Make or Break

Don’t let climbing injuries dictate your success

As Wolfgang Gullich said, «getting strong is easy, getting strong without
getting injured is hard». Sooner or later, nearly all climbers get injured
and it will be injuries that ultimately dictate how far you get in climbing,
if you let them.

Unfortunately, the data shows it takes over a decade just to get small
proportions of medical research adopted in regular practice. Sourcing reliable
and up to date advice on preventing and treating finger, elbow, shoulder and
other climbing injuries is challenging to say the least. You need to be the
expert, because there are so many strands of knowledge and practice to pull
together to stay healthy as a climber, and no single source of advice to cover
all of these.

The book draws together both the cutting edge of peer reviewed sports medicine
research, and the subtle concepts of changing your climbing habits and routine
to prevent and successfully recover from injuries. It is a handbook on how to
take care of yourself as a lifelong climbing athlete. By spanning the fields
of climbing coaching, physiotherapy, sports medicine and behavioural science,
it goes beyond the general advice on treating symptoms offered by sports
medicine textbooks and into much more detail on technique and habits specific
to climbing than the existing climbing literature base.

You will learn how your current climbing habits are already causing your
future injuries and what you can do to change that. If you are already
injured, it will prevent you from prolonging your injury with the wrong
climbing habits and rehabilitation choices. You will learn how the ingredients
of prevention and good recovery come from wildly different sources and how you
have been using only a fraction of them. Fully referenced throughout, the
practical advice for diagnosis, rehabilitation and prevention of climbing
injuries is drawn from up to date peer reviewed sports medicine research.

226 pages, 29 illustrations, 68 photographs.
Edition 1.1 2019