Improving Design Characteristic to Estimate Load for Future Rock Climbing Studies

Rock climbing is an increasingly popular physical activity with indoor competition climbing accepted for inclusion at the summer 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The International Olympic Committee consensus statement recommends the accurate monitoring of training load to reduce injury risk in athletes (Soligard, et al., 2016). Differences in acute/chronic training loads have been found to be predictive of injury occurrence (Gabbett, 2016). In published climbing literature to date, differences in injury terminology, data collection procedures, calculation of exposure and operational measures of performance used by authorship teams impedes comparison. At present, there is no consensus on design characteristics for use in epidemiological cohort studies in rock climbing. The aim of this article is to report a critical appraisal of methodologies used to estimate load and recommends an amendment to the IRCRA comparative grading scale to include British adjectival grade and design characteristics for future studies.

https://www.ircra.rocks/chamonix-rock-congress-201...