Warming up before climbing (and more or less any sort of physical activity) has become something of a sacred rite. All fitness instructors, it would seem, have been indoctrinated with the same dogma that all exercise must be built up to gradually and that not to do so will lead to horribly painful, crippling and quite possibly disfiguring injuries. Thus during football matches each team watches the touchline to see who is running up and down as a warm up so as to anticipate any possible substitutions. No doubt they all believe that this is necessary. At climbing walls too there are areas set aside for stretching and warm ups and you can see ostensibly normal people doing the most weird contorted activities rarely seen outside yoga classes. There are even some warm up exercises that seem to have been developed specifically for climbing. You can often see people doing an animated wrist rolling exercise that involves interlocking the fingers and then rotating the hands and wrists rapidly. This appears to be vaguely reminiscent of the 1970’s Nescafe advert with Gareth Hunt (a one man bit of rhyming slang) doing his one handed “Richer Smoother Flavour” wrist shimmy. Some folk do so much stretching and posing that it looks as if they have gone to the wrong place, maybe they have and on another night they spend a very frustrating evening trying to traverse the walls at a Yoga class.

The question must arise as to whether it does any good. Studies have shown (click here for the story) that warm ups have no effect in preventing injury and that mankind is designed for sudden physical activity from rest. This is quite logical if we consider that we are still in cave-man’s bodies and no palaeolithic is going to catch an antelope if he has to do five minutes of yoga on spotting his quarry before he can give chase. Thinking along these lines we should be able to jump straight into vigorous exercise with little risk of injury, though it must be said your average Palaeolithic was probably a lot more active that your average Londoner.

This of course is not the whole story because warming up has another equally important psychological effect. The head game in climbing is much more important than in most other sports and thus any activity to get people in the right frame of mind is going to be helpful. You are not going to climb at your best while stressed and anxious and if a few minutes yoga helps this then who is any one to pooh-pooh it.

Another important point is that stretching, though not preventing injury, will eventually improve your flexibility. For men especially this becomes much worse with age and so it is probably worth considering if you don’t do it now.

Another curious point is that although people spend ages warming up at walls I cannot think of any time that I have ever seen anyone warming up at a real crag. People just wander in, rope up and off they go. If warm ups were so important wouldn’t they all be bringing yoga mats to the crag for a spot of Ashtanga in the lea of Stanage?

At the end of the day it is a personal choice but don’t believe that it is a panacea for all your ills.

NK