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Dave MacLeod

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comPiler:
Separated Shoulder
30 August 2017, 3:11 pm



5 weeks ago, I had an accident playing with my daughter and separated my shoulder. I did it properly as well; a grade 3 separation tearing all three ligaments which join my right collar bone to my scapula. It was a classic shoulder separation scenario - diving into a roll but instead landing on the point of my shoulder. Seeing my reflection in the car window was all I needed to know what had happened (it was obvious!), but nonetheless I headed off to get an x-ray and exam to confirm. My clavicle was elevated with a marked deformity across the top of my shoulder.

I’ve always counted myself lucky not to have had any traumatic shoulder injuries. There is a first time for everything. On the first two days it was so painful it took me 30 minutes to get sat up in bed. Taping it had me yelping like a kid! Obviously at this point I was not too happy about the situation.

But even by the third day I was able to make some tiny movements. By the beginning of the second week, the immobilisation of my arm in the sling had devastated my arm and shoulder muscles, which looked (to my eye at least) tiny. It is always shocking how fast immobilised limbs waste away, especially when it is your own limb.



Step deformity at the AC joint (the end of my collar bone)

With my daily exercises, I did everything I could to progress the return of range of motion, strength and muscle mass. At first, I could only really do 1-2 hours per day, but by the third week that was more like three in total. Early on I was just doing a ton of grip and pinch exercises, biceps curls with my arm supported, internal/external rotations with tubing or my other hand for resistance, isometrics at different angles and many more.

It got noticeably better every day, although there were of course still some mornings when I felt rotten, and some evenings when I sloped off to bed exhausted and sore at 7pm. Speaking of bed, the exercises were as always only half the picture. These days I am rather more careful to enforce a minimum amount of sleep, go after a far higher maximum and I’m much more careful with my diet now I have better knowledge on what I’m optimising for. While its not possible to know just how much all of these things make a difference, here is the output so far.

At five weeks I have fairly decent range of motion, but still a bit to go to achieve the last few degrees of pre-injury flexion and especially crossing my arm across my chest. I can manage about 12 pull-ups pain free and can now tolerate short climbing sessions on a 45 degree board doing moves which are fairly easy for me.

I can’t yet tolerate long training sessions, any really hard moves at 45 degrees, forceful ‘gaston’ press moves, very dynamic jumps on steep ground, or other heavy loading of the AC joint with my arm overhead. To me that feels like excellent progress, and I’m still seeing daily improvement. I’m sure I’m not the first climber with this injury so I’ll report back as a few more weeks pass and see what I can manage or cant manage.

Although it’s obviously a massive pain in the ass to have an unexpected traumatic injury I could have done without. But once it has happened, it’s happened. You have to deal with it head on. Its a good opportunity for me on three fronts. First, it allows me to test out the principles I detailed in Make or Break and continue to build on them. Second, it’s allowed me to work on some other projects that needed done. Thankfully the weather has also been rotten for the past month anyway, so there is no FOMO for the mountain crags going on. Finally, as always it allows me to go back to square one and assess my weaknesses to work on in training, and put some proper time into addressing these without the constant drive to just go out climbing all the time.

So let’s see what the next month brings. It would be doing well to be worse than the previous one.

Dave MacLeod

My book - 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes

Source: Dave MacLeod blog

comPiler:
FWMF Minifest trailer
22 September 2017, 11:06 am



from Fort William Mountain Festival on Vimeo.

Here is a trailer I put together for the Fort William Mountain Festival Minifest which is running on Saturday 7th of October in the Nevis Centre. Some of my own aerial footage from around Lochaber in the trailer, and the list of great looking film showing.

You can get tickets for the night at mountainfestival.co.ukDave MacLeod

My book - 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes

Source: Dave MacLeod blog

comPiler:
AC joint recovery, progress and protocol
22 September 2017, 2:07 pm



It’s coming up for 8 weeks since I separated my shoulder. I’m delighted with my progress and although I’ve obviously got a long way to go yet, I’m a lot further along at this point that I expected.

Even two weeks ago, although I was doing some gentle endurance type climbing on my wall and an ever increasing load of rehab exercise, I was still unable to load my shoulder dynamically without some pain. How it would respond to ‘proper’ climbing i.e. 100% effort, with dynamic loading still felt like a big unknown.

Now, I feel rather more confident that I will be able to recover really well from this injury. I can campus without any problem, complete a half one-arm pull-up and have managed to get up some of the ‘medium-hard’ problems on my board. Fewer and fewer moves are causing pain and strength is improving daily. It will still take quite some time to recover 100% of the strength lost. But my day-to-day work is feeling less and less like rehab and more like real training.

I also just had my first day back out at the crag which was a huge boost. Through experience I’m well equipped to cope with the enforced break from my normal routine of outdoor climbing that is so important to me. But ‘coping’ is the key word. It takes active effort to get through the stress of deprivation from being outside in nature and doing that you love. So when you can stand outside in the quiet of the north west, smell the autumn air and dangle about on a cliff preparing a new route until the sun sets, it feels like a huge weight is lifted.

Just this experience is like the sun coming out in my head. Both body and mind are telling me it is time to GO.

 i.e. Go climbing.

A lot of people have messaged me asking to know exactly what I’m doing for my rehab since the results have been good so far. Obviously my program is personally tailored to me, but here is a quick list of the bulk of what you need to know. You’ll see that none of it is rocket science, but also very easy to get wrong in our modern way of life.

There are three central foundations on which the rehab protocol are built. Sleep, nutrition and stress management. The detail of much of this is described in my book Make or Break. But aside from the myriad of sleep hygiene tactics, the main issue for me is just to enforce a hard bedtime to ensure I get at least 8 hours of quality sleep (not just time in bed) with no exceptions. Nutrition wise, I eat what most would describe as a Paleo type diet, although I certainly don’t set out to follow the Paleotm rules. Basically I just eat unprocessed foods - lots of red meat from properly raised animals, lots of leafy green vegetables, lots of eggs and high fat dairy depending on my energy needs. I’m glossing over a ton of detail here but broadly I eat this way for three main reasons. It helps me maintain my weight without having to constantly watch my calorie intake. It is generally anti-inflammatory and this makes a huge difference to recovery from injury or training in general. Finally, it makes it a lot easier to make sure I get all the nutrients in abundance. For geeks, Marty Kendall’s site is a fantastic tool to explore various options for getting your nutrition right. Cronometer is also a great tool for monitoring. I also try to actively limit stress. Getting injured and then trying to recover is already stressful enough and I can see the physiological effects of this quite readily. Lowering the allostatic stress load is important to give your body a chance to heal. In practice this means getting the above factors right, making some space for relaxation and managing my work as well as possible. The biggest challenge in my case is that time spent outside at the crag is possibly the biggest stress reducing behaviour in my life, and being injured tends to remove it! Although I did make an effort to have days outside as soon as I could, I definitely could have done more to get outside earlier in the rehab process.

On top of this foundation comes the exercise protocol. I’m not going to go into the detail here because the principles are in Make or Break. On top of the basic shoulder rehab exercise program, I went for testing with my physio every three weeks to identify weak areas and extra work needing to be done as I progressed. But once I could tolerate movement of my arm I started climbing immediately, but very gently, just moving round a vertical wall covered in jugs. So easy I didn’t really need to pull with the arm at all, and only for a few minutes a day. Each session I could do more, progressing to quicker (or more accurately less-slow) movement and then to a slightly overhanging wall and eventually to moving slowly on a 45 degree wall. I tended to find with almost every new stage of the progression that the first session introducing a new level gave some soreness, but subsequent sessions were fine and I could consolidate that level over the following days.

Off the wall I maintained a daily routine of a standard shoulder rehab protocol - rotator cuff, back and arm exercises with bodyweight, dumbbells, bungee cord and rings. For an AC joint rehab, chest presses, press ups and dips were the very last thing I was able to add - not until 7 weeks and even then very gentle. However, pull-ups were tolerated far earlier. I had a good setup with my rings and feet supported on piled up boulder mats to take weight off. In the first 3 weeks I did assisted one-arm pull ups on the good arm, then two arm static hangs on bent arms, then assisted two-arm pull ups, then unassisted building up from sets of 5 to sets of 20, then one arm locks on the injured arm, and at this stage I can do 50% of a one-arm pull-up. Standard progression. Clearly, someone who was unable to do one-arm pull-ups before the injury would have a progression at a lower level, for instance with a more drawn out progression of assisted pull-ups and then progressing through low numbers of unassisted.

Over all I would say that I have done 2-3.5 hours of work per day, just about every day. Not all of this was hard exercise on the shoulder of course - that is a total of everything, from grip-strength work to hip stretching. There was no hard and fast rule to progress other than monitoring how the shoulder felt during the session and how well it recovered the next day. The only time I felt I’d overdone it was actually in week 7, adding too many dips and press-ups too quickly. I needed to take two full rest days before continuing, and after that left those particular exercises for another week. I was careful to complete all the rotator cuff, scapular and back exercises in my program before doing the climbing related ‘fun’ stuff. It’s all too easy to just climb and ignore the real work.

Now at 8 weeks I am starting to climb and focus on real climbing goals and days out at the crag rather than just rehab goals. So I need to continue to be careful to schedule in the rehab exercises  on days at home, so that they don’t slip off the radar and slow my continued progression.

I must say, 6 weeks ago I could not even imagine the position I am in now. I felt so awful and disabled at that point. If the next 6 weeks brings anything like the same consistency of progress that will be fantastic.Dave MacLeod

My book - 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes

Source: Dave MacLeod blog

comPiler:
Testify
4 October 2017, 11:33 pm





On the headwall of Testify 8b, Loch Maree Supercrag last weekend. Yesterday, on the first ascent, these lovely rough Gneiss crimps were a wee bit wet in the pouring rain, but they are incut enough I could get past them. Photo: Chris Prescott/Dark Sky Media

In May I got a chance to visit the brilliant new sport crag at Loch Maree - beautiful setting, excellent crag, mostly waterproof routes. Thanks to the NW usual suspects for putting a huge amount of effort into developing it (or anyone who opens new sport crags anywhere!). On my spring visits I ticked the 8as already established and completed an 8a+ extension which was 50m long (The Circus). I couldn’t help eyeing up the  unclimbed terrain to the right and figured there would be at least one great route to be done here.



Approaching 1/3 height on Testify 8b. It's massive! Photo: Dark Sky Media

As soon as my recovering shoulder was up to it, I packed my Hilti and my titanium glue-in bolts (to last many decades in the maritime environment) and drove north west. I bolted a line right of The Circus that splits in two at 25 metres (halfway). The right hand version looked around 8b with an easier but exhilaratingly exposed upper half. The harder version has a brilliant but desperate boulder problem at 45m.

Last week I got stuck into the easier version. The tech crux is actually low down and is a fingery cross-through move - pretty much the only move that still hurts my recovering AC joint. I knew it would take a couple of sessions to get used to moving dynamically on this move, and it did. But yesterday I got through it and the sustained section above. But with numb hands I slipped off near the end of the crux section and split my ring fingertip which bled everywhere and seemed to indicate the end of my session.

It was the first cold day of the autumn and I’m not up to speed with my cold weather tactics yet. Next try, I spent a few minutes moving large rocks around at the base to improve the sloping gully ledge at the foot of the route, but more importantly to get muscles up to temperature for the next blast. It worked a treat and I felt way stronger and found myself on the brilliant easier middle section of the route. I checked my finger, which was only bleeding a little and so was fine to go for the top. The previous week of heavy rain had some serious waterfall action fringing off the top of the crag and unfortunately was catching four of the crimps near the last bolt. But this section is not that hard so I was pretty determined to make it through. It was just too good not to! Of course I didn’t let go and was delighted to clip the anchor on my first new route since the shoulder injury.

I would say that this closes a chapter on the shoulder injury story for me, but not the book. I am obviously beyond the sufferfest stage of climbing withdrawal, but I have a bit to go to feel my right arm is really strong again. For that I have the harder line to focus my efforts. Given the encroaching cold weather, this is most likely a spring project for me, but I’ll give it some goes and this can direct some winter training for it. I think the boulder at the end is in the V10 range, and on some really tiny edges. It’s going to be hard to pull on these after so much climbing below. Exactly the sort of project to fire up a winter’s training.Dave MacLeod

My book - 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes

Source: Dave MacLeod blog

submaximal gains:
New blog post up since the 25th of Jan http://davemacleod.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/dont-let-go.html

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