Bouldering falls, pads and the injuries nobody expects

Bouldering feels safe because the consequences look small. Three or four metres, a pad, a friend standing behind you. Compared with a rope route it seems trivial.

The injury statistics do not agree. Ankles, heels, wrists and backs get hurt regularly, and the mechanism is nearly always a landing rather than the climbing.

Look at the landing before you look at the problem

Reverse the usual order. Before working out the sequence, work out where you will land from each part of it — because the fall from the crux is often not the fall from the top-out, and the ground is not flat.

Boulders sit on other boulders. Landings slope. There are gaps between blocks, roots, and a stump three metres to the left that is exactly where you go if you fall from the traverse.

The specific question is: from each move, where does my body land, and what is under that spot?

Pads are not a solved problem

A pad reduces impact. It does not eliminate it, and badly placed pads actively cause injuries.

Gaps between pads are the classic. An ankle goes into the gap between two pads and rolls. Overlap them, and cover seams with a smaller pad if you have one.

Pads over uneven ground create a flat-looking surface with rocks underneath. You land, the pad deforms into the hollow, and your ankle finds the edge of the boulder that was hidden. Feel the ground under the pad, and level it or avoid it.

Pads on a slope slide. Stake them, weight them, or accept that they will move and have a spotter tracking them.

Too few pads. The fall zone from a traverse is a line, not a point, and it needs covering along its length.

Thickness matters for high problems; softness matters for low ones. A very soft pad on a high fall bottoms out; a very firm one on a low fall transmits more. Most people end up with a mix.

Spotting is a specific skill

A spotter's job is not to catch the climber. Nobody catches an adult falling from height, and trying to produces two injured people.

The job is to direct the fall onto the pad and protect the head and spine. Hands up, thumbs tucked in — a spread thumb catches and dislocates. Watch the climber's hips, because hips tell you where the body mass is going, not the hands or the feet.

Stand where you can move, knees soft, ready to step. As the climber falls, guide their torso so they land on the pad and upright. Push, steer, absorb some energy. Do not stand rigid and let them hit you.

Talk before the attempt. Where is the fall likely? Which side? Is there anything the spotter should specifically move? A spotter who has not been briefed is decoration.

Landing well

Feet first, together, knees bent, and then roll backwards onto your back or shoulder rather than stopping the fall with your legs alone. The roll dissipates energy over time and distance, which is exactly what your joints cannot do.

Do not put your hands down behind you to break the fall. Straight arms taking body weight is how wrists break and how shoulders dislocate. Tuck the chin, arms in.

Practise it. Drop from small heights repeatedly onto a pad until the roll happens automatically, because in a real fall you have no time to plan it.

Heels and ankles

The recurring bouldering injury. Landing flat-footed from height compresses the heel pad and can bruise or fracture the calcaneus, which is slow and miserable to heal. Rolling an ankle on an uneven landing is faster to happen and almost as slow to fix.

Both are landing problems, not climbing problems, and both are reduced by the same things: even pad coverage, landing with bent knees, rolling, and — importantly — not repeatedly falling from the same high move when tired.

Top-outs are where the real height is

The most dangerous fall on most problems is from the top, mantling, when you are highest, most tired, and least likely to land cleanly. Yet people place pads under the crux and leave the top-out uncovered.

If you are not confident of the top-out, do not commit to the last move. Reverse, or downclimb, or bring another pad. Highballs are genuinely serious climbing and deserve to be treated that way rather than as bouldering with extra metres.

Know when to stop

Injury risk rises sharply with fatigue, because tired climbers fall unexpectedly rather than in the controlled way they fell earlier in the session. The last attempt of the day, on the hardest problem, when everyone is tired and the light is going, is a recognisable pattern in injury stories.

Bouldering is high-intensity and the temptation to keep trying is enormous. The people who avoid injuries are the ones who leave with something left.