Cave Climb

This is a fun cave route at Movement LIC. I tend to use the cave as a way to learn to trust my campusing. Hero clipping on a literal roof forces one to trust that they can hang on just one arm while they clip. All the while there’s the constant thought that missing said clip would result in a pretty big fall into a wide-open space.

That’s what’s happening in the cave climbing video. I’m campusing on a roof and then trying to hang on my right arm while trying to clip with the left. The problem is that I tweaked my right shoulder last year, so campusing like this after not doing it at all in the last year was really scary.

I was still able to campus, but I would have to pull primarily with the left arm. I would also only campus on overhangs that aren’t too steep. Hanging like I’m doing in this video hurt too much, and I was afraid that I would accidentally hurt my left shoulder too.

So let’s talk about it! Shoulder injuries are common in the climbing world. First-time and experienced climbers alike will sometimes overload their shoulders by accident. It takes one weird move to cause pain, or even damage, to their shoulders.

While focusing on my footwork last year, I was also retraining my campus muscles. I decided to really slow down the process so as to get my shoulder as strong as possible so I can be less afraid to campus during a competition.

I started with shoulder stretching. I then moved on to doing scapular pull-ups. That step took a long time because my shoulder would hurt whenever I would try to put weight on it. When I could eventually put do scap pull-ups, I moved on to doing static normal pull-ups. From there I went on to doing dynamic power pull-ups. By this time I was also able to get back to the point where I could do one-arm scap pull-ups.

These steps helped my shoulders a lot. I was working hanging on one arm at a time for a while, and doing this helped alongside the previously mentioned steps helped me get back to where I felt comfortable hero clipping.

That brings us back to this video. What you’re seeing is the result of all the work I put in over the last year. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but progress is being made.