2 Simple Ways To Improve Your Balance + Stability | The Climbing Doctor

My name is Jared Vagey. I'm a doctor of physiotherapy, a professor at the University of Southern California, and the author of the international best-selling book, Climb Injury-Free. I'm here with Adidas Terrax and 5'10 athlete, John Cardwell. John, tell us a little bit about the importance of balance and stability while climbing. Balance and stability and climbing to me is a very important part of climbing, especially outside. It pertains to all different types of climbing. That could be slab climbing, erect climbing, steep climbing. Having knowledge of how to be efficient and balance on your feet will greatly improve your climbing ability. I think it's just a way of being stable on the rock and being efficient while moving. It improves your efficiency, your stability, and also it prevents injuries. It allows you to put the weight into your leg, into your feet on these tiny platforms, so you can save the energy in your arms. Exactly. Let's go through some assessments. I'm going to take you through some standardized balance assessments. We're going to see how good your balance is, your right side versus your left side, and then some exercises specifically based on climbing that we can do for climbers. Sounds good. All right, let's give it a go. All right, John, now we're going to assess your balance and stability. Great. We're going to go through single leg, and I'm going to try and make it a little bit more specific with climbing, getting your arms overhead, getting your foot in this almost rotated out position. These are done typically for 30 seconds, but for people watching this at home, we're not going to go through 10 minutes of balance. I'm going to have you just try it, and we're going to see which ones are the easiest and which ones may be a little bit harder. Sounds good. All right, so which side do you want to start with? I think maybe my right side. All right, right side. So this first one is going to be arms up overhead like you were to climb. Lift your foot slightly on your left side and rotate outwards, and hold that position for 30 seconds. It seems like you're pretty stable there. Try it on the other side. Let's just do a quick comparison, and back down. No problem. We're not going to bore you with 30 seconds of balance, but now let's start stepping up a little bit. Okay. So now what we're going to have you do is you're going to close your eyes. Okay. So imagine that you're climbing. It's dimly lit. It's in the dark, but now we're going to take away your vision. Okay. So go into that position. Hands up. Yep. Step upwards with your left. Hold that. Try and find that center without using your vision to fixate. You can tell it becomes a little bit more challenging. Definitely. And come back down. It was more challenging, but you kept it. You stayed stable. And again, we test that for 30 seconds. Yeah. Let's do that left side. So same thing. Go ahead and hold, and back down. The left side almost feels better. I had to readjust a little bit, but then once I found it, then I was there. I felt... So you almost felt a little bit more stable, like locked in on that left side. So this is where it's interesting is maybe if the right side is a little bit more unstable, when you're on that right side, your upper body has to work a little bit harder when you're on those tiny platforms on your feet. Right. Yeah. But I want to challenge you more. Okay. So now imagine that you're climbing. You're balancing on one side. This will be your right side first, left side lifts. Now you're looking side to side at your hands that are on the holds. Okay. Should I have my hands up for this as well? You can go open hand. You can crimp. Whatever you want. You're climbing now. We'll go crimp. That's great for me. All right. Go for your crimp. Now look towards that right hand. Look towards your left hand. Look towards your right and back down. Nice job. Yeah. It almost feels like that's more natural to me than just standing here. Yeah, exactly. That's what we do. That's we climb. Do it on the other side though. Okay. And look up. Look towards your one hand. Look towards your other. That's harder. Keep it. And then back to the other. And back down. So we're on an unstable surface. Yeah. And this makes it even harder. Yeah. On a bouldering mat at a gym. But the nice thing is you're able to keep your balance. You had a couple hops. So the hops are challenging. If you hop on the rock wall, well, we'll fall. Right. We'll fly off. But it still was really good. I'm going to up the ante now. Okay. Eyes closed. Head turned side to side. Okay. Arms up. Right side first. Yep. Climbing in the dark. Looking for your hand holds. And this is where even the rock stars have challenges. I bet Tommy Caldwell would have no problem. Well, we'll have to test it. All right. Check on the other side. He's a night climber. Exactly. All right. And then take a break. It's quite hard. That's tough. So maybe Tommy, he climbs a lot at night. He's down with that. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. But the real thing is this is an assessment. You do that for 30 seconds. The test ends when you hop or when you put a foot down. Okay. Almost immediately. For me, yeah. Almost immediately. Yeah, sure. But now let's pull this into climbing-specific exercises. Okay. So you choose the one that's the most difficult for you to do. And then let's train it. Okay. All right, John. Now that we assessed your stability, now we're going to put it into some climbing-specific positions. Great. So the first thing I'm going to have you do is going to be a sideways flag. So balance on your right side. And you're going to take your left side, bring it out as far as you can. Keep that knee straight on your left side. Reach your right arm as far as you can. Straight line from the tips of your fingers to your toes. And then come back to the starting position. Okay. Go ahead and do that two more times. Get that full extension, that full reach. Core stays engaged. Come back to the start. And then one more time. So you could imagine if you had an unstable leg on that right side, how that could put a little bit more stress or strain into that right arm. Yeah, absolutely. With this position. Now we're going to reverse it. So now you're going to stand on your left leg and you're going to reach your right side in a reverse flag all the way out to your left. Okay. And your right arm goes out. Get that full reach. You want that leg to come towards me because this is the rock wall. And then come back to starting position. And I can see that you're working because your lips are starting to tense up a little bit. And I have in mind my left knee, like the injury prior, you know. So this rotation kind of makes me feel a little unstable. Yeah, you feel a little bit nervous about loading that side. So let's try that now on your other side. Okay. So let's do that right knee. Do that reverse flag. So you're going to reach all the way out to the side. You can see you're a little bit more comfortable. The jaw is soft. And we come back to this starting position. I'm like most definitely more comfortable doing that. Much more comfortable. So it's nice because we can train this in our lower body. We get comfortable with that. And then when you get into those tough positions on the rock wall, you're ready to send it. Not as nervous. Exactly. So we could do this eyes closed. We could do this with head turns. We could do this even on your tiptoes a little bit and add some more challenge. Great, yeah. We're not going to do that right now. I'm actually going to challenge you with a disc. Okay. So this is a TheraBand, a balanced disc. You can use any type of surface. You can use a pillow on the ground or even just a bouldering surface, a pad. But go ahead and just balance on there. And let's just do the sideways flag and see if you can get that full extension. I can see you use a lot of visual cues. So you use your eyes a lot. Come back to the starting position. Well done. Opposite side. This kind of to me simulates a bit slab climbing. How so? For instance, I was setting a boulder the other day and it involved a no hand stance pretty much and you had to reach over to the foothold. And if you just jump to it, you'll miss it and fall off. So you had to use stability in your leg. Yeah, it's really that fine tune motion through your foot, through your knee, through your hip to really be able to stabilize on the rock wall when you get those reaches. Slab climbing is one of the best examples. Yeah. So we can do this exercise. Now, when you did the balance, what was the hardest part for you? The assessment. Oh, with my eyes closed. And head turn. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to challenge you now. We're going to get rid of the balance disc. And let's do a flag, eyes closed, head turn. Nice. All right. And then I fell. I went too far. Yeah. So definitely things that we can work on. Not only does it help with the performance, but helps prevent injuries as well. So we went through a couple of different balance assessments and exercises. What did you take from those? You know, I found that there are definitely imbalances that I have in my body, especially when I'm closing my eyes and stuff like that. So I think it just kind of highlights things that I could work on potentially if I decide to choose a project that requires more balance. Yeah, I think that's the important part is maybe someone's not so good with their eyes closed, but maybe they always climb when it's bright out and their eyes are always fixated. Or maybe someone's not so good when they turn their head, but they climb and they have an intuition of feeling where the holds are and they don't really turn their head that much. So it's really knowing each individual's abilities and then relating that to these assessments and treatments to prevent injuries. Sure. And that being said, I think kind of like you can never have too much balance. Really like the more balanced, the better for climbing. Absolutely. Yeah. Cool.