Those who are fitness enthusiasts and want to increase their stamina and overall strength, choose rock climbing as their most important workout activity.

However, the adventure sport is a lot more dangerous than it looks and therefore necessary precautions have to be taken into consideration before you step out to experience the adventure. Here are several tips and techniques that can help you avoid injuries while climbing:

Develop Antagonist Muscles in Your Body

Try to strengthen the upper arms, chest and shoulders so that to create a balance between the upper and lower body strength. Generally, while climbing, the body pulls energy from the lower part of the body. This makes the upper body useless as it does not have anything to pull or push, making you more susceptible to having an injury. Do exercises that strengthen the upper body, but to an extent where the body feels the strain, causing the muscles to gain strength.

Wrists, Hands and Fingers

Pulling is also helpful when climbing because it takes away the load from your legs and gives your upper body a workout. Fingers, hands and wrists are very crucial for pulling. The most important gripping technique is the Metolius Grip Saver. This technique helps pull the fingers upwards against the resisting force, giving you a chance to rest your legs and building up your upper body strength.

Shoulder

Work on your shoulders with exercises that help extend shoulder muscles, assisting you to counter the pulling action requirement while climbing. Stand in front of the wall with your face towards it and extend your arms straight upwards and behind for a period of 10 to 30 seconds. Push-ups and triceps exercises will also help you gain strength in your shoulders, helping you avoid injuries while climbing.

Elbows

Tendon strength is important for prevention of tennis elbow or golfer’s elbow. Also, exercises that help improve tendon strength can help rehabilitate tennis and golfer’s elbow injuries. Holding a handle in vertical position with the entire weight focused on top and keeping the hand at the bottom, one has to slowly turn their thumb towards themselves and lower the weight 90 degrees horizontally for five seconds. The other hand has to be used to lift the handle back to the initial point. This exercise will help work the tendon and not the muscle. The exercise is helpful to prevent tennis elbow or can heal those with tennis elbow. For golfer’s elbow the same process has to be repeated, but the handle has to be rotated 90 degrees in the other direction and the thumb has to be turned away from the body.

Climbing Technique

Rather than hanging of the bones one should use their shoulder muscles. Use crimping with your open hand as the closed hand crimping puts pressure on the A2 pulley and the joints. Keep your arms straight and elbows low, wherever possible. Avoid keeping your arms bent or chicken wing shaped as it will put a lot of pressure on the shoulder tendons. Also, keeping the arms high will put pressure on the triceps muscle. Use the core muscles and the legs to climb, preventing the injury prone body parts of be safe, i.e. shoulders, fingers and arms.

Other than the technique a lit bit of static stretching or yoga before and after climbing will do wonders in relaxing your body from the tension all the muscles in your body had to endure. Also, proper relaxation should be practised after you are done climbing, as there could be some chronic injuries that you would not know immediately about.