Seen this?
Sloppy footwork – frequent slippage of feet leading to sudden overloading of elbows causing repeated micro-trauma. Check Insufficient use of momentum in movement – overly static movement causes much higher peak forces on the elbow, which simply adds up over time until symptoms appear. This technical inefficiency is often never recognised by the climber, or even by qualified therapists and hence many climbers have recurring elbow problems for the rest of their careers. Poor attitude to caring for the body – Understand that climbing is an un-natural activity, we are designed physiologically to run and do many other types of movements, but not to support our body weight from our arms and flex our elbows repeatedly under this load. Don’t treat your body as if it should absorb this punishment. Treat it as if it will become injured unless you go out of your way to help it accommodate the chronic un-natural loading. cCheckPoor warm-up or recovery status – training when tired, poorly fuelled, not mentally ready for the climbing (think: climbing straight after work or with bad distractions) means you are much more likely to do damage to your elbows. It might not be a catastrophic tear. Rather, it will be microscopic. But do this three times a week for a year and the injury will reach the symptomatic point. Check
Sorry, don't know how to do one of those hyperlink things, but I wrote a long piece on here a while back about arm pain associated with instability at the shoulder. Have a search for shoulder instability or elbow pain and i'm sure it'll throw something up.
That said, I’m interested to know what the shoulder exercises are that you seem to have recommended to people – I would like to give this a go and see if this cures the elbow problem I very occasionally get. It probably doesn’t happen frequently yet because I don’t climb on consecutive days but as the weather is picking up this will probably change...
I've found this article http://www.theshortspan.com/features/injury/shoulder.htm really helpfull for shoulder stability issues. I personally do these exercises around 2-3 times per week, which seems to work for me.
Le Sausage:Do you think shoulder instability could cause brachilis/brachioradialis strains (or tendonitis/osis)?