How To Build Finger Strength (SCIENCE EXPLAINED)

one of the most common issues any High performing climber will encounter is the balance between adequate recovery as well as muscle gain but now what if I told you that might not be the case anymore this is me as I met Dr Keith Bar in real life for the very first time so there we go now I'm a researcher uh today I'm joined by he's a professor in molecular exercise physiology and an author of a review paper titled minimizing injury and maximizing return to play a lesson from from engineered ligaments which in short states that

10 minutes of activity every 6 hours is a key to improving healthy connective tissues and creating longevity in athletes today we'll hear what he has to say these ones are ACL cells um for right now they're from an older individual but it it seems like it but that's going to be in a few minutes because first I want to let you know why I traveled to the kingdom of the Netherlands to visit Keith in his laboratory so there's more of the cells there oh okay yeah 3 years ago I posted a video showing some insane

finger strength gains that I had by training on a hangboard now that's nothing too uncommon for us climbers but what was surprising was the method I used which involved training two times per day for 30 days straight now this may sound like way too much of a load but hear me out and maybe you'll understand why it may be kind of a game changer so the method I used was to train my fingers with about 40% of what I could maximally hold for 5 to 10 seconds I would hold this with varying grip types for

10 seconds each with about 50c rest in between each of the no hangs I would continue this for a total of 10 minutes and it basically feels like a light stretch in my fingers and forearms so if I wanted to I could probably do this protocol all day without actually reaching fatigue I measured my Hang Time and strength on different edges in the gym before and after the 30 days that I did this for and I found a shocking increase in strength from it across the board with every hang type that I tried in fact

my results were so surprising that I burst out laughing after a couple of the thanks this protocol was based on the recommendations by Dr bar although he had used the recommendations to recover injured ligaments i instead intended to use this protocol to improve my already healthy fingers to be able to climb more but to my surprise I saw a strength increase that I had never seen before with my at the time 9 years of training in sports science this would seem very contradictory to see maximum strength benefits from which is why despite my surprising results

I was very adamant about not recommending this protocol to anyone else since it was really only me and my brother Felix who had tried it so far meaning that there's no statistical relevance in the results that I saw it could have just been a result of a bunch of different factors like resting from other types of training or just staying more active we really don't know for sure however I can't argue that it wasn't interesting and I've been very curious to find out more ever since and finally I [Laughter] have you see a little over

a year ago I received an email from Keith Bar who thanked me for posting the video and asked if I ever wanted to chat about science and how he would modify the training protocol to fit better into climbing and if we fast forward through some very interesting calls well then we'll make it to today's video where I will be presenting a retrospective study that I've done together with the very same Dr Keith Bar Natalie Gilmore and the creator of the crimp app Peter climi now with full disclosure I have not written much in this paper

and instead I want to give the credit where it's due uh I'm kind of the Dumbo in the middle of it all who gets to work with all of these wonderful and Brilliant Minds so I just want to give a big thank you to Keith Natalie and Peter for making all of this happen all the information you'll find in this video is very very largely thanks to them uh so yeah nothing but thanks and gratitude towards them anyway onto the action last year after discussing the protocol with a fysio called Kal and concluding that there

are no obvious negative effects to performing the protocol we put it in the crimp app and it has since been logged over half a million times when we started the study it was few in that but it was still well over 100,000 entries that we could filter the data from so what we did is we compared how the average strength gain in finger strength improved when compared to different ways to train as climbers the first group that we looked at consisted of people who did only climbing but had done two Max finger strength tests in

other words these people reported no finger training on a hangboard of any kind the second group were people who performed the golden standard for Max finger strength training and these are called Max hangs conventionally speaking these are the way to train train finger strength in climbing and that's why we wanted to compare the no hang protocol that my brother invented to well what is the golden standard the reason for this is that Max HS work very similar to when we want to improve our max strength in the gym we load up close to our Max

and go for a short duration and hopefully that will in improve our strength the third group we had was people who did only the no hangs these are referred to as ABR hangs in the study as mentioned earlier light stretch in the forearms or about 40% of what you can maximally hold but always low body weight is the expected load from this category and lastly we wanted to see how people who did both the no hang and the max hangs were affected in order to find out whether or not these could be combined or detrimental

towards your gains So based on these different categories it was time to start filtering out the data and figure out which of the uses we could have in this study and once we'd understood that it was time to check in with Keith to see what our results actually were if we go in and and and compare to climbers so people who just climb not surprisingly well maybe a little bit surprisingly they don't actually increase their finger strength with [Music] time but people who incorporate the Abra hangs in with their climbing their maximum hang for for

5 seconds went up by about 2.5% and this is across a large number of people this is hundreds of people the people who did Max hangs they their their increase in finger strength or in their in their Max hang capacity only went up 3.2% and there's no statistical difference between those two groups in short this means that we can either do the max Hanks or the noks to improve our finger strength which seems rather contradictory to regular beliefs especially since maximum load has been kind of a Cornerstone in traditional Fitness training and this of course

begs the question what does this mean for the Science World so that's really exciting for us as as physiologists exercise physiologist because the way that we've always said is strength comes from lifting a heavy weight right and so you can increase muscle mass so if I want to make my biceps bigger I can lift any weight as long as I go to failure but if I want to get my muscle as strong as possible I need to lift as heavy as possible so that's the way that we've always thought about it but in this situation

where we're doing something that is Maybe more tendon Centric what we're seeing is that your performance your strength is actually going up exactly the same with something that uses a part only part of your body weight versus something that uses M you know your body weight plus extra weight right and so the the the weight component or the the strength component is is still the same between those and the most interesting aspect for us is that when you combine both the a hangs with the max hangs now you actually get an additive effect that's right

when we looked at people who had done both the max hangs and the no hangs we saw an increasing strength as if the fatigue didn't matter and didn't affect them at all now for contexts imagine that you're doing some really really heavy lifts in the gym you start off in the morning and then you just rest a few hours and you go in for a second session you wouldn't expect to get any additional gains from that you would expect to get completely destroyed and and tired and ultimately you'd see Nega negative gains rather than positive

ones more importantly you wouldn't expect your gains to be doubled and with that being said I had to find out would the recommendation be to do both or to pinpoint what you think is good for you and then do that so it's always about that first group The Climbing group so if you're climbing has lots of dynamic moves where you're doing lots of really quick holds and you're maybe dropping some and you've got a lot of dynamic load maybe adding more Dynamic load like a Max hang is going to be too much M and so

that's where we would use something that's more a a neighbor hang so that if you're going to have really Dynamic moves then what we have to do in the gym is we have to give you the other stimulus and that's what I always try and tell strength coaching performance coaches if your sport is all really high jerk moves really plyometric moves lots of accelerations decelerations I don't need that in the gym I'm getting that on the field or on the court so on the court you're getting that I'm going to give you the other thing

which is the kind of Health based movement if you're say a swimmer or a rower or a cyclist and you don't have any plyometric and you very low plyometric load now maybe incorporating that in the gym might be useful same thing is true here if you've got somebody who's doing very slow climbs where they're just where they're in contact with a wall for long periods of time they're holding a long period of time adding more aor hangs maybe is just not really going to do much for them where maybe for them a Max hang would

be better you know just climbing is great but you're not improving doing either one of the two types of hangs alone you're improving but when you do them together and you get this almost exact additive effect what that suggests is that there is there are different benefits from the two and when you put them together it gives you something even more wow and so really I if we think of it as the max hang is working the muscle and the nervous system and the abrah Hang is working the Force transmission in the connective tissue now

when we put it all together those are the three components of strength and so yes if if person isn't injured doing both of them is probably going to be the best outcome for at least for finger strength for their ability to improve this one measure right I mean that's pretty fascinating right it kind of blew my mind when we started Ed seeing these results and I personally think what Keith mentioned in the end is quite a fascinating point in reality what we want to Target is what we're needing for our finger strength gains so if

you're like me for instance who is a very Dynamic climber I jump around between the holds I regularly Cut Loose then maybe the no Hanks is a protocol that could be implemented into your training to see some finger strength gains however if you do stay on the wall for long durations of times maybe you do multi- pitch or maybe just do long routes then maybe Max HS should be the thing that you're adding to your training we can of course increase the load we can add more and more more but you will need to be

careful to make sure you're not overdoing your training and I think this is a specific important topic regarding the nohan protocol because it is originally designed to help you have healthier fingers not to increase your finger strength so once you put that component into play and you're trying to just get those finger strength gains you might be overdoing it and I think it's incredibly important to make sure that the load is kept as light as possible cuz all the research that we have it doesn't suggest that you should try and push your fingers as hard

as possible it basically just means that you need to activate your your cells your attendance your connective tissue once every 6 hours to see these benefits another important thing to note is that this is a retrospective study which means that it has a lot of limitation for starters the data we collected is uncontrolled we do not know what all the users did exactly the loads they were putting into their fingers we didn't know if they were logging everything correctly there are a lot of Errors within all of this um that we can't control everything you've

heard here it just means that we have signs pointing towards finger strength gains from this light load but nothing conclusive another point of interest is that we had to have quite an open window because people who regularly climb or only climb usually don't do a lot of finger shrink tests uh so the window at which you could perform this test was quite large which can have its its drawbacks as well what we did find out though is that this showed that training frequently with low weight increased finger strength to the same extent as training with

max strength hangboard training and that's quite a fascinating starting point for all of this research however because of all of these limitations we're looking into creating a prospective study to further work on this research that basically just means we'll be looking to make it a lot more controlled and and be able to compare things and know exactly what's been going on behind the scenes as well and as a first step we've created a VCC for climbing injuries which you can find in the description down below so if you want to take part in the prospective

study and help us understand understand more about finger health and strength well then you know where to find it I will of course be posting all of the results from this as well as the full prospective study if you've watched this far uh and you haven't already subscribed I would really appreciate it if you did I will be posting the full talk that I had with Keith later on uh in a month or two which contains just an endless amount of fantastic knowledge around tendon health and and connective tissue and some stuff that would Fascinate

most people interested in sports science I believe I'd also like to add that the protocol will be in the crimp app and if you search for emal I'm sure you'll find it quite easily so yeah if you want to dive in a little bit more in depth into all of this research you will be able to find the actual paper which has now been published in the link in the description down below as well as a link to the podcast that I did together with Ryan delin and Keith Bar where we went really in depth

on all of this uh so yeah thank you all for watching and I'm looking forward to working more with this