Natural Armor: Injury Prevention for Climbers

Natural Armor is a brief manual addressing injury prevention for rock climbers. It is broken down into three sections: The Nature of Climbing Overuse Injury, Adapting the Hands and Forearms, and Adapting the Scapula and Shoulders. The adaptation sections include several pictures and dialogue addressing correct as well as incorrect climbing techniques. There are also directions and several pictures demonstrating proper exercise form to maximize your natural armor. It is not my goal to give you a program, regiment or list of instructions. Rather, I believe that Cultivating knowledge of how your body works, what forces are acting on it and how to adapt your body to face those forces is a much better method of cultivating a body which is resilient to injury. We all own a body and therefore have a responsibility to understand it to a degree which allows us to live the life we want and be free of chronic pain. To accomplish this we must condition our mind as much as our body because they are one and the same. We must attempt to decipher the vocabulary of signals our body sends us, understand (to an extent) what they mean and actively engage techniques that adapt ourselves to address the root issues. I hope this text will help give you a few insights toward those goals. -Logan Scully