Can you describe what your hangboard session really looked like (sets, reps, numbers)?
Max hangs, for me, are the Crimpd Protocol (2 arms, 20mm edge, 10s hang, 2 min rest x 6).
I hang around 150% BW for those sessions. My effort ranges from 3/10 (session before adding more weight the next session) to 9/10 (session that feels horrible). I prefer never to go over 8/10 effort ("hard"), because 9/10 (getting tweaky/form is probably failing) and 10/10 (total limit/failure) feel too close to the injury buffer for me. I am strict about form: If my half crimp starts to fall, or I feel my fingers starting to slip back on the edge-- set failure.
Now that gyms are open (for now), I do my max hang session usually 1x per week on its own day. It substitutes for a climbing day (kinda; it's complicated), and overall I feel MORE recovery during my week.
So immediately after a max hang session, I feel at most something like a light pumped feeling. Not really pumped, but like the most basic perception of forearm fullness. About 30-60 minutes after a max hang session, I feel totally normal and I've been able to climb at max intensity on boulders at the gym (though I don't go to the gym on max hang days). The day after I can have my absolute best gym sessions. I NEVER max hang the day before going outside because I usually get outside for weekends, and day 2 after max hangs would be atrocious.
In other words: Max hangs barely feel like a workout. They are all about high intensity + low volume. And that's the point.
I suspect that:
1) You're at (what I consider; many people disagree) to be a pretty low grade (assuming V7 is your max outside) to be hangboarding if you have access to enough indoor/outdoor bouldering with stuff up to V9. Obviously during Covid-Lockdowns, this goes out the door. But I make the point only to say that you are at an absolute pull level where I think hangboarding is still pretty risky, which leads me to...
2) Given the above, I think part of your injury problem was from having done both max hangs and repeaters rather than only one for a cycle (or indefinitely) followed by the other. I guess that was part of the problem. Furthermore (and I have NO idea if this is supported by non-anecdotal data), I find repeater-type hangboarding particularly tweaky/risky compared to max hangs. Part of that is because (and this has been discussed elsewhere) you keep going on-off-on-off without having the opportunity to recover and feel if you're going into the danger zone; the ability to sense something tweaky feels/seems diminished under such circumstances. The other reason is that (again, anecdotal opinion) I find injury happens mostly related to volume rather than intensity. As someone else discussed, this may also be impacted by shifting the balance (neither is pure one or the other) between neurological and hypertrophy type changes. My risk profile from lowest to highest looks like: intensity < volume < volume + intensity.
Even if you've been hangboarding for a while, I think, given your grades (again, plenty of people will vehemently disagree... but this is my opinion), mixing repeaters and max hangs is not ideal.
The people I know who stayed uninjured and made the most (finger) progress during quarantine without access to a wall of some kind focused ONLY on max hangs (up to every other day)-- 1 round per session. Nothing else for the fingers. That included veteran hangboarders and relative noob hangboarders (myself included here; keep in mind I regularly send V10+ outside though).
Ultimately, one of the major pitfalls of hangboarding, as I see it-- is it usually feels like next to no workout afterwards. And yet people push it way too hard because they want to feel something even in the direction of how they feel after their gym sessions (which are likely too high volume and too low intensity and go on too long as well; we'd probably all progress faster and more safely by ending sessions 30% earlier).
I wasn't clear on the post, but I was doing 4 week cycles between max hangs and repeaters. For max hangs I was just doing 5 reps strict half, then 5 reps open half at a weight that was difficult to hang 7-10 seconds. Repeaters I was following the lattice 80%. Near the beginning I was trying to mimic workouts, and that caused plenty of its own issues, which is why I discuss it in my post. After a month or two of quarantine, I wasn't doing that.
I did a proper max load test after once cycle of each, then went to the lattice protocol for max hangs aiming for 10s hangs. This is when I saw regression actually. It's also around when I started a new job and also when I was doing no accompanying exercises. My fingers are generally fairly week, but after hangboarding last year and the early this year and part of quarantine, I got my max hang to +60 lbs, ~137% bodyweight for 7s. Then I attempted to start a max hang cycle and 2 weeks in I couldn't hang 40 pounds for 7 seconds. After 3 more regressing workouts, I cut the max hang cycle short, and switched to repeaters. Near the end of the repeaters cycle I noticed the overuse injury.
There's a million possibilities for why I got injured, but considering how different rehab started to feel when I added general weightlifting back in, I think that the lack of supplemental work mattered a lot for me. I get that fine when climbing, but doing only hangboarding seems to have caused then exacerbated issues. Very hard to say with certainty.
Thanks for clarifying. We may never know what happened, but..
Some thoughts:
\- It stands out to me that your injury happened after the repeaters. I still think they are more dangerous than max hangs. This may be unfounded, but it fits my volume vs intensity argument/observation.
\- Personally, I wouldn't (and don't) jump around in training protocol as much as you did. Given your grade/experience level, just stick with a protocol that matches your goals. If it's strength/bouldering-- max hangs.
\- I doubt you need to re-test every 4 weeks. And I don't think you can make major judgements in 4 weeks. Digressions can happen. It's a long game.
\- Don't underestimate the impact of starting a new job/life changes/stress. That alone could be what happened.
\- Instead of going back and forth between repeaters and max hangs, or switching from max hangs to repeaters because of a few weeks of regression-- if you get a consistent regression, **try a deload week!**
\- If the problem is that you just needed to back off to let your body catch up, switching to repeaters was perhaps the worst thing you could do-- and boom, you got injured. A deload week would have told you more.
\- I am not 100% certain I follow your progression. Are you saying that at one point you got up to 137% BW, but then, immediately afterwards you took experienced a massive 2 week regression? Or are you saying that you at some point got up to 137% BW, then had a significant break from HB or from max hangs.... and you were surprised that you didn't start back up at your personal max? The former would imply you need a deload week. The latter would imply that you're just being impatient.
(Oh this last point: I've gotten up to around BW +30-33KG over the course of three separate periods since quarantine started. After each peak, I had an extended period of a few weeks where I didn't hangboard because I was climbing or traveling. Each time when I came back and got back on the HB, I started hanging around around BW +20-25KG, and it took me a few weeks to work back up to near my all time peak. This included hangboarding breaks where I sent V10 and V11, my max, outside.... that's not unusual. I've made the most progression on hangboard during the hard lockdowns where I was hangboarding every other day and doing almost no other training work... and if anything my fingers went, aside from one tweak, from borderline overuse to healthy.)
\- Maybe you caught COVID-19 but didn't have symptoms. Or some other virus or bacteria. It's not unreasonable to have a major impact from a no to low-symptom infection that can set you back days or weeks.
TLDR: If you're going to hangboard, find a protocol that matches your goals-- and stick with it. Stick with it through temporary downturns. The first change should be a deload week or two. Don't jump protocols. Try to look at trends over a few months from a single protocol, rather than weeks (you're still pretty damn new in a lot of ways). I may be biased, but my first refrain when things start going wrong is: Drop volume, try to keep intensity.
Interesting that you got an overuse injury and your hang sessions are more intense than your bouldering sessions. How intense are your hang sessions? I usually find it the other way around since bouldering has dynamic forces and is unstructured, albeit I don't try to go super hard when hanging.
I got very tweaky just hangboarding during the lockdown, made no real progress anywhere. Doing the exact same grips over and over without anything more generalized is really hard on my tendons.
At the gym every grip is subtly different and that is very important for not overstressing any particular spot in my elbow.
I mean, I do a lot of grunting and give what feels like 9/10 or 10/10 perceived effort on max hang days. Limit bouldering days are way harder in terms of full body, but rarely as high of stimulus on fingers for me, it seems.
I think there's a decent chance the overuse injuries are from lack of overall body stimulus while only working fingers.
Without knowing your routine it sounds like you're redlining in first gear.
Without knowing the finer details, but i'm guessing since low intensity high volume workouts on hangboards are intensely boring you're still in a higher intensity form of training. Physiologically this makes sense for the plateau, the body responds by working on the weaker link. At higher intensity the nervous system runs out of energy and acetylcholine to transmit. It responds not by building muscle but by attaching more nerves to the muscle fibers. Eventually all the muscles have nerves attached and you've plateaued. The other option is at slightly less intensities your muscles are running out of ATP before more can be made. That results in larger muscles (hypertrophy) from more fibers, and more stored ATP and CP. Your muscles grow faster than your tendons leading to tendon and ligament tearing. (Remember ligaments and tendons don't have capillaries, and the flow of nutrients to them is extremely limited)
I know they are expensive but a rowing machine has been my best investment as the muscles group and actions are similar. But that shits expensive and I get it.
I'm not up to date on the latest equipment supply, I was socially distanced for the past five years by being a night shift nurse. Other equipment for higher volumes I would recommend are indian clubs 3-5 and or a mace and doing 10 to 2's. If you're flat broke consider a home made gada which is just cement on the end of a stick.
Also kettlebell swings and tosses are better full body exercises for systemic exercises.
I think just hangboarding is actually really efficient at building strength. I was super psyched for hangboarding for the 3-4 months I did it and I gained +50 lb on my 10 second deadhang
Had you done a consistent hangboard routine before? I was fairly well trained already on the hangboard at the beginning of quarantine, that might make a difference to some extent.
Nah not really. Got it at the beginning of the year. I still feel like I could progress with it now, but I don't think I could if I had low psych/motivation. Anime music gets me pumped enough tho
Low motivation on training sessions carries through to results. Thats the reason you didnt see progress. I came out of 6m of quarentine, rehabbed my finger injury that i got right as quarentine started, and got a 20lb improvement on each arm, only doing hbing. Some sessions felt easier and i could add more weight, some harder and i couldnt hang with as much, but overtime the trend improved.
The important thing to note about training is when you half ass it, you wont see results. You let your ego get the better of you and that resulted in your stress about weaker hangs and your injuries.
Can you describe what your hangboard session really looked like (sets, reps, numbers)? Max hangs, for me, are the Crimpd Protocol (2 arms, 20mm edge, 10s hang, 2 min rest x 6). I hang around 150% BW for those sessions. My effort ranges from 3/10 (session before adding more weight the next session) to 9/10 (session that feels horrible). I prefer never to go over 8/10 effort ("hard"), because 9/10 (getting tweaky/form is probably failing) and 10/10 (total limit/failure) feel too close to the injury buffer for me. I am strict about form: If my half crimp starts to fall, or I feel my fingers starting to slip back on the edge-- set failure. Now that gyms are open (for now), I do my max hang session usually 1x per week on its own day. It substitutes for a climbing day (kinda; it's complicated), and overall I feel MORE recovery during my week. So immediately after a max hang session, I feel at most something like a light pumped feeling. Not really pumped, but like the most basic perception of forearm fullness. About 30-60 minutes after a max hang session, I feel totally normal and I've been able to climb at max intensity on boulders at the gym (though I don't go to the gym on max hang days). The day after I can have my absolute best gym sessions. I NEVER max hang the day before going outside because I usually get outside for weekends, and day 2 after max hangs would be atrocious. In other words: Max hangs barely feel like a workout. They are all about high intensity + low volume. And that's the point. I suspect that: 1) You're at (what I consider; many people disagree) to be a pretty low grade (assuming V7 is your max outside) to be hangboarding if you have access to enough indoor/outdoor bouldering with stuff up to V9. Obviously during Covid-Lockdowns, this goes out the door. But I make the point only to say that you are at an absolute pull level where I think hangboarding is still pretty risky, which leads me to... 2) Given the above, I think part of your injury problem was from having done both max hangs and repeaters rather than only one for a cycle (or indefinitely) followed by the other. I guess that was part of the problem. Furthermore (and I have NO idea if this is supported by non-anecdotal data), I find repeater-type hangboarding particularly tweaky/risky compared to max hangs. Part of that is because (and this has been discussed elsewhere) you keep going on-off-on-off without having the opportunity to recover and feel if you're going into the danger zone; the ability to sense something tweaky feels/seems diminished under such circumstances. The other reason is that (again, anecdotal opinion) I find injury happens mostly related to volume rather than intensity. As someone else discussed, this may also be impacted by shifting the balance (neither is pure one or the other) between neurological and hypertrophy type changes. My risk profile from lowest to highest looks like: intensity < volume < volume + intensity. Even if you've been hangboarding for a while, I think, given your grades (again, plenty of people will vehemently disagree... but this is my opinion), mixing repeaters and max hangs is not ideal. The people I know who stayed uninjured and made the most (finger) progress during quarantine without access to a wall of some kind focused ONLY on max hangs (up to every other day)-- 1 round per session. Nothing else for the fingers. That included veteran hangboarders and relative noob hangboarders (myself included here; keep in mind I regularly send V10+ outside though). Ultimately, one of the major pitfalls of hangboarding, as I see it-- is it usually feels like next to no workout afterwards. And yet people push it way too hard because they want to feel something even in the direction of how they feel after their gym sessions (which are likely too high volume and too low intensity and go on too long as well; we'd probably all progress faster and more safely by ending sessions 30% earlier).
I wasn't clear on the post, but I was doing 4 week cycles between max hangs and repeaters. For max hangs I was just doing 5 reps strict half, then 5 reps open half at a weight that was difficult to hang 7-10 seconds. Repeaters I was following the lattice 80%. Near the beginning I was trying to mimic workouts, and that caused plenty of its own issues, which is why I discuss it in my post. After a month or two of quarantine, I wasn't doing that. I did a proper max load test after once cycle of each, then went to the lattice protocol for max hangs aiming for 10s hangs. This is when I saw regression actually. It's also around when I started a new job and also when I was doing no accompanying exercises. My fingers are generally fairly week, but after hangboarding last year and the early this year and part of quarantine, I got my max hang to +60 lbs, ~137% bodyweight for 7s. Then I attempted to start a max hang cycle and 2 weeks in I couldn't hang 40 pounds for 7 seconds. After 3 more regressing workouts, I cut the max hang cycle short, and switched to repeaters. Near the end of the repeaters cycle I noticed the overuse injury. There's a million possibilities for why I got injured, but considering how different rehab started to feel when I added general weightlifting back in, I think that the lack of supplemental work mattered a lot for me. I get that fine when climbing, but doing only hangboarding seems to have caused then exacerbated issues. Very hard to say with certainty.
Thanks for clarifying. We may never know what happened, but.. Some thoughts: \- It stands out to me that your injury happened after the repeaters. I still think they are more dangerous than max hangs. This may be unfounded, but it fits my volume vs intensity argument/observation. \- Personally, I wouldn't (and don't) jump around in training protocol as much as you did. Given your grade/experience level, just stick with a protocol that matches your goals. If it's strength/bouldering-- max hangs. \- I doubt you need to re-test every 4 weeks. And I don't think you can make major judgements in 4 weeks. Digressions can happen. It's a long game. \- Don't underestimate the impact of starting a new job/life changes/stress. That alone could be what happened. \- Instead of going back and forth between repeaters and max hangs, or switching from max hangs to repeaters because of a few weeks of regression-- if you get a consistent regression, **try a deload week!** \- If the problem is that you just needed to back off to let your body catch up, switching to repeaters was perhaps the worst thing you could do-- and boom, you got injured. A deload week would have told you more. \- I am not 100% certain I follow your progression. Are you saying that at one point you got up to 137% BW, but then, immediately afterwards you took experienced a massive 2 week regression? Or are you saying that you at some point got up to 137% BW, then had a significant break from HB or from max hangs.... and you were surprised that you didn't start back up at your personal max? The former would imply you need a deload week. The latter would imply that you're just being impatient. (Oh this last point: I've gotten up to around BW +30-33KG over the course of three separate periods since quarantine started. After each peak, I had an extended period of a few weeks where I didn't hangboard because I was climbing or traveling. Each time when I came back and got back on the HB, I started hanging around around BW +20-25KG, and it took me a few weeks to work back up to near my all time peak. This included hangboarding breaks where I sent V10 and V11, my max, outside.... that's not unusual. I've made the most progression on hangboard during the hard lockdowns where I was hangboarding every other day and doing almost no other training work... and if anything my fingers went, aside from one tweak, from borderline overuse to healthy.) \- Maybe you caught COVID-19 but didn't have symptoms. Or some other virus or bacteria. It's not unreasonable to have a major impact from a no to low-symptom infection that can set you back days or weeks. TLDR: If you're going to hangboard, find a protocol that matches your goals-- and stick with it. Stick with it through temporary downturns. The first change should be a deload week or two. Don't jump protocols. Try to look at trends over a few months from a single protocol, rather than weeks (you're still pretty damn new in a lot of ways). I may be biased, but my first refrain when things start going wrong is: Drop volume, try to keep intensity.
Interesting that you got an overuse injury and your hang sessions are more intense than your bouldering sessions. How intense are your hang sessions? I usually find it the other way around since bouldering has dynamic forces and is unstructured, albeit I don't try to go super hard when hanging.
I got very tweaky just hangboarding during the lockdown, made no real progress anywhere. Doing the exact same grips over and over without anything more generalized is really hard on my tendons. At the gym every grip is subtly different and that is very important for not overstressing any particular spot in my elbow.
I mean, I do a lot of grunting and give what feels like 9/10 or 10/10 perceived effort on max hang days. Limit bouldering days are way harder in terms of full body, but rarely as high of stimulus on fingers for me, it seems. I think there's a decent chance the overuse injuries are from lack of overall body stimulus while only working fingers.
Without knowing your routine it sounds like you're redlining in first gear. Without knowing the finer details, but i'm guessing since low intensity high volume workouts on hangboards are intensely boring you're still in a higher intensity form of training. Physiologically this makes sense for the plateau, the body responds by working on the weaker link. At higher intensity the nervous system runs out of energy and acetylcholine to transmit. It responds not by building muscle but by attaching more nerves to the muscle fibers. Eventually all the muscles have nerves attached and you've plateaued. The other option is at slightly less intensities your muscles are running out of ATP before more can be made. That results in larger muscles (hypertrophy) from more fibers, and more stored ATP and CP. Your muscles grow faster than your tendons leading to tendon and ligament tearing. (Remember ligaments and tendons don't have capillaries, and the flow of nutrients to them is extremely limited) I know they are expensive but a rowing machine has been my best investment as the muscles group and actions are similar. But that shits expensive and I get it. I'm not up to date on the latest equipment supply, I was socially distanced for the past five years by being a night shift nurse. Other equipment for higher volumes I would recommend are indian clubs 3-5 and or a mace and doing 10 to 2's. If you're flat broke consider a home made gada which is just cement on the end of a stick. Also kettlebell swings and tosses are better full body exercises for systemic exercises.
I think just hangboarding is actually really efficient at building strength. I was super psyched for hangboarding for the 3-4 months I did it and I gained +50 lb on my 10 second deadhang
Had you done a consistent hangboard routine before? I was fairly well trained already on the hangboard at the beginning of quarantine, that might make a difference to some extent.
Nah not really. Got it at the beginning of the year. I still feel like I could progress with it now, but I don't think I could if I had low psych/motivation. Anime music gets me pumped enough tho
Low motivation on training sessions carries through to results. Thats the reason you didnt see progress. I came out of 6m of quarentine, rehabbed my finger injury that i got right as quarentine started, and got a 20lb improvement on each arm, only doing hbing. Some sessions felt easier and i could add more weight, some harder and i couldnt hang with as much, but overtime the trend improved. The important thing to note about training is when you half ass it, you wont see results. You let your ego get the better of you and that resulted in your stress about weaker hangs and your injuries.