EP 267: Keith Baar & Natalie Gilmore — The Secret to Strong & Healthy Fingers, & Exciting New Science

The Nugget Climbing Podcast

Steven Dimmitt

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4.2 • 576 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2025

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Keith Baar is a leading expert in tendon and ligament engineering and repair. Natalie Gilmore is a PhD student focused on climbing-specific research. We talked about the results of their recent retrospective study, exciting new science, why “Abrahangs” improve force transfer, why progressively overloading them is a bad idea, protocols for finger health and strength, and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friends, and welcome to the Nugget Climbing Podcast. This is your host, Stephen Dimmit. My guests today
0:07.9	are Dr. Keith Barr and Natalie Gilmore. Dr. Keith Barr is a professor at UC Davis, and his research
0:15.0	focuses on engineered ligaments and how ligaments and tendons adapt and repair. He's a leading expert on the science behind
0:22.4	ligament rehabilitation. And Natalie Gilmore is a PhD student working in Keith's lab. She's a climber
0:29.0	herself. She's been climbing for 10 years, and she is leading the climbing specific research
0:33.6	that they are working on now. In this episode, we dove into their recent retrospective study
0:40.6	and what we can learn from it and their follow-up studies that they are working on now.
0:45.2	I want to give you guys some context for this interview. I had limited time with Keith and
0:50.6	Natalie. So for the purpose of this episode, I'm going to assume that you guys have
0:54.8	some awareness of two videos that Emil Abrahamson has put out on his YouTube channel. A few
1:01.5	years ago, he made a video called hangboarding two times per day for 30 days. I did a podcast
1:07.1	episode with him about it, episode 85. And then he made a follow-up video a couple
1:11.7	years later with Keith Barr digging into the results of a retrospective study they did
1:16.7	and the science behind it and so on and so forth. So if you haven't seen those videos, I link to
1:23.8	both of them in the show notes for this episode at the Nuggetclimbing.com.
1:33.9	I think this episode is a standalone, but if you feel like you're missing out, there's a lot more context in those two videos.
1:40.8	One more thing to mention in this episode, we refer to Emile's No Hangs protocol as Abra Hangs.
1:45.2	That's where you're hangboarding at a very gentle intensity with your feet on the ground, just pulling down lightly on the hangboard. You can also do it with a portable hangboard
1:50.2	in a sling or something like that. But Abrahangs is the term that we're using in this episode for
1:55.5	Emil's No Hang Protocol. In this episode, you can expect to learn what is happening when we do
2:02.0	Abrahangs that can lead to such impressive improvements in finger strength for some people,
2:07.0	why some people get better results than others, why it's a bad idea to progressively overload
	...

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