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I was once an avid rock climber, but stopped for many years. One night on a surf trip in Indonesia I had someone hold my beer while I climbed a palm tree, which

I was once an avid rock climber, but stopped for many years. One night on a surf trip in Indonesia I had someone hold my beer while I climbed a palm tree, which was only about 15 feet high, but that's still high enough that you don't want to fall. I got to the top of the trunk and reached up to grab one of the branches, and it was like, 'oh man, I'm so out of condition, I can barely grip this'. But then, accidentally, my feet cut loose. A jolt of adrenaline shot through me, and I managed to hold on one handed to this slippery, slopey palm tree branch as my body swung away from the trunk of the tree. This whole chain of muscles from my fingers down to my lower back fired at once. I used to use those muscles all the time when I climbed regularly, but on the tree I didn't have access to that strength until the adrenaline kicked in, and then it was all there like it had never left. Of course, because I was out of condition I strained every muscle in that chain and I had to skip a few days of surfing. But it had me thinking about procedural memory, and how it relates to skills where raw strength is a factor. Strength is memory. There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones. Now I'm back into climbing, but when I was first starting out I had this weird experience where a hold that I was too weak to latch at the beginning of a session became easy by the end. It's counterintuitive, if anything you should be getting weaker as you wear yourself out, but, after a decade of not climbing much at all, my finger muscles were remembering how to fire the way they needed to to stick that particular hold, and they got stronger. Now I'm at the point where my strength has mostly returned, but my tendons aren't yet resilient enough to handle the stress when I'm at my limit, so I've got to be really careful. This was all a big revelation for me.

pdelbarba 8y ago
This kind of illustrates an important point that I think a lot of people don't realize. Strength isn't just muscle mass but also neurological conditioning. You're not just stimulating your muscles to get bigger when you work out but also refining the "programming" used to control them. In some cases, possibly like yours, this effect can dominate everything else. This is also separate from the application technique as well, such as in the cases of body builders losing to much smaller pro arm-wrestlers.
steve_adams_86 8y ago
I came to love climbing as a sport partially because of what you're describing. You could be able to deadlift 450lb, do 10 pull ups with 100lb hanging off of your body, what have you, and still be an awful climber (like I was) despite having so much grip and upper and lower body strength. It's all about technique, and it takes years to nail it down. That feeling of progression is a lot of fun and it isn't linear at all. I love bouldering most because sometimes you can brute force problems, sometimes you absolutely can't - you'll spend a few sessions trying to figure out this one pain in the ass movement or hold, then one day... You've got it, and you don't lose it. It's a ton of fun and I like to think it's actually great for your body and mind. Sometimes it feels a bit like wall-yoga.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Technique is super important. Female climbers obviously don't have the same kind of strength as men, which is why they climb differently. That doesn't mean that they're (much) worse than their male competitors.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    In terms of strength to weight ratio, top women are pretty damn good, in sport they're only a couple letter grades behind the top men, and there are only 3 men in history who have outclimbed the best female climber, and only Adam Ondra, who is truly a genius of gymnastic climbing has sent 5.15D. At that level their technique is pretty close to being maxed out. They spend months, sometimes years training specifically to send those climbs. I wonder how much the disparity between top men and women climbers is accounted for by the size of their respective talent pools. There's just so many more men out there dedicated to climbing hard than women.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      >There's just so many more men out there dedicated to climbing hard than women. There's a study that looked into this for chess and found that for the amount of people who actually stick at it, 96% of the the split in chess can be accounted for by it being what you would expect for the amount of men and women playing. >Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains >A popular explanation for the small number of women at the top level of intellectually demanding activities from chess to science appeals to biological differences in the intellectual abilities of men and women. An alternative explanation is that the extreme values in a large sample are likely to be greater than those in a small one. Although the performance of the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best German women, we show that 96 per cent of the observed difference would be expected given the much greater number of men who play chess. There is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for. In science, where there are many more male than female participants, this statistical sampling explanation, rather than differences in intellectual ability, may also be the main reason why women are under-represented at the top end. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161
cube2222 8y ago
I can relate to the "getting easier when nearing the end" feeling. I play cello and whenever I don't play for a week or more and I just sit down to play, my hands lack a lot of dexterity and are imprecise. Most people just play for half an hour to get it all back. However, what I noticed is that if I play for a minute- or two, make an hour break and come back to play again, my hands are fully ready to play, as though I didn't have any longer (week) pause whatsoever. It's rally kind of magical.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Actually, in trying to describe the phenomenon to a friend I drew the analogy of a musician who hasn't picked up a guitar in a while trying to remember how to hit a particular chord. They kind of fumble around for a bit, and all of the sudden their fingers just fall into place and they got it.
  - mstade 8y ago
    My grand father who passed away this spring, at the ripe young age of 103, left his finely crafted 1920s era piano to me. We often talked about how both of us wanted to learn but never got around to it, and now to honor his memory I’ve started taking some lessons. I haven’t played very long, just a couple of weeks, but even I can relate to this feeling. I try practicing a little every day and I mostly fumble around for the first 5-10 minutes before hitting my stride, and the song I just a few minutes earlier brutally murdered now actually sounds.. ok. It’s a wonderful feeling really, makes me feel like I have learned something.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    You don't even need a special skill to see this effect. Just try to remember the name of someone you knew kind of well but haven't thought about in 5 years. Often you'll get that "tip of your tongue" feeling and the name will magically appear in your consciousness several minutes later.
setr 8y ago
>It's counterintuitive, if anything you should be getting weaker as you wear yourself out, but, after a decade of not climbing much at all, my finger muscles were remembering how to fire the way they needed to to stick that particular hold, and they got stronger. I think it’d be less surprising if you thought about it as remembering more efficient positioning, than getting stronger; which ofc is what I imagine is happening. I suppose thats unlikely to beat out the wear of the day, if you actually end up feeling stronger than when you started
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Nitpicking: adrenaline doesn’t act that rapidly. Rather it’s the sympathetic response to a perceived threat.
- stinos 8y ago
  A.k.a. instinct. Wouldn't the majority of people in this situation, past climbing experience or not, try to hold on to that branch with all possible strength? It's either that or possibly severe injury/death. It's possible the climbing experience makes the OP do this action in a better way than people with no such experience though.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    Yes, as illustrated in this video: https://youtu.be/dLBJA8SlH2w https://youtu.be/dLBJA8SlH2w
gameswithgo 8y ago
> had this weird experience where a hold that I was too weak to latch at the beginning of a session became easy by the end It is counter intuitive and counter to my experience when I get back into climbing. Perhaps you have some muscular endurance talent or something, or climbed long enough to create some long lasting physical adaptations.
- Fricken 8y ago
  I climbed for 13 years, with varying levels of intensity, and stopped for a little over 10 before returning. In the time off I climbed sporadically, but never really stuck with it for more than a month or so. At my peak back in the day I was redpointing gym 13c and could do 35 pullups, and on my first day back I was more like 5.8 and could do one set of 3 pullups and not much more. Now, 6 weeks in I'm pulling hard 5.12 moves here and there but I wouldn't call myself a 5.12 climber, my endurance is shit and when I get into tricky sequences it becomes apparent that the more refined aspects of technique are not coming back quite like riding a bicycle.
danmaz74 8y ago
> There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones. Citation needed. Training for strength also increases your muscle mass, I'm not ready to believe that strength is only about neural pathways.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  Think of olympic lifters. Pyyros Dimas, a guy who isn't "huge" (compared to say football players or body builders) won a Gold for the clean and jerk at 215 kgs (474 lbs) in the 85kg weight class (187 lbs). There is something else going on there besides muscle mass when a <187 lb guy can throw up almost 500 pounds completely over his head from the ground. Here's a good article on the impact of your neural pathways on strength: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170710091652.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170710091652.h... from the article: > Jenkins found evidence that the nervous system activates more of those motor neurons -- or excites them more frequently -- when subjected to high-load training. That increased excitation could account for the greater strength gains despite comparable growth in muscle mass. Adrenaline does wonders for the excitation-induced stimulation of the skeletal muscle system
  - stonecraftwolf 8y ago
    It’s also the explanation for noob gains (getting much, much stronger in the first 6 months of lifting or so, then tapering off as your ability to recruit muscle catches up with the muscle you already have). If you’ve ever lifted, the feeling of learning to use your body more efficiently is pretty obvious.

pdelbarba 8y ago

This kind of illustrates an important point that I think a lot of people don't realize. Strength isn't just muscle mass but also neurological conditioning. You're not just stimulating your muscles to get bigger when you work out but also refining the "programming" used to control them. In some cases, possibly like yours, this effect can dominate everything else. This is also separate from the application technique as well, such as in the cases of body builders losing to much smaller pro arm-wrestlers.

steve_adams_86 8y ago

I came to love climbing as a sport partially because of what you're describing. You could be able to deadlift 450lb, do 10 pull ups with 100lb hanging off of your body, what have you, and still be an awful climber (like I was) despite having so much grip and upper and lower body strength. It's all about technique, and it takes years to nail it down. That feeling of progression is a lot of fun and it isn't linear at all. I love bouldering most because sometimes you can brute force problems, sometimes you absolutely can't - you'll spend a few sessions trying to figure out this one pain in the ass movement or hold, then one day... You've got it, and you don't lose it. It's a ton of fun and I like to think it's actually great for your body and mind. Sometimes it feels a bit like wall-yoga.

adrianN 8y ago
Technique is super important. Female climbers obviously don't have the same kind of strength as men, which is why they climb differently. That doesn't mean that they're (much) worse than their male competitors.
- Fricken 8y ago
  In terms of strength to weight ratio, top women are pretty damn good, in sport they're only a couple letter grades behind the top men, and there are only 3 men in history who have outclimbed the best female climber, and only Adam Ondra, who is truly a genius of gymnastic climbing has sent 5.15D. At that level their technique is pretty close to being maxed out. They spend months, sometimes years training specifically to send those climbs. I wonder how much the disparity between top men and women climbers is accounted for by the size of their respective talent pools. There's just so many more men out there dedicated to climbing hard than women.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    >There's just so many more men out there dedicated to climbing hard than women. There's a study that looked into this for chess and found that for the amount of people who actually stick at it, 96% of the the split in chess can be accounted for by it being what you would expect for the amount of men and women playing. >Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains >A popular explanation for the small number of women at the top level of intellectually demanding activities from chess to science appeals to biological differences in the intellectual abilities of men and women. An alternative explanation is that the extreme values in a large sample are likely to be greater than those in a small one. Although the performance of the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best German women, we show that 96 per cent of the observed difference would be expected given the much greater number of men who play chess. There is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for. In science, where there are many more male than female participants, this statistical sampling explanation, rather than differences in intellectual ability, may also be the main reason why women are under-represented at the top end. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161

cube2222 8y ago

I can relate to the "getting easier when nearing the end" feeling. I play cello and whenever I don't play for a week or more and I just sit down to play, my hands lack a lot of dexterity and are imprecise. Most people just play for half an hour to get it all back. However, what I noticed is that if I play for a minute- or two, make an hour break and come back to play again, my hands are fully ready to play, as though I didn't have any longer (week) pause whatsoever. It's rally kind of magical.

Fricken 8y ago
Actually, in trying to describe the phenomenon to a friend I drew the analogy of a musician who hasn't picked up a guitar in a while trying to remember how to hit a particular chord. They kind of fumble around for a bit, and all of the sudden their fingers just fall into place and they got it.
- mstade 8y ago
  My grand father who passed away this spring, at the ripe young age of 103, left his finely crafted 1920s era piano to me. We often talked about how both of us wanted to learn but never got around to it, and now to honor his memory I’ve started taking some lessons. I haven’t played very long, just a couple of weeks, but even I can relate to this feeling. I try practicing a little every day and I mostly fumble around for the first 5-10 minutes before hitting my stride, and the song I just a few minutes earlier brutally murdered now actually sounds.. ok. It’s a wonderful feeling really, makes me feel like I have learned something.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  You don't even need a special skill to see this effect. Just try to remember the name of someone you knew kind of well but haven't thought about in 5 years. Often you'll get that "tip of your tongue" feeling and the name will magically appear in your consciousness several minutes later.

setr 8y ago

>It's counterintuitive, if anything you should be getting weaker as you wear yourself out, but, after a decade of not climbing much at all, my finger muscles were remembering how to fire the way they needed to to stick that particular hold, and they got stronger. I think it’d be less surprising if you thought about it as remembering more efficient positioning, than getting stronger; which ofc is what I imagine is happening. I suppose thats unlikely to beat out the wear of the day, if you actually end up feeling stronger than when you started

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

Nitpicking: adrenaline doesn’t act that rapidly. Rather it’s the sympathetic response to a perceived threat.

stinos 8y ago
A.k.a. instinct. Wouldn't the majority of people in this situation, past climbing experience or not, try to hold on to that branch with all possible strength? It's either that or possibly severe injury/death. It's possible the climbing experience makes the OP do this action in a better way than people with no such experience though.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Yes, as illustrated in this video: https://youtu.be/dLBJA8SlH2w https://youtu.be/dLBJA8SlH2w

gameswithgo 8y ago

> had this weird experience where a hold that I was too weak to latch at the beginning of a session became easy by the end It is counter intuitive and counter to my experience when I get back into climbing. Perhaps you have some muscular endurance talent or something, or climbed long enough to create some long lasting physical adaptations.

Fricken 8y ago
I climbed for 13 years, with varying levels of intensity, and stopped for a little over 10 before returning. In the time off I climbed sporadically, but never really stuck with it for more than a month or so. At my peak back in the day I was redpointing gym 13c and could do 35 pullups, and on my first day back I was more like 5.8 and could do one set of 3 pullups and not much more. Now, 6 weeks in I'm pulling hard 5.12 moves here and there but I wouldn't call myself a 5.12 climber, my endurance is shit and when I get into tricky sequences it becomes apparent that the more refined aspects of technique are not coming back quite like riding a bicycle.

danmaz74 8y ago

> There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones. Citation needed. Training for strength also increases your muscle mass, I'm not ready to believe that strength is only about neural pathways.

jimmy1 8y ago
Think of olympic lifters. Pyyros Dimas, a guy who isn't "huge" (compared to say football players or body builders) won a Gold for the clean and jerk at 215 kgs (474 lbs) in the 85kg weight class (187 lbs). There is something else going on there besides muscle mass when a <187 lb guy can throw up almost 500 pounds completely over his head from the ground. Here's a good article on the impact of your neural pathways on strength: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170710091652.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170710091652.h... from the article: > Jenkins found evidence that the nervous system activates more of those motor neurons -- or excites them more frequently -- when subjected to high-load training. That increased excitation could account for the greater strength gains despite comparable growth in muscle mass. Adrenaline does wonders for the excitation-induced stimulation of the skeletal muscle system
- stonecraftwolf 8y ago
  It’s also the explanation for noob gains (getting much, much stronger in the first 6 months of lifting or so, then tapering off as your ability to recruit muscle catches up with the muscle you already have). If you’ve ever lifted, the feeling of learning to use your body more efficiently is pretty obvious.