Brent Apgar
  climber, chiropractor
- January 4, 2010

FRB: Name?

Brent: Brent Apgar.

FRB: Age?

Brent: 36.

FRB: Height/Weight?

Brent: Right now I'm approximately 180 pounds, I've been 6 foot even for awhile now.

FRB: Location?

Brent: Inside the Bubble.

FRB: Ape Index?

Brent: An unfair +5 inches.

FRB: Profession?

Brent: Chiropractic Medicine with an interest in sports medicine/human performance.

FRB: Website/Blog?

Brent: synchropractic.blogspot.com.

FRB: How did you get into climbing, Brent?

Brent: My very first climbing experience was through UC San Diego's Outdoor program. We went bouldering for a day at a tiny little local area called Santee Boulders.
Then things progressed on to setting up top ropes at the local areas, since most of the climbing in San Diego county (at least then) was all top roping.
Then in '96 I moved to Boulder and climbing pretty much took over my life.

FRB: Who were some of your early influences?

Brent: With respect to climbing? ...I don't feel like I can really point to any one person. I felt like my climbing in So. Cal occurred in a vacuum for the most part. I never climbed indoors and there wasn't much of a local “scene” so I got to know a few guys that I would see out at the local crags but they were pretty much only acquaintances. For the most part climbing was something I did by myself until I moved to Boulder.

I would have to say that Dr. Charles Lynn stands out as an early influence. He was a good friend of the family and really the first person that I remember knowing who was very interested in pushing his physical limits and just playing hard. He was the first person I saw who had a methodical training routine and incorporated dietary protocols into his performance goals.
He was also a Chiropractor, so that was my first exposure to Chiropractic care and I think that all of those influences stayed with me and always kept the thought of doing Chiropractic Medicine somewhere in the back of my mind.

Brent Apgar at the Big Bend Boulders in Moab, Utah - Photographer: Tara Gee

FRB: Who do you normally climb with, dude?

Brent: I climb a lot with my roommate and I'll also rope up regularly with a few of the staff guys at the Spot that are psyched to place gear and do some bigger stuff in the mountains.

FRB:  Tell us something about you that
           most people don't know.

Brent: I really do have a sense of humor. It's just that I am the only person that thinks I'm funny.

FRB: Tell us about your professional training, dude.

Brent: On paper my c.v. says that I've got a B.S. in Exercise Physiology, a doctorate in Chiropractic Medicine and that I've been climbing for 13 years.
What I've done is combine my knowledge in those three areas in an effort to hopefully advance the understanding of sports medicine as it applies to climbing.

FRB: Who knows you best? What would they say about you?

Brent: My mom. That I'm a total pain in the ass.

FRB: You're a chiropractor. Where's your shop?
          You do trades for membership with the BRC
          and the Spot?

Brent: I lease space from the Spot Bouldering Gym and have office hours there Monday through Friday.
I am also one of the therapists that does a trade for membership with the Boulder Rock Club. We alternate weeks and so I am there the first and third Wednesday of the month from 8-10pm with two other therapists.

FRB: How has climbing effected your chiropractic work?

Brent: In many ways I could say that climbing defines my chiropractic work. I've always been drawn toward the fields of human performance and health care even before I started climbing. As time has gone on I've become more and more interested in sports medicine as it pertains to climbing. Because climbing is a relatively new sport, there is not much researched knowledge available on the best ways to train, what the most common injuries in climbing are and how best to treat them. Although there is not a lot of data available, there is a ton of knowledge from other disciplines that can be used and adapted to create a starting point to build on which can then be used to serve climbers. So climbing has given me a desire to adapt my academic knowledge to solve some of the problems of climbing specific sports medicine.

FRB: How has your chiropractic work effected your climbing?       

Brent: I feel that it's hard to spend so much time educating yourself in a field, especially something like human performance, an not have it become a lens through which you begin to observe the environment around you.
So for better and worse I have a default setting in which my mind is always looking at things like biomechanics, specific weaknesses during movement and diet and nutrition to maximize climbing performance and recovery.

FRB: I'm plateauing in my climbing...
          What do I have to do to get past it, Brent?       

Brent: Where's my soapbox??? This is really the crux of the performance game. Most of us started climbing because it was fun to move around on rock, then we started improving and were able to climb more difficult terrain which is even more fun and so then we started climbing more to keep getting better. This is where the problems start. At some point you'll plateau in your climbing ability if all you're doing is climbing. Just trying to climb harder routes no longer provides the right kind of training stimulus to make your body adapt and keep you getting better at the things you need to get better at to climb harder routes. Granted, this is a bit of an oversimplification of the situation. The fact remains that at some point in your climbing career the time will come when if you want to continue to improve you'll have to take a hard look at where you are in your abilities, where you want to be and then come up with a plan (i.e., a systematic training routine) to get you from A to B.

For a lot of people this is when climbing becomes frustrating and not nearly as much fun as when they started. I guess that if you really want to continue to improve as a climber this is where you have to ask yourself just how important this goal is and what am I willing to sacrifice to get it. I read something by John Long at some point where he neatly summed this up. He said that “improving at climbing is easy, all you have to do is simply not do anything that doesn't take you in the direction of your goal.”

FRB: What about my rest days... specifically what do I
          have to do to expedite my training days? What about
          eating, drinking and partying... What's too much... What's
          not enough...? Give me the straight dope, Brent?

Brent: I decided to combine these two questions into one answer since they're kind of the same question. The two most overlooked aspects of recovering are actually resting and being sure to eat enough. When I say rest I mean physically doing little to nothing. An hour of Vinyasa Yoga, swimming, running or a lot of other things climbers pass off as “an active rest day” is just more stress that your body has to recover from. I'm not saying to do nothing but climb, but to be aware of how hard you're playing on your rest days because it may be hard enough that you're not really resting enough to recover between climbing sessions.

The other good place to start is to take a look at your eating habits. Diet can be a super complicated topic when you start including supplements and individual biochemistry. To keep it simple you need to make sure that you're eating enough calories. If you're climbing a lot then you're using up a lot of energy and breaking down a lot of soft tissue. So to recover you need to make sure that you're eating enough to fuel your climbing days AND also enough to be sure that you're providing your body the raw materials and extra energy to rebuild that tissue. If I remember correctly, I had read in a physiology text that it takes approximately 1,500 calories to build a pound of muscle tissue. So not only do you need to have the protein available to build the physical structure of the muscle you also need to eat enough food to provide the energy required to put the proteins together.

I'm working from the assumption that you're wanting to maximize your rate of improvement. If you want to take all the fun out of it, partying is just another stress that keeps your body from recovering. So while you're out drinking you're probably not getting enough sleep and you're also giving your body the additional task of having to neutralize the toxic effects of the alcohol. Having 2 or 3 drinks a week probably won't set you back but if you're only goal is to push your physical limits as hard as possible ...abstinence really is the best policy.

Brent Apgar on Center Route in Eldorado - Photographer: Tara Gee	Brent on The Scientist in Dream Canyon - Photographer: Tara Gee

FRB: Are there any supplements that I should take if I train hard?

Brent: Supplements and training... that's always an interesting topic surrounded by a lot of misunderstanding. I do believe that there are some supplements that can help you train harder. But before incorporating any supplements into a training routine you must first make sure that your basic nutritional needs are in order to support your training/climbing intensity and volume. Supplements are that extra/last 5% that can help push performance up a notch, but only if there's a solid dietary foundation to work from.

Unfortunately the supplement companies propagate the idea that if you use X product it will either make you bigger, stronger, have more endurance or whatever. The truth is that supplements, for the most part, simply help your body tolerate a higher training load and allow it to recover more quickly. You could shoot all the Test you wanted and unless you put in the work you wouldn't see any results from steroids. The thing is that your body can only handle so much abuse, at some point your body pushes back to make you slow down. And I mean this on a homeostatic level, if you go out and kill it for several weeks at a time you'll see a myriad of changes in your hormone profiles, testosterone levels will drop, cortisol levels will rise, adrenal function will change... all of these changes will cause you to feel more fatigued and you'll naturally want to slow down so that your body can adapt before an injury happens. Supplements allow you to artificially simulate a less stressed out biochemical state which means you can continue to play hard and get stronger.

Almost everyone has had first hand experience with this. Caffeine is a powerful and amazing drug. Contrary to popular belief caffeine is a drug and not a an essential nutrient and it can be an incredibly useful training aid. To get the best results for a session approximately 200-300mg of caffeine a half an hour before climbing/training should do the trick. If you're a habitual user this may not be enough and I'm sure that everyone has heard of the side effects of caffeine withdrawal. As an example of borrowing technology from other disciplines, here's one from body building. One of the fastest growing areas in supplement development is pre-workouts. These products are designed to promote blood flow, delay fatigue and boost muscle metabolism. Caffeine figures prominently into these products and whether or not they do everything that they claim there is certainly a difference in my workouts using them versus just a cup of coffee.

The other supplements I recommend to anyone looking for a place to start if they're interested in heading down this road are: Glutamine (not Glucosamine), Creatine, Waxy Maize and a good multi-vitamin.

Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in the body, supplementing your dietary intake with this helps a wide variety of metabolic processes from digestive function and maintenance of muscle tissue to keeping the immune system running smoothly when training levels are high.

Creatine has been around for a long time and has been on the climbing community radar before. Most of the negative things surrounding creatine use have to do with fears of weight gain, either from water retention or from increased muscle mass. Both of which are not realistic. The most water weight that you might gain using creatine is maybe 5lbs and if you find that you're suddenly gaining muscle mass that's more to do with you genetics and how you train than anything else.

Waxy Maize is a relatively new product. The idea behind it is that due to its specific chemical properties it's easily absorbed and utilized by muscle tissue. It's designed to aid in post workout recovery, the idea is that it acts like a mini carbo loading routine so that the muscles are able to replenish their glycogen stores. Having the glycogen stores topped off means that you've got a full tank of fuel for your next session.

FRB: Medical Marijuana is all the rage right now.
          Does it really have any place in optimizing your
          climbing performance?

Brent: No. I'd put THC in the same category as alcohol: something to do with friends while hanging out around the campfire that's fun and relaxing. Ultimately though, both THC and ETOH are two more things that your body has to work to clear from the system and neither one aids the body in adapting to the stresses of climbing. As a side note, I'd put both of these as less harmful than habitually using Ibuprofen.

FRB: Can we get our own chiropractic instruments
          and heal ourselves?

Brent: I wish. I do believe that through balanced supplemental training injuries can be minimized. Though there is a reason that athletes have physicians and trainers who routinely work with them. Injury prevention is mostly a matter of knowing what your weaknesses are and what injuries you're predisposed to by virtue of your morphology or previous injuries. This and some maintenance care is usually enough to deal with most of the nagging, repetitive injuries people experience from playing hard. Unfortunately some things do need professional intervention to resolve. Sometimes you need to have more knowledge and experience at your disposal to solve a problem and that's what you're paying a doctor for.

FRB: Physical manipulation. Do i need it on a
          regular basis if I'm not necessarily hurting
          any where?

Brent: My treatment philosophy is that regular treatments/adjustments aren't necessary if you're not having a problem. Though I do believe that regular maintenance care in the form of myofascial release, massage and joint manipulation will allow a person to adapt more quickly to a given training intensity/load.

FRB: How do I know if I'm over, or even, under training
          if I'm not hurting. (ie) How do I know how much to train?

Brent: This is where a training journal comes in handy. At first keeping a training log may seem like a total waste of time but as you build a database of your personal performance you can go through it and see trends. It will help to point out strengths and weaknesses and give you ideas for how to change up your training so that you continue to progress. The really annoying thing about training is that your body is extremely good at adapting to the stress placed on it, so over time you must continually change your training routine so that your progress doesn't stagnate. (And not changing up a training routine for months at a time is one of the quickest ways to create an injury.)

My lame, avoiding the question response is that: this is the experience part of training. You have to train a lot and pay attention to what's working, what's not and what effect it's having on your body and your climbing performance to establish a baseline to work from.

Things to watch for that would indicate under-training:
You never feel sore or trashed after a session.
You haven't changed up your training routine in six months or more.
You're not seeing any progress in your climbing.

Things that would indicate over-training:
You always feel sore and trashed after a session.
You always seem to be fighting a little tweak or nagging injury.
You're no longer psyched to train hard and feel fatigued.
You're not seeing any progress in your climbing.

FRB: Why is it I seem to hurt myself in the gym as
          compared to climbing outside?

Brent: The bottom line with indoor climbing is that it's very easy to do a crap load of hard climbing in a short time. This makes the gym a great training tool but also means that you've got to practice some self restraint to avoid overdoing it.

FRB: What do you recommend to someone just starting out?
          training wise to minimize injury?
          (stretching, warm up, etc)       

Brent: If you're brand new to climbing, try and respect your current limitations in training/climbing and give your body (especially hands)time to adapt to the stresses of climbing. I like to ask clients how long they plan on climbing? Most of us started climbing because it was fun and plan on climbing for a long time to come. So what's the rush? Don't destroy yourself by continually pushing yourself beyond your current limits, there will always be something you can't climb. You may as well enjoy the journey because there really is no destination when it comes to climbing performance, at least not unless you plan on stopping once you've ticked a certain grade or route.

FRB: You're a chiropractor. My elbow hurts from climbing at
          CATS 3 times a week. HELP!
         What do i have to do to stop my elbow from hurting,
         because I got to train even harder?

Brent: This is part II of the soapbox rant. This is the classic example of the obsessive climber who is having fun and just wants to climb all the time. Everyone has a limit to the amount of climbing/training stress that they can recover from and past that you stray into the domain of overuse injuries. This comes back to being willing to sacrifice a few things if your ultimate goal is to push your body to its limits so that you can improve your climbing performance as quickly as possible.

In the big picture of pushing performance limits the physical act of punishing yourself pulling on small holds or lifting weights becomes the easy part. The hard part is doing all the little things when you're resting to maximize your recovery so that you're ready to go for the next session. Things like making sure you're sleeping enough, eating enough, giving your body enough time between sessions to mostly recover ...etc. This is the experimental part of training and why athletes have a whole team of people tweaking their training to keep them performing at their maximum. Unfortunately for most of us we aren't pro athletes whose only job is to train and get better at our sport and so we have to figure out all this stuff for ourselves.

The short answer to the question above is to back off a little and give your body a chance to adapt to the stress you're putting on it.

Brent on Liquid Jade in Smith Rocks, OR - Photographer: Andrew Zoltay	Brent on I Lean in Shelf Road, CO - Photographer: Tara Gee

FRB: What are the best ways to deal with an over-use injury?

Brent: First you've got to take the fuel source away from the fire, ie stop overusing what ever hurts. Once you've got the pain under control any soft tissue problems, biomechanical aberrations and joint restrictions need addressed (this is my job) and then the tissues need to be strengthened so that they are able to withstand the load required to climb at whatever level the person is after (here it's my job to come up with how to go about strengthening the tissues and your job to consistently do the work).

FRB: Do you use the typical chiropractic machines?
          What devices do you use to heal?

Brent: I think a lot of people are surprised at how sparse my treatment room is. Literally the only two pieces of equipment I use regularly are my hands and a set of Graston Technique tools. Because I work mostly with healthy, athletes my treatment style varies from what most people have probably experienced seeing a Chiropractor. When dealing with someone who is playing hard you tend to deal much more with overuse injuries which is different than working on a person that sits at a desk all day and then has neck problems or tweaks their back lifting something they're not used to. A lot of my “treatment” time with someone looking for that next step in performance gains is spent talking about how they can train smarter to meet their goals. I spend a lot of time essentially doing a mini training 101 class that covers how to address strength imbalances, how to train/move with proper biomechanics, what to eat and how to recover. Certainly I do a lot of hands on work addressing soft tissue problems and the traditional chiropractic adjusting of joints but most of the problems experienced by the climbers I see are only going to be truly fixed by that individual making some changes to how they go about trying to improve at climbing.

FRB: Sum it up for me, Brent.
          What do I have to do to climb
          at my maximum?

Brent: Be CONSISTENT! The downside of improving is that it becomes more difficult to improve the closer you push your ability to your potential maximum. So the better you get the more consistent you have to be in your training if you want to keep seeing gains in performance. This means that you need to educate yourself in all the things that it takes for you to improve. There was a great quote from Jim Karn in one of the old Masters of Stone videos. He was talking about how people would ask him how to train, what to eat and how to get better at climbing. His response was, “when you get to the point that climbing overrules everything else in your life, you'll know how to train, what to eat and what to do to get better at climbing.” To truly approach your maximum potential takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice over a prolonged period of time and isn't something that you'll happen to achieve unless it's a very deliberate goal.

FRB: Thank you for the interesting and informative interview, Brent.

Brent: Thanks for listening.

Brent Apgar on Enterprise in Owens River Gorge, CA - Photographer: Tara Gee

Brent Apgar D.C. - synchropractic.blogspot.com - 303.968.6081

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