Craggy Island 1 !

Last night, Cornerstone Therapies hit the mats at Craggy Island in Guildford, Surrey! Along with my brave band of helpers; David (my one and only), Fenwick and Robin (2 of my bros), Anna (my climbing partner), and Edd (great friend and all round good egg), I asked 24 climbers who are interested in bouldering to help collect data for my dissertation.

It was great fun to be part of such a fantastic team, and that includes all of the people who climbed; you all did great and I thank you all! Also, thank you also to the Craggy team, including Rob and Ben; it was very kind of you all to let us in. 

Over 3 hours we managed to record 24 climbers climbing at the top of their ability twice, and this is why....

Over the next 9 months I will be looking at the data we collected last night and next Tuesday to see if resisted stretching (known as MET or PNF stretching) or Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) helps the performance of amateur Boulderers. My dissertation has a fancy long winded title, but that is the essence of it.

For those of you who are new to climbing, the art of 'Sport Bouldering' is to sit on the edge of a crash mat and then, by using handholds that have been drilled into a wall, climb a selected route to the top of the wall and then come back down. The climber has to start from a seated position and both hands have to touch the top hand hold before the climb is considered complete.

Bouldering is very different to Sport Climbing, not just because there are no ropes involved, but the climber has to use very explosive short twitch fibres within the muscles to perform the moves to get to the top.

For Bouldering the climbs are about 15 to 30 seconds long and so the muscles use an anaerobic method of contracting; meaning that within the 'Krebs Cycle' they don't use oxygen. Short twitch fibres in the muscles allow this method of movement and they are perfect for short explosive moves. Because of this my hypothesis is that short forms of stretching will help the performance of the climb.

Sport Climbers use ropes and as the routes are longer, (anything from a couple of minutes on a sport wall to a whole day on a mountain),they use long twitch fibres to allow them to climb over a longer period of time. This requires the muscles to use oxygen, and so the chemical balance in their body is a lot different to those bouldering.

Personally I would love to compare the two disciplines and see the way they can use stretching effectively to achieve different goals, i.e. Long yogic stretching for the sport climbers and the shorter stretching for the boulderers. But I think that may be a PhD … maybe in a few years time!

Anyway, last night we got the base data completed, which means that I got a lot of information about the route learning all the climbers went through, so next week we can see them climb once more, then stretch all the climbers, and ask them to climb again. Hopefully we will see differences that I can ponder over!

If you fancy popping down to see us in action at Craggy Island, it would be great to meet you! We'll be there next Tuesday between 6:30 and 9:30pm and we'll be in the fetching t-shirts you can see in the photos.

What I'm loving in the Treatment Room today:

Dreamy Lavender Foaming Bath; it was great last night to sink into after the climbing event.

Music of the day:

I haven't got round to that today; I'm still waking up!