pick up it probably be me or Cam that works here still actively doing a PhD in climbing. So we were still involved in research. But for me, it was is getting perspective or collaborating with people in the industry or in the applied fields, because I wanted to know, and I got recommended this as well. I was very fortunate. Someone said, like, you know, if you want your research to be read and and make a difference, talk to people in the applied field because

they're going to tell you if it's useful to them or not, or if you're just doing something because you think it's interesting. And I think I've seen a lot of ideas been like, yeah, that's kind of interesting, but who's going to use it? I think it's okay if it's not directly applicable to an applied field, but it's got to be probably a stepping stone in there. Like a lot of the profiling stuff is maybe not directly applicable because we've not got access to that technology, but it's going somewhere, isn't it? And maybe it's a...

Simon (1:22:57)
Yeah.

josh (1:23:20)
there to be the gold standard which you can make reference tests from or something like that. But yeah, making it applied is always useful to people like us that are coaching.

Simon (1:23:27)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, absolutely. Making it applied. You know, like you say, talk to people that work in the field, talk to coaches, talk to the end product, wherever that might be. And often, you know, it's a relatively under -researched sport. So there are often, you've got to do the building blocks before you can get to those applied studies. But a lot of them are now being done. And we probably are at the point where we're starting to do a lot more applied work because we know the building blocks.

So now is a great time to get into it because now there aren't so much more applied stuff being done, which is amazing. Much more training interventions, supplements, what are the efficacious approaches to different forms of training. Yeah, but I think collaboration is, as you say, key.

josh (1:24:21)
Yeah, back when I was in uni, we just didn't have any intervention based stuff. I think everything was about just learning how to profile rock climbers. And if you can't profile the before and after, you know, if you didn't have a before and after test, why you couldn't do the intervention in the middle. So yeah, for me, I'd love to see more intervention based stuff be done, but obviously it's being done now and it's really cool to see.

Simon (1:24:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been done now, yeah, we do some stuff with shaking, you know, trying to just simply, you know, trying to understand different interventions to improve, you know, reperfusion during shaking. Some really interesting stuff that Eva Lopez has been doing around different strength training interventions. Yeah, there's some great stuff coming out for sure.

josh (1:25:02)
So my final question then, before we wrap up is, and you briefly touched on this, but like what is Sprint Lab and where can we find you if we want to get ourselves profiled?

Simon (1:25:13)
Yes, if you want some physiology profile and testing, yeah, get in touch. We're a high performance facility based in North Gloucestershire, a small place called North Nibley. And you can get in touch either on the website, which is www .thesprintlab .co .uk, or you can email us on info at thesprintlab .co .uk. But yeah, we hope to...

I'd be able to provide really high quality physiology performance, sports science informed testing. All the testing that we do is research informed. So all of it is informed by the research that we've conducted and the database that we have in terms of normative values is conducted from all of the athletes that we've worked with over the last 10 years. So there's quite a good bank there in terms of understanding, you know, what may be your physiologically, what may be your limiting factor.

performance.

josh (1:26:14)
Well, I mean, watch this space. I'm going to be heading down to the Sprint Lab in the summer and hopefully get some of these tests done so you can see someone going through the tests. Although, if you're not doing critical force tests, it shouldn't be too bad.

Simon (1:26:26)
No, we might add it in for you, just because.

josh (1:26:31)
Yeah, okay. Yeah, why not? Cool. I think we'll leave it there. That was really amazing to have you on today. It was nice to dig out all of the research and hear your knowledge on that.

Simon (1:26:41)
No worries. Thanks very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

josh (1:26:46)
Cool, yeah, cheers Simon, and I'll see you later in the summer.

Simon (1:26:48)
Amazing, cool. Thanks Josh.