Training to work around a finger pulley injury 

I bought your book for Christmas and I was thinking about what a gift it is that you're alive. A lot of people have sports figures they look up to but they are either old, tired, or dead. Not you Dave, you are still active in sharing your wisdom. I appreciate you, and just wanted to say thank you.

Perfect timing dave, A2 pulley in the index 2 weeks ago

Bizarrely I have injured the same finger on the right hand at the same time as yourself. It’s really inspiring seeing your attitude towards the injury and it’s reassuring to myself and all other climbers here with an injury to know that we do have a level of control here! Thanks Dave

this is very valuable information, and a great complement to some of the tips from your book. Thanks for sharing your process!

the sensitivity with which you are able to listen to your body is inspirational

This is pure gold Dave! Thank you!

Thanks for that Dave! Good luck!

This is EXACTLY the video I needed, thanks Dave :)

Another great video, Dave!

Thanks Dave, a very useful video. hopefully you'll be back up at full strength soon.

Perfect timing! I have an A1 pulley injury from 3 weeks ago. Sounds at a similar stage to yours. Mostly seen it as a good excuse to do easier endurance sessions lately, throwing in the odd harder boulder to test and progressively load it. I put a fair amount of tape on it too. Seems to help.

I currently have a very similar A2 pulley injury. Didnt feel it at all during the session but the next day it was sore and painful. I'll be progressively loading it more and more to get it to recover. Hope your finger is back to full health soon!

perfect timing, I recently tweaked the a4 pulley on my middle finger. i cant load that finger in half crimp at all without feeling it, but 3 finger drag seems totaly fine.

Very useful, thank you

Nice instructive video, I've been in a similar situation a couple months ago and would have used some tips Soundtrack is freakin awesome anyways!!! Great choice for the first part of the video

Just aggravated my shoulder, this is a useful reminder to take it a bit easier. When you are training, try tying a red ribbon around your injured finger so you don’t forget to be careful 😊

Was climbing on Friday and heard a loud pop/snap in my ring finger. What a setback…

Hi Dave, wish you the with your recovery. Do you have any advice on synovitis? It's so nagging, difficult to heal 🥴 Thanks.

Lol have also a light Pully injury and was looking into your book Just Yesterday evening 😂

Dave, I've been rehabbing an FDP injury myself, and this time I've had *incredible* success with using a no-hang device. I've always felt the hangboard was limited by the fact that bodyweight is a sort of minimum, at least for convenient use. This is mostly not a limitation for training, but it's a *huge* limitation for rehab. Setting up a pulley system to take off, say, 80% of body weight, is a huge inconvenience. You can simply pull lightly to the point where you feel it without lifting your body off the ground, but that's not measurable really. Using the no-hang device, I was able to start with 15lbs (about 7kg) and go up from there one pound at a time. I did high duration (30sec), low intensity lifts like this a few times a day (as my other daily activities allowed, but not more than once every six hours). Doing rehab this frequently would not have been possible if I had to faff with a pulley system, and doing it with weight allowed me to really measure my progress and start where I left off without as much testing. Today I hit the Moon Board for the first time in 3 weeks and it felt completely at the time, but a few hours later the FDP feels mildly tight (but not really tweaky). This is a *far* faster recovery than I was expecting. A friend of mine has a force gauge, which I suspect would be even more convenient if you don't have as easy access to weights as I do.

Doing one arms on the injury feels so wrong 😂 - Good video as always!

Great to see my personal (anecdotal) evidence validated that very progressive loading is good. For probably both the mechanical and the somatic, I don't think it's only about the finger itself, but also about retraining the brain to figure out that injury is not a fatality

Hi Dave, do you always completely avoid pain when rehabing an injury? Or are there some cases where a low amount of pain (e.g. 1 or 2 on a scale of 10) is acceptable or even appropriate?

Hey Dave, is the volume in the video the sole climbing amount you did that day? How much time on the clock do you think it all took? I likely have much lower work capacity than you but even still it seemed like a fairly short session.

When you're working through your warm-up loading and could you expand on what you're feeling when you say "you can feel the injury", is it a sore feeling, painful feeling, or you just notice the injury? Two/Three weeks ago I injured my left-hand middle finger A2 (best guess) when jumping to a crimp which I had managed many times before, the injury occurred when the edge of the rock pushed onto my finger in a painful way. Half-Crimp I can feel the injury (not in a painful way, but you know it's there) and Open-hand/three finger drag it goes unnoticed. Fast forward to now, I haven't pushed myself to my limit, but am able to climb around 80% max effort with the injury while only having a sore feeling after my training session and resting until there's no soreness (2-3 days time). At the beginning of my sessions I don't notice the injury, into the session it feels sore and I'm aware of it's existence but it's not painful in any way. With that said, during your training, recovery, rehab - do you back off and add more rest days between loading when the finger is sore after a session? Thank you for all of your content and sharing your findings!

Hi Dave, do you still mixed climb? If so, are you taking the time now to train on your tools?

Crazy strong still lol! What's your view on peptides such as BPC-157 or TB500 for tendon healing?

Good time to work on wide cracks😊

I was about to type how well timed this video is, but then i remembered I almost always have a strained pulley somewhere...

Avoiding pain on the pulley while training makes sense. What about if there is some pain the next morning? Would you say that means you likely pushed the rehab too far? Thanks Dave!

What's your opinion on using tape on the joint to avoid being able to crimp, rather than trusting yourself not to? And if you were to do it, would you only tape the finger that has the injury, or maybe the middle, ring and index all at the same time?

How do I know the severity of a pulley injury? I somehow managed to injure mine to the point where I can feel pain when I use my fingers for various tasks outside of climbing, and that sucks. Yet when I warm up and start climbing, the pain goes away and I can do more or less the same grades.

Would you stop at any pain level or is a 2 or 3 out of 10? I’m 4 weeks out from something happening to a4 (not full rupture) and I think open hurts a little still

How do you deal with injuries that are only tender to the touch and generate no pain during climbing? How do you assess them (like you did in this video), given you don't have any clear indicator they're being aggravated until you're done?

Hi Dave - what do you think about taping pulley injuries?

Hi dave what are you looking for when you say what can it handle?

How about proximal bicep tendonitis

I’m sure you’ve gotten this question a lot but I’d love to read Make or Break but I live in Japan and the delivery fees are prohibitively high. Any chance for an ebook version?

Just curious: if the three finger drag is easier on the pulleys than the crimp, should we maybe reconsider what the primary grip should be? I'm not an advanced climber, so please pardon if this is a silly question. Just seems like it would be best to optimize for least probability of injury.

I struggle to understand the chisel grip. Dave, you are the only person i have heard referring to this. Is it possible that my index finger is just too short compared to the other fingers for this to be possible for me?

You dont use tape?

Stronk!

Nothing a little climbing tape wont solve here amiright ??

Are you kidding me the little finger is injured I w eighteen broken disks and hips impinged I train every day and