Oliver Keynes climbing and coaching

22/02/2025

https://youtu.be/jPfDTBHuLN8?si=NiY3MWbaQhizPo_T

Testing what it's like to fall on different Bouldering Crashpads and Crashpad configurations.When stacking pads, should hard or soft go on top?Thanks ...

17/12/2024

15/12/2024

Stretching is a bodily technique presented as having multiple benefits like relaxation, increasing flexibility, prevention of injury and muscle soreness and enhancing performance through better movement and recovery times. It offers a common image of lengthening a muscle. But what does ‘stretching mean’?

* Biomechanical concepts involved in understanding stretching include load, strain, range, elasticity, creep, recovery, plasticity, flexibility, stiffness and pliability.
* When stretching we need to consider alignment, stabilisation, intensity, duration, speed, frequency and type of stretch depending on intention.
* Stretching can be targeted for specificity (e.g a hamstring stretch) or globalised (like yoga) for a full body range of motion: both are important.
* There is no one ‘best way’ to stretch, just a variety of options.
* When we stretch we apply force to a muscle and its connecting tissue, initially loading muscle fibres until the surrounding connective tissue becomes engaged, which aligns fibres in the direction of stretch. The more fibres engaged by a stretch, the greater the length developed by the stretched muscle (aided by a comfortable and targeted alignment). Through repetition muscles and connective tissue adapt their strength, stiffness, and length to stretching load.
* Stretching is a dynamic process: permanent muscle lengthening (as implied by the fitness industry) never occurs; instead we need to stretch daily or consistently for effectiveness.
* Anything that can be stretched has a mechanical limit - its yield (e.g a jelly baby will stretch to a point when it will return to its original state but beyond that it splits apart). Stretching within this limit ensures a muscle behaves elasticity and returns to its original shape. Stretching beyond this limit means it will behave plastically, becoming deformed and damaged. Thus harder stretching (as promoted by the fitness industry) won’t increase the range of tissue connections but can break them, which is how stretching injuries happen.

* Basically - stretch often, without overload.

07/12/2024

初心忘るべからず – "Shoshin wasuru bekarazu" - "Never forget the beginner's mind"

People often like to describe the development of skill along a spectrum from beginner to expert and elite. Yet an alternative Zen Buddhist concept of Shoshin ('beginner's mind') challenges this categorisation. Shoshin asks us, can we remain a beginner? For in such a state, being a true beginner, the mind is always open to learning, always questioning, ever asking. In this way we can avoid the illusion of knowledge to really learn a skill.

15/11/2024

The mantra for many climbers is 'stronger hands, stronger tendons!' yet tendons are are to muscle as muscle is to tendons.

* Tendons have formed to transfer force made by muscles to our skeletal system thereby making movement. They have incredible tensile strength (how much stress can be tolerated during stretching/pulling), being much stronger than muscle because energetic muscle contraction needs a lot of oxygen supplied by blood vessels in their tissue. Lack of blood vessels is what gives tendons their strength.

* Tendon strength development aims to make them stiffer to take & transfer increased forces from muscle to bone so that we can move more efficiently. However, strong muscles will feel soft & a sensation of muscle stiffness hinders movement.

* Tendons are much slower to recover & adapt to demands compared to their connected muscle (Epro et al 2023), in part due to their more limited blood supply. Muscles can make new fibres within hours but developing tendon stiffness needs at least two months of gradual, consistent effort (Kubo et al 2012, Cook et al 2016). We can think that 6 weeks of muscle growth may then roughly equate to 6 months tendon development.

* Because tendons & muscles work together in making movement, "an imbalanced development of muscle and tendon has implications for a) movement performance, b) risk of injury & c) prescription of training loads" (Arampatzis et al 2020). E.g increasing muscle strength without equivalent attention to tendon stiffness increases tendon strain during muscle contraction, risking chronic tendon overuse.

01/11/2024

20/10/2024

The paradox of effort:

After we learn how to try really f***ing hard, we have to use as little effort as possible.

07/10/2024

When does 'process' truly represent an abstraction of experience (and what does that mean?). And when is it just used to glorify performance?

For example, do you celebrate the '3' equally with the '9'?

27/09/2024

Some climbers describe their movement by making a binary distinction between that which is 'static' and that which is 'dynamic'. Speaking of 'static' movement is to use an oxymoron. This is a mechanical device juxtaposing two contradictory words that have opposing meanings.

* Static stretches involve holding a position for a period of time without moving, whereas dynamic stretches involve slow, continuous movement through various positions that go close to the end of range. Static balance is the ability to maintain balance without moving or support, whereas dynamic balance is the ability to maintain balance when moving.

* 'Static' climbing movement refers to changing a body position on the wall through deliberately controlled slow movement, whereas dynamic movement is fast and explosive. Yet unlike in stretching or balance this binary distinction in climbing terminology always references...movement. It contains an implication then that faster movement is less controlled, less stable and less reliable.

* Given the embodied nature of language is using such a binary distinction helpful?

11/09/2024

Bargain harness - £9.59 from Amazon!

* nice n cheap :)
* Good reviews :)

(But no CE or UKCA mark or EN number? 🤔)

05/08/2024

How do you explain the importance of a warm-up?

One of my favourite ways is to suggest we think of our muscles as being like jelly babies... if a jelly baby is cold and you bend it and flex it then what happens (hint - it snaps!)? But if a jelly baby is warm and you bend it and flex it what then happens (hint - it's bendy and flexible!)?