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Finger swelling from crimping? 29-Jul-2005 At 2:29:52 PM chris

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Julian recently was quite adamant in an article in Rock about avoiding crimping.
It makes me wonder how much he has climbed in the Blue Mtns......
I think open hand grip is great in the Gramps and at Nowra, but you can't get away without crimping in the Blues.... all those cruxes involve crimping on small holds. It's the rule rather than the exception in the blue mtns.
I know that Lee Cossey trains crimping, and I think a lot of the other blue mtns climbers do, too (including Garth Miller).
One of the British websites talks about crimping in a more positive way.....ie to crimp well you have to practice it, just like any other form of strength.
From personal experience, even buckets of open hand power could not get me around the Wrong Movements crux, but a few weeks crimping on the finger board and I can finally do the move. My open hand strength has not improved at all.
My thoughts are that the tendons and pulleys of your fingers, which are most likely to be injured, are much slower to strengthen than your forearm muscles. The result is climbers pull hard on small holds before the pulleys have got strong enough, and get pulley damage. I suppose the process of tendinosis must play a role, too, because good climbers seem to bust pulleys, and they should have strong tendons.....
Tendon/pulley degeneration is related very much to overtraining, as far as I understand, and good climbers are very prone to overtraining.
Hope what I have written is comprehensible! What do other climbers think of my pseudo-scientific hypothesis?