Chris Sharma free climbs a giant Redwood Tree

Chris is a legend, one of the best. He climbs routes and routes without ropes that others do not even consider possible. This time, he takes on a giant Redwood tree.

"In climbing there is suspicion of a shift in the central pattern generators because of the extraordinary demand by pseudo-quadrupedal gait climbing due to the demand on the upper limbs and their motorneuron pools to mobilize the organism up the mountain.  We know these quadrupedal circuits exist. In 2005 Shapiro and Raichien wrote “the present work showed that human QL (quadrupedal locomotion) may spontaneously occur in humans with an unimpaired brain, probably using the ancestral locomotor networks for the diagonal sequence preserved for about the last 400 million years.”
I have written several articles on the complex neurology and biomechanics of climbing.  You can search for them on our blog.  - Dr. Allen