Investigation of the finger forces applied and muscle activation in open hand and half closed grips in climbing sports

It is known that finger grip positions in climbing sports vary towards hand and upper extremity positions, body posture, anthropometric dimensions, and contact surface qualities. Accordingly, as finger and wrist phalanx positions, joint angles change towards, total and individual forces produced in each finger and stimulation of flexor muscles in the front arm varies as expected. The first prime aim in this study is to develop a system to examine the generated forces and muscle contractions for each finger towards diverse physical parameters. The primary outcome of this research is a manufactured setup enabling adjustments for finger contact surface height and contact width. The secondary aim of this research is to test these muscle tension and generated force outcomes with climbing athletes, for each, the system is individually adjusted by matching anthropometric measures. The main combinations tested in this study are open and half crimp with varied contact surface positions. This study shows that unlevel edges aligned towards finger joint positions are followed with lesser force but similar or more effort. Nevertheless, just raising one finger in such positions provides an increase in total force without changing the muscle activity. During sport performance, a climber may give full potential for holding a single hard grip but, for training, variously shaped holding elements may develop the performance with lesser force but similar muscle activity. Nevertheless, more balanced force sharing among fingers is not observed during holding edges aligned towards finger joint positions.