Pulling and pulleys
Bouldering and toproping at Palladium today. Everybody's technique is coming along well, I can see how body positioning is coming to the fore as ED, BL, and SS increase the amount of static moves, careful feet placement, and efficient pulls. For a great review of technique, check out Eric Horst's site.
Popped the middle finger on my left hand holding a static crimp, my guess is it's a pull of the A2 pulley, maybe a partial tear but not a rupture. RICE and laying off climbing for a few weeks should help - just in time for JTree! As you're climbing more, it's good to keep an eye on finger issues - it's the most common climbing-related injury. Good general information in this article and this thread.
A lot of climbers tape their fingers, but the evidence that it helps is equivocal. One study that looked at cadaveric hands found that taping adds no strength to intact pulleys, and some suggest that taping prevents your soft tissues from gaining strength. Caveat though - partially torn pulleys could well use the additional support under load. UPDATE: great find by Brian of a study by a German group suggesting that taping with pressure applied over the PIP joint is more effective for A2 injuries.
Bonus: here's a discussion of the alternative belay method Brian was talking about. In the end, use what you feel most comfortable with - and don't drop me (or anyone else)!
3 comments:
Nice post. How did you diagnose a partial tear over a rupture? Just curious.
Good article on the "slap" method of belaying. That, and a few forum discussions convinced me that this is the safer way to belay. To be clear though, it's safer by a small margin, assuming you can competently handle the rope using both the "pinch" (the first one Scott & I were taught) and the "slap" (we were also taught this, which is NJ standard to teach now apparently) methods. The glaring weak points of the "pinch" are that slack is taken up when 1) two pieces of rope are next to each other and 2) when the belay device is applying the least friction to the rope. This hasn't been a problem for me when belaying normally, but on both of the blind drops I did as part of certification, I got rope burns cause the instructor dropped when my hands were in the worst possible "pinch" position.
Also, this matters less if you are using an autolock device, although you are in for a nasty surprise if you get used to grabbing both pieces of rope at the wrong time and switch to a tube-style device.
Just food for thought, and like Kenway said, you should default to what your body wants to do naturally.
A couple of things tell me it's not a rupture:
- no bowstringing of the tendon
- minimal to moderate swelling, no bruising
- minimal pain, mostly point tenderness over the A2 pulley itself
Gold standard, of course, is an MRI looking for what they call dehiscence of the tendon away from the bone. If the tendon floats like that, then the pulley is no longer holding it in place.
Treatment's qualitatively the same, rest and recovery essentially, + ibuprofen and ice if the swelling gets bad. A few weeks (*severity) off, with slow application of use over weeks.
I'll be OK for JTree, I think, we're not going to do routes with a lot of crimping...
The more I think about it, the more I agree. Especially for a first-timer, the hands-below-belay-device is so much more intuitive. And it totally eliminates the potentially deadly above-belay automatic grab when the climber falls. Since rope up high is no friction and rope low is friction, makes sense to do the tricky part - grabbing and sliding - below the device.
I think mostly I'm just used to the pinch, but as Eric and Scott noted, I instinctively switch to the slap when I'm belaying if things start looking dicey for the climber.
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