To start with I would like to discuss my injury. It is not the first time I have gained a pulley injury to one of my fingers. It occurred during a training session at my local wall when I was working a problem which involved using an aggressive crimp on my right hand. The injury did not just occur suddenly but throughout the session the frontal area of the proximal phalanx became tenderer. This tenderness did not disappear over a week and the feeling was the same as I have had when I previously ruptured my pullies. These are a type of overuse injury and 40% of overuse injuries occur in the fingers (Hörst, 2003).
I faced one big problem with this injury in the fact that I had 2 rounds of SIBL coming up over the following month and the way to recover from this injury is rest. But there are ways to shorten the length of time spent to recover. There are 3 things I did regularly to speed up my rate of recovery: The first was cold treatment, Dave Macleod has talked about this on his and explained it better than I could o here is a link to it:
The second is stretching the damaged are which increases the blood flow and increasing the blood flow is what promotes recovery, the last is a tip I got from my phsyo/climbing friend which is to use cross the grain rubbing for five minutes to break down the scar tissue that is forming in the injured area. So for my A2 pulley I would rub up and down the front of my proximal phalanx because the pulley runs around the front of it.
During the 2 rounds my finger felt better but was not fully healed. In the first of the 2 rounds I managed to do well and was only inhibited on 2 of the routes that I tried. The second round did not go so well, I chose to retire after trying 10 routes due to the injury. After the 3rd round of SIBL I took a month completely off climbing to recover. My advice if you get a pulley injury is to take a break from climbing and use the 3 tips I have stated earlier to reduce the time off from climbing.
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