Online Climbing Coach

Learning errors? come back fresh

2012-01-18T00:38:00.000Z

The story behind this new problem from yesterday is on my main blog here. But I wanted to share a couple of lessons I learned from a few sessions trying this rather technical eliminate:

First, while trying it after a summer of trad when I was weak I went backwards on it. I couldn’t understand why at first. I had an awful session when I couldn’t even do the swing move at all. My raw finger strength was still there - I could feel it in how hard I could pull on the holds. But the move wasn’t working. I later learned that lack of recent bouldering mean’t I’d forgotten (relatively speaking of course) how to maintain maximal body tension through a sequence of very sustained moves. In the process of trying it over and over out of frustration, I accidentally learned many errors in the moves. I started taking the holds in a less efficient way, timing the movement wrongly and getting less weight through my feet.

It happened because I was ‘over thinking’ the movement rather than letting my subconscious mind do at least some of the work. Because I was previously able to do the moves easily, I concluded there must be a movement error I was making, and If I just experimentally tried subtle tweaks in the move I’d figure out the mistake. But there was no mistake, I just wasn’t quite strong enough and in the process of looking so hard at one move I learned some new errors and lost confidence.

How to avoid this problem if you are in the habit of redpointing? On the whole I’d still say it’s fine to try one move that you can’t yet do over and over for tens or even hundreds of times. But recognise that within the session you sometimes lose confidence, strength, positivity and make more errors, even if this effect remains largely subconscious. You’ll sometimes find that you come back next session with a fresh body and mind and do it straight off. The correct way to do the move will just happen spontaneously.

Take a break, try something else for a session and come back to it.

One other thing: The first move of the problem required pulling in super hard on a small heelhook on a spike. Wearing slippers (I took my tightest pair that I can’t even get on my feet unless it’s cold!) or even lace-ups if you pull really hard your boot might start to slide off and you’ll lose tension. A good solution in the pic below is to wear a sock for extra boot tightness and run finger tape through the pull-loops around your ankle. Point your toes downwards while you stick the tape down. It works a treat.

Confidence de-training

2012-01-11T14:11:00.000Z

I went bouldering outdoors for the first time in two months yesterday. Lochaber deluge enforced indoor training regime. I was shocked at how tentative I was and worried about bad landings after so long falling onto big friendly climbing wall mats. Note to self, and anyone else in the same situation:

Too much time above big mats destroys your boldness and ability to fall properly outdoors on poor landings. Not much you can do about this other than be aware of it and take care to give some time to retraining when the rain stops.

Through the whole move

2012-01-04T00:48:00.000Z

I’ve just spent the week staying with family in Glasgow and visiting the fantastic new TCA bouldering centre as often as muscles allow. It’s obviously a bit different from most bouldering facilities, being the biggest in the UK, and this brings many new benefits for training, as well as some new ptifalls. Some observations on these:

The first observation I made which was very heartening, was the notable absence of people complaining about being too short, or the moves being too reachy. Obviously, part of this is down to an underlying assumption that by it’s very nature, the bouldering game involves more big dynamic moves that route climbing tends to. For those who find themselves often blaming failure to climb on height or reachy setting - have a few sessions in a bouldering centre like this. Take time to look around you at the short folks slapping and jumping for the holds. You can’t change your height, but you can learn to move your feet into the right position and then go for that hold!

Someone asked me about how training purely in a bouldering wall, even for route climbing stamina might affect their technique. It’s a worthy concern - constantly bouldering teaches you how to to deliver maximum force and tension from start to finish. It’s often very easy to tell that a climber mainly boulders, just by looking at them climb for a few moves. For someone very experienced who is still climbing a lot of routes for a large part of the year, it’s not such a problem. But if a large proportion of your yearly climbing is on a boulder wall and you are ultimately training for routes, it’s still worth putting a harness on and clipping a rope on a real route whenever you can so you don’t lose the ability to climb with minimal force on the steady parts of routes. In the boulder wall, circuits are still ‘the business’ but make sure and mix them up often and include some you don’t have dialled, so you remember how to use your brain while pumped and make it up as you go along if you mess your feet up or forget where the next hold is.

Someone else asked me about high steps. They are a real weakness for me, as they are for a lot of guys. I’ve improved mine a good bit with some work but I’ve got plenty more to do and I’m determined to sort it out this year. My passive hip flexibility is fairly poor but I get away with it to a certain extent by having very good active flexibility. A lot of folk don’t know about the difference. Passive flexibility is the range of motion (ROM) you have when you pull the limb as far as it will go with an external force (such as your hands pulling your leg into a high step position). Active flexibility is the ROM that the limb can achieve under it’s own steam (i.e. Your highest high step in a real climbing situation!). Obviously, if the antagonist muscle group is very short, passive flexibility will ultimately limit how far you can pull the limb. But in reality, active ROM is often limited by the agonist muscles ability to pull hard in the inner range of it’s ROM. I’ve seen lots and lots of climbers with pretty or even exceptional hip flexibility who still struggle with high steps because they are not strong enough at the extreme joint angles to pull the leg really high under it’s own steam. Why? Like everything, it comes down to the basic rule of training - what you do, you become. They spent lots of time sat on the ground stretching by pulling the leg with an external force, and not enough doing desperate tensiony high steps.

Properly inflexible guys like myself have to do a lot of both passive and active flexibility training - a LOT and for a long time - to see real improvements. So if you really want to high step, work on it every time you climb. If you have your own board, make sure you set problems with very few footholds available and in very unhelpful places. Try to set them so that moving the feet is the crux of the problem. Train yourself to stay tight and strong on the lower foothold and two handholds while you forcefully open your hips and pull the leg right up into a high step at the limit of your ROM. I find it helps to visualise my body as a rigid board stretched between my toes to my fingers while I move the other leg. You can also stretch by pulling the leg up with your arms to stretch your gluts and then let go and try to hold the position unassisted to train your inner range holding.

Training at big boulder walls with big dynamic moves requires a lot of body tension. I’ve often seen the term ‘body tension’ referred to in magazine articles as a strength aspect. It’s not just that. Strength is needed to be able to apply body tension, but it’s your technique that actually does the applying! It’s perfectly possible to be a front lever monster with rubbish body tension on the rock because you fail to apply that strength. A big part of body tension technique is remembering to apply tension through one or both feet through the whole move as you dynamically lunge to the next handhold. I found myself recently completing a lot of problems during training by consciously thinking about this as I executed the move. Really claw down into the key foothold with the big toe until the last possible moment. This buys you the maximum amount of time to take the next hold a little slower and more accurately and generate enough grip to hold onto it. I often remind myself by saying ‘through the whole move’ inwardly as I set up for a big move, so I don’t lose tension too early and end up with an impossible swing to try and hold. It works!

Training the ability to try

2011-12-21T14:18:00.001Z

If you see people in action during training (it’s easiest to observe in a traditional weights/cardio gym), it’s not hard to notice that theres a massive difference between the majority who are having a ‘light’ session to say the least, and the much smaller proportion who are really working their bodies hard.

As an aside, If you do see those people in the gym who look like they aren’t trying - don’t scoff inwardly (or outwardly!) at them - not everyone goes to the gym to work hard. Some people exercise to relax and wind down. And remember you don’t see what other workouts they get up to. You might be surprised!

Sometimes folk don’t have the right peer group to influence them to learn to try really hard, sometimes, they just haven’t found the right motivation, or more likely they just don’t realise how hard they could be trying. This is not something that applies to some and not others. Everyone has room to really grit their teeth and work themselves harder.

It’s true in many cases that the best athletes are the ones who are trying hardest. It’s not always the case for various reasons and it’s too simplistic and misleading to view athletic success purely as a product of effort. However, that doesn’t change the point that if you can find ways to try harder, you’ll go further.

I talked a lot about how to do that in my book, but one thought for your training sessions over the Christmas period; Before you go for your session, or have your next attempt on the problem, or circuit, or route, imagine what it would feel like if you were to try harder than you’ve ever tried before. Think about how your fingers would feel crushing down on that little hold. Think about how you’d grab the next hold and start pulling lightning fast and concentrate on keeping pulling with maximum force right through the move until your feet swing back in. Think about how sore your skin and arms will feel on that last circuit and how you’ll detach yourself from it and keep right on slapping. Think about the mindset of those climbers who inspire you by their amazing feats of climbing. What do you think goes through their mind when they train? They are people on a mission! They have learned to love their training and they feel satisfaction that every last grain of hard effort takes them closer to the routes they are on the mission to climb. So what's your mission?

Now repeat through the whole of next year!

Technique learning - noticing things

2011-12-03T15:32:00.001Z

When coaching climbers I’m constantly trying to encourage them to set up a routine both in themselves and as a group of peers climbing together of recording the details of their climbing movement and tactics and discussing the feedback and experimenting with different ways of doing everything.

Examples of this might be: how does the move change if you lunge a bit harder, or pull more with the right toe, or use that other foothold instead? The criteria for for success on a move isn’t just if you can climb it or not. It’s whether you found the most efficient way. So even if you flashed the problem at the boulder wall, do it again and find out if the move was easier if you used that other foothold or sequence.

If you climb with others and you have a good routine of passing movement feedback and ideas back and forth between you on the climbs you try - that’s great. But it’s only the first level. The next level is to be able to do this by yourself.

You don’t have an observant friend to say “You threw your left hip inwards more that time and that looked closer to the move”. So you have to notice it yourself while you are actually climbing, and that’s not easy until you train yourself to do it.

The easiest way to learn is when bouldering, trying a problem that is taking you a few tries to complete. When you are working the moves, don’t give all of your mental focus to delivery of power. Instead, keep a little part of your concentration reserved for noticing how your body and limbs feel as you move through the sequence. Look for things that feel ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, where wrong means it’s more likely to make you fall off. If your right foot is very stretched or is about to slip, what options do you have to solve that problem?

Once you are close to success and you feel it might happen next try, you can switch to full on redpoint mode and focus completely on just getting the next hold and completing the problem.

Note: The above is moderately advanced. Many less experienced climbers wouldn't even be able to tell you which hands when on which holds immediately after trying the climb, never mind recording the amount and direction of force at each limb and the path of the body during a move. If that’s you, practice noticing just the hand sequence you used, even if it’s just for the first few moves. It’s an essential skill for more advanced climbing and it takes time to learn. There are lots of ways to help you memorise it. But deliberately looking at the wall and each hold and then taking a mental snapshot of how the hold feels in your left or right hand works well.

Leading confidence - a worthy enemy

2011-12-03T15:07:00.001Z

Recently I’ve been coaching a lot of sport climbing and spent lots of time trying to get climbers to recognise that leading confidence is placing a huge barrier in the way of improving almost any aspect of their climbing.

What I’ve noticed is that climbers with leading confidence issues are desperate to avoid tackling it despite appearing quite highly motivated to make changes in most other areas of their climbing skills. Taking the first step in attacking leading confidence just feels so painful and scary. It’s more comfortable to convince yourself (and try unsuccessfully to convince me!) that it’s unattainable due to past bad experiences with leading or that it’s not actually an important weakness.

Next time you lead a route, notice what thoughts are running in your mind during the climbing. If most of the time is spent thinking “I’m scared, try to calm down… I can’t get to the next bolt, the last one is too far away, I don’t want to go any higher… what will happen if I fall” then very little progress can happen in your climbing. Fear is paralysing your ability to focus on the rock and the moves, and therefore your ability to learn.

In fact, your climbing standard might be doomed only to go down. Every time you toprope, you reinforce the feeling that toproping is normal, leading is abnormal. And when you do lead and take a fall, you have never learned to fall cleanly and your scrape down the rock rather than leaning back and letting the rope take you will wipe away even more of your confidence. A downward spiral basically, of climbing feeling progressively more scary and unpleasant until you eventually feel you just aren't enjoying doing it at all.

Improvements in confidence come in small increments, from forcing yourself to lead more and more and not ignoring learning how to fall nicely onto the rope. But what I’m realising is that many folk stall before even getting onto the road to improvement because they have yet to actually see it for the huge problem it is.

Leading confidence is not a small detail of climbing. For many climbers, it’s the biggest challenge climbing will ever throw at you. Beat it, and many more skills will unfold beyond and become attainable. Respect it as a worthy enemy and give it effort and energy accordingly.

Footnote: Leading is not essential in sport climbing. I often say to climbers that if they never want to lead and always toprope routes others have lead that’s totally fine. Climbing can be whatever you want it to be. I’m sure there are plenty of folk that do just that and probably get on very well because they can get on with actually enjoying their climbing. However, although I’ve said this to many climbers I’ve never actually met any who have decided to reject leading. In fact, often I’ve noticed that just by recognising that leading is an option (not an imposed rule) and it’s their choice, they choose to attack leading and if they follow the right steps (part 3 of the book) progress is almost guaranteed.

A jump from being too scared to lead hardly at all to leading consistently can be achievable within a few sessions for some, just because the shift in attitude from leading as an unpleasant rule to a worthy challenge is so powerful. That’s what happened to me also - at 16 and too scared to lead. My attitude changed and I jumped from Severe to E2 in a week.

The importance of being not normal

2011-11-03T21:54:00.000Z

Following on from my last post about learning technique, another thought following my recent travels. I was speaking about risk and decision making in bold climbing at the SAFOS seminar at EICA Ratho. One of the other speakers was Mark Williams who gave an excellent lecture summarising some of the fascinating research on skill learning in sport right now.

Mark talked a lot about practice, it’s importance, just how much is necessary to reach your potential (a LOT) and crucially, what good practice consisted of. A key characteristic of good athletes in any sport is that they look for patterns in the vast amounts of basic data we absorb in our day to day practice and play. They don’t just take in the data, they strive to understand it, make sense of it. There’s a big difference. Understanding it means re-running it, either in the imagination (day dreaming, or in scientific terminology, visualisation) or by trying it again and tinkering with some aspect of it in order to understand it better.

In climbing terms this means trying the crux with the right foot on all the plausible options, then coming back next time and trying again, until something in your mind tells you you have ‘understood’ the move. Quite apart from the physical effort of practice, which has the side effect of getting you strong, it takes a huge amount of mental effort and focus.

After his talk I was very eager to ask Mark what, if anything, climbers could do to improve the quality of the practice since in climbing it is difficult to amass thousands and thousands of hours since our little forearms get tired and our skin wears out.

He told me that a big part of it comes down to this striving to ‘understand’ the movements. He reminded us that truly great athletes stand out because they are by definition ‘not normal’. They verge on an obsessive, compulsive need to go back and analyse every detail.

So is this trainable. Well, much as an obsessive compulsive driven athlete would find it nearly impossible to simply drop this deeply held personality trait on demand, it’s similarly hard to start acting like this if it’s just not you.

However, just by recognising that this sort of time consuming, repetitive practice and reflection is what is necessary, we can at the very least remove some inhibitions that might hold us back from this sort of approach.

In my mind, modern life demands of us the need to preform a heck of a lot of repetitive yet skilled tasks with a great deal of concentration and effort in our working lives, that are lot more boring than training for climbing. I know we are ultimately climbing for fun, but if we are serious enough even to use the word ‘training’ to describe some of our climbing sessions, then surely we can apply a hardcore work ethic and up the ante a little. It's worth noting that one of Mark's points was that even the experts who absolutely love training often feel that the best practice sessions simply have to be so systematic and repetitive that they cannot be enjoyed.

But the results of those sessions certainly are enjoyed!

Coaching observations

2011-11-03T21:26:00.000Z

I’m just back from various coaching sessions around the UK. After a little break from coaching over the summer, I’ve come to it with fresh eyes after digesting a lot of variety in watching and doing climbs of many different types. It’s amazing how your perspective widens.

There are always some patterns to observe. Older climbers who have been going 10-20 years don’t go for the holds with nearly the same determination as the young angry lads. The young angry lads are too busy going for the (hand) holds and being angry to move their feet onto better footholds and actually use them.

Some more detail -

Older chilled climbers: Experiment by role playing the 16 year old young angry men! Climb like you really really want to hold onto the next hold and nothing in the world is going to stop you. Grimace like you’re going to bite your bottom lip off. Don’t let go, even if you think you have no chance. The reality is that you only have no chance if you jump off the boulder wall instead of lay one on! The other point is that the learning, and training happens in the zone between success and failure.

Young angry men: Time that anger. Climbing has two stages; preparing to move and execution of the move. If your mind is fuzzing with anger while preparing to move, you don’t see the foot sequence, you don’t feel the shift of body weight that makes the difference. Learn to detach from that anger for a moment and take in the available move choices. If climbing was just about how hard you could pull or how angry you can get, the top climbers would be very different.

Both groups: Learn to be curious about finding the ‘right’ way to do moves. Whether you succeed on the problem/route, try it again using that other possibility you spotted for the move. And that one, and that one too. See which was actually the easiest. Systematic experimentation with moves makes you learn what works. Just because you got to the top doesn’t mean you did it the best way or actually learned anything about how to climb. Just because the climb is too hard for you doesn’t mean you can’t use it to learn something about movement. Even if you just watch someone else manage it. Be curious, watch others on the move, then try again yourself. Compare options, learn. This experimentation is what makes up the bulk of your bouldering sessions.

The limiting factor - setting

2011-09-25T16:03:00.003+01:00

The limiting factor in your rate of improvement can sometimes be something that never changes throughout your climbing career. That’s not to say they are inescapable, just that folk simply never take the bull by the horns and change them. ‘Permanent’ limiting factors are things like only climbing a couple of times a week, avoiding overhangs, never learning how to try hard or focus, or being scared of falling.

Other limiting factors are more often important for part of your career. Things such as having an old floppy pair of rockshoes you never bothered to replace, putting on a stone over christmas, getting a new job and not climbing much for 6 months. That kind of thing.

While giving some coaching clinics recently I met quite a few good climbers who struck me as being limited by their ability to set their own problems. I’d hazard a guess and say that most climbers who regularly boulder to train and have climbed for more than 10 years know how to go a bouldering wall and set themselves problems to fill the training session. It often seems surprising to climbers that I think it’s a critical skill to have.

But think about it, if you can’t set your own problems, you are dependent on either a bouldering wall with a steady supply of well set, numerous and regularly changed problems, or climbing with a bunch of mates who can set good problems and are willing to show you theirs all the time. That’s fine if you have that, but move house, lose a regular climbing partner who moves away, or get a lazy route setter at your local wall and all of a sudden your training drops a couple of gears to say the least. You aren’t in control of your own improvement basically.

Even if your local wall does have excellent problems, there are some pitfalls. The biggest of these is local hero syndrome. You have the problems wired, you do them a lot and feel strong. But even though there are quite a few of them and they are on different angles, they are not varied enough. Your technique suffers. Your standard outside of the wall is not nearly as high. If you have any sway with your climbing wall management, persuade them to invite a rotation of different setters as often as possible. Some modern dedicated bouldering walls are now showing the way in this respect. Hopefully the dinosaurs will catch up. But even in boulder walls which have a steady flow of good problems, it’s a good idea to set your own of make variations on the set ones rather than just lap them all the time. This is about setting a nice ratio of hours spent climbing on moves you know well vs moves that are new to you. Too much of either extreme has consequences for technique.

If you have a wall which doesn’t have set problems, or set ones which are never changed. Setting your own problems is essential. Get into a good routine of setting the problem at the right standard for this part of the session (warm up, in a few tries, or whole session to climb the problem). Tweak moves that don’t work well. When you have the hold choice right, stick with it and refine the movement until you do it. If you can do it with others helping to choose the holds, even better. It adds variety and saves you from playing to your body size advantages (tall or short!).

All this means that when you have the inevitable sessions when noone else is around and the set problems are crap, you still can do some meaningful training and not end up bored, demotivated or just not any stronger than before.

For climbing coaches : “In a Hurricaine…

2011-04-20T00:14:00.000+01:00

...even Turkeys can fly”

I go on in my book and this blog a lot about influences and their importance on how well we climb. The above quote, reminded to me by a CEO talking about economics, made me nod and agree.

In a social group of climbers, like a group of friends, a climbing wall scene, a club etc there are some who are the beacons - they have so much energy and drive that it radiates onto everyone else nearby and helps them learn more, have that extra attempt, try that different foot sequence or bear down and hold that swing. If you are that person - great! All you need to do is learn to focus your energy and unleash it without inhibition at the right moments.

For everyone else, it’s a problem because without the warmth of external energy, you might not keep progressing, or may even go backwards in your climbing. The paradox is the that your challenge is to take what you can from the beacons, but also learn to be able to go under your own steam. This means understanding well what particular parts of the climbing game motivate you to do the mundane stuff, like try that problem all those different ways or complete those physio exercises, or do that training session on your own.

For coaches looking after a cohort of climbers - your task is tricky. You have to identify the beacons, channel their energy, not let them settle for just being the best in their little group. Show them the next level of challenges before they lie back and forget how to be hungry for improvement. You also have to look for the turkeys (I’m only calling them that in ref to the above quote!) - the ones who will not keep showing up and giving it some if the beacon wasn’t there with them. Showing them how to stay patient, focused and enjoying the routine of climbing from within themselves rather than the social framework where it normally occurs is easier said than done. It’s best taken in small steps, with gentle encouragement.

For young wannabes playing the lottery

2011-02-20T21:21:00.002Z

As a climbing coach who is always trying to understand and communicate the ingredients of becoming really good at climbing, I spend a fair bit of time observing other disciplines like art and business. An idea I read today looked at the lotteries we play as wannabes in whatever field.

Not the ‘actual’ lottery, but the lottery of getting picked by a talent scout, signed by a big record company or featured in a TV programme. Most people get to show some raw, unrefined talent as youngsters. It’s not really gone anywhere yet. It needs focus and application over years to develop before it has the power to break new ground. If you are gearing everything you do towards winning that lottery, are you accepting that you’re almost certain to be one of the ones who loses? People don’t really keep playing the national lotteries as a way to become millionaires. What keeps them buying the ticket is the buzz of buying the ticket.

A lot of the time, ‘waiting’ to win opportunity lotteries like record deals causes young talents to languish without ever going anywhere. In a flash they are no longer 18 but jaded and tired out from the fruitless wait for something they will never win. I’ve seen a lot of talents in climbing fizzle because they are ‘waiting’ to score a sponsorship deal, strike on a magic training formula, move to a climbing mecca and magically soak up the ability etc.

How would it change your approach if you bet on never winning a lucky break? If you bet on having to get there just on the resources you have right now? That’s when industriousness kicks in and some actual progress happens.

Clean and messy performance

2011-02-13T14:35:00.000Z

Climbers who are into training or pushing themselves are often trying to keep everything ‘clean’. Clean in this sense means without complication - black and white, yes or no, all or nothing.

This is good, but it can backfire. It backfires because real life performance in sport (of life etc) is messy, always. Well, OK not always. If you’re a bit older, you’ll look back on a handful of moments, maybe only one, where everything was clean for a fleeting few minutes on a climb. Sometimes that’ll be during a lifetime best performance for you, but not always. Sometimes it happens on an easier climb that just went like a dream.

So the problem is that in all your mental effort and training, you’re pushing to make everything cleaner. Clean training schedule with no interruptions from work, weather or injury. Clean technique with no sloppy footwork, grunting or wobbling. Clean preparation with a good nights sleep, rested muscles, good food and good vibes before you want to climb something hard. It never happens does it? Well apart from those one or two times in your life when it does.

Obviously we can’t go around hoping for one of those once in a lifetime moments to happen right now. We need to find a way to climb well and be comfortable with our performance on a daily basis. It’s fine to try and keep everything clean and optimal. It’s the eternal game of the athlete. But accept that no matter how much you try, you dealing with something that is inherently messy (life) and you will never win.

Climbers that do try to beat the messiness of life and sporting performance get backed into a corner. Narrowing your field of skills to keep greater control over them. Training fewer performance components so you don’t have to face losses of previous gains. Competing in smaller and smaller arenas, like one angle, board, discipline etc. In the short term it might even work and feel comforting. In the longer term, it is almost guaranteed to fail to make you a good climber and leaves you wide open to taking big hits to morale and motivation. Most of the keen climbers I’ve seen give up completely have done so for this reason.

Keep your climbing, your training, your mental preparation, your schedule as clean as life allows. But be ready to keep going when everything is a complete bloody mess.

For skinny female climbers

2011-02-06T18:00:00.000Z

Comparing general performance characteristics between male and female climbers is always interesting, especially when coaching in a group session. The common finding is that the guys can often at least throw for the holds, but fall trying to hold onto them. Meanwhile, the girls can hold on for ages but fall trying to move between the holds.

The basic reason is that guys have much more muscle to throw their upper bodies around at extreme joint ranges. A lesser appreciated reason is that girls are often reluctant to climb by throwing for holds out of fear of falling, and so adopt a massively inefficient static style. Thankfully, the guys more than balance it out by forgetting to use their feet and still can’t climb a vaguely technical problem despite all that muscle and grunt.

The winner is the guy, or girl who is confident enough to have a dynamic style, considers the best foot sequence before actually going for the move, and lastly (LASTLY!) has the strength to move to the hold, and hold onto it.

For girls, first of all, no progress can happen without addressing the fear of falling first. Every effort will fall flat on it’s face. You can’t climb to your potential without slapping, snatching, deadpointing, dynoing on most moves, or if fear of falling is dictating how you approach every move. The solution is simple, easy to follow and 100% successful whether it’s bouldering, sport climbing or trad. The details are section 3 of my book.

With that out of the way, there is an argument for some girls for a little dedicated work on the larger upper body muscles. In some cases, girls who can move confidently and have strong fingers struggle to clock up enough mileage on steep powerful terrain to ‘fill in’ their lack of upper body power.

The best way to address this is simply by climbing on steep ground with well spaced holds that are big enough that you can actually climb all session long. In many climbing walls, the number of steep juggy problems on the boulder walls aren’t numerous enough to prevent boredom. Answer: ask to set some more yourself. Steep juggy routes does it too - especially if you climb them with your feet on features only. Sometimes though, a little supplementary weights for a few months is useful to get you off the starting line.

I wouldn’t lean on them permanently, because the strength gains will eventually be more than cancelled out by how badly weights make you climb. Basic exercises like a work out of pull-ups (probably assisted at first), lat pull-downs, press-ups, seated rows (but not the low resistance aerobic type), and maybe some hanging leg raises and clean and jerk are all good. Do more of the ones you can feel you are really weak on. A few sets of each, a few times a week, for a few months should get you to a stage where you can drop the weights and progress to doing all the work on steep powerful real climbing moves.

Above all, don’t be intimidated by the ‘wads’ at the bouldering wall with tops off and making loud grunts. They don’t bite! They are often a useful source of new problems to work on, if nothing else. Just remember to burn them off occasionally on the balancy wall problems and high-steps..

Golfers/Tennis elbow etc - what eccentrics do.

2011-02-06T17:20:00.000Z

I’ve been asked a lot about eccentrics which are a really big part of successful rehab from tendonosis, in climbers that’s usually Golfer’s or Tennis elbow. What to they do? How do they work to heal the tendon?

There are no definitive answers, in fact, right now the various teams around the western world researching such things are arguing more about this subject now than they were a few years ago. Here is a little discourse on where things are right now.

The protocol of eccentric wrist curls was first brought to prominence by two Canadian physiotherapists (Stanish and Curwin) who reported very impressive and consistent success rates with their tennis elbow patients using a protocol that stopped short of provoking pain in the tendon. Since then, lots of studies have followed over the past decade and a half, also generally reporting good or excellent results with various protocols. These days, the evidence is mounting that nearly everyone with elbow epicondyle tendinosis should be able to get rid of it without resorting to surgery, so long as they do the exercises (the hard bit!), do them right and eliminate the original cause (the other hard bit!).

Protocol - The various different research teams have, generally speaking, had success with three different protocols. One is to do 3 set of 10 reps daily, with a weight that stops just short of provoking pain throughout the exercise. A second is similar, but at an intensity that provokes a little pain in the final set. The third protocol, favoured in a string of papers by a Swedish researcher Hakan Alfredson and his team, is to do 3 sets of 15 reps daily at an intensity that causes mild pain throughout. Several other teams replicated good results using eccentrics only three days a week.

The allowance for pain during the rehab exercises runs counter to much of orthodox sports medicine, even from researchers in the same field. Far from being settled, it’s a question that is only just being opened in tendon research right now. However, the successful healing demonstrated by Alfredson’s protocol does speak for itself. Briefly, the idea behind it is that tendons suffering tendonosis (degenerative tissue changes) grow numerous and sensitive new nerve endings that serve as a protective measure to self limit the condition. In order to stimulate the tendon enough to grow new collagen and remodel immature scar tissue, the exercise must be a little painful. If the exercise progression is correct, a little exacerbation in the first few weeks should give way to steady pain ratings while the exercise intensity gradually goes up.

So why eccentrics only? Well a lot of researchers were unsatisfied with the rather simplistic explanation that this mode of contraction (lengthening under load) preferentially loaded the tendon rather than the muscle, preventing the muscle from getting strong ‘too quickly’. It’s true that muscles respond better to a combination of concentric and eccentric loading. What tendon strength responds best to is nearly impossible to research (would you let a man in a white coat train you for weeks, chop your bicep tendon out and pull it on a strain gauge until it snaps?).

One idea from Alfredson was that the eccentric loading breaks up the adhesions of disorganised scar tissue, as well as abnormal blood vessels and free nerve endings that proliferate in degenerative tendons, allowing both pain free stimulation and collagen maturation. There are various other ideas about how the tendon responds biochemically to eccentric loading related to growth factors, inflammatory processes and other very complicated processes of cellular messaging.

An intriguing new hypothesis is emerging that tendonosis might be down to underuse, rather than an overuse injury as it’s traditionally been perceived. Research into painful achilles and patellar tendons is suggesting that unequal distribution of loading exists within tendons that are chronically loaded at a certain joint range. Some areas are overworked and strained, other areas ‘stress shielded’ become atrophied and weak, and eventually strain as well. This lends weight to the importance of technique, training design and posture as being the direct causes of these injuries in at least a proportion of cases. There is some evidence that eccentric loading allows more even loading in the tendon, stimulating both the overused and underused portions in a way that allows them to recover normal collagen content and arrangement.

Whatever the underlying mechanism, there is quite convincing evidence that these exercises are the thing to do and seem to get through to even the most unresponsive tendons, except in a few extremely advanced cases where the tendon has been trashed so severely it literally turns to bone. Which protocol you choose largely comes down to experimentation I’m afraid, as no studies have compared the effectiveness of each in a reliable way. Personally, I’ve found that either pain free, or with a little pain worked on all three of my injured epicondyles (two now symptom free, one more recent injury well on the road to complete recovery).

People tend to fail at this by simply not disciplining themselves to do the exercises. Simple as that. I’ve read a couple of studies that demonstrated clearly that tennis elbow sufferers tended to recover much better on identical protocols if they were done with the physio there.

Remember that doing these exercises, although a gift to climbers who are suffering chronically, are only one part of the response. Unless your technique, posture, training all change to remove the reason you got injured in the first place, it’ll probably come back the minute you start trying to push your grade or training volume again.

This post is just a snippet about one aspect of elbow rehab. The above discussion should reinforce that healing a tendon for sport is a massive field and way more than a few blog posts. There is much more you should know - about the stretching, fitting the rehab in with climbing, and the detail of the changes to make in your technique, posture, training, lifestyle. Hence I’m writing the book. I know, I know, it’s not out yet… I’m working hard on it, but couldn’t resist a moment out to write this as I’ve been asked so many times…

Happy curling

Base training detail

2011-01-03T12:25:00.000Z

I was just talking on my main blog about my own training over the past few weeks, building a base of strength and addressing various fitness/physiological issues at the start of the new year. Various folk have asked I elaborate a bit on this.

The normal progression of a new macrocycle is generally to begin with high volume, low amplitude work (with oscillations within smaller cycles) and gradually progress to higher intensity work with more rest as you get closer to when you need the fitness for your goal routes.

If you live in the northern UK then the dark months of Nov-Jan of are a good time to mark one training season’s end and begin again with a new period of foundation training. The tricky thing for most is resisting the temptation to rest and have a mini ‘peak’ because something (like Gritstone) happens to be also in condition right now. The decisions about the trade off between short term ‘peaks’ and long term progress are totally down to you. But the detail of that is another blog post…

If you have a ‘dead’ month or two and want to do a base training phase then usually keeping the intensity low and progressively increasing volume to a high level is the thing to do. The idea is to get your body used to a high training load. But increasing volume rather than intensity is less injurious than racking up intensity early on. It’s also a great (essential if you are advanced) time to address any strength deficits, niggling causes of recurrent injury or technical flaws you might have. For girls this might be a little weights or pull-ups to strengthen comparatively weak shoulders and arms. For guys this is likely to be rotator-cuff exercises and stretches to realign gorilla shoulders (I’m doing this 90 mins per day right now).

High volume means doing something every day, even at an intermediate level. But because intensity is low, rather than feeling wasted, you’ll probably feel really good. Certainly this phase for me leaves me feeling fit, refreshed and highly motivated for the training that follows in February and beyond.

Some typical components for a base phase:

-Bouldering with short rests on problems/angles you know you’re bad at. No getting addicted to one problem and repeatedly thrashing at it.
-Static or CRAC stretching of the muscles around the hip joint. For men especially hamstrings and hip adductors.
-Full stretching and exercise workout to correct shoulder instabilities/postural faults.
-Repeated drills of particular moves you are bad at e.g. Foot swaps.
-Fall training on lead, LOTS of it.
-Weights to address muscle weakness or injuries.

New year message for your training plan

2010-12-28T17:38:00.000Z

As another year draws to a close think of all the training/climbing wall/ crag sessions you’ve done in the past year.

Now think of the grade increase you’ve made in the past year. Not your ‘best ever’ grade when everything came good, but your day-in, day-out regular climbing grade. What do you warm up on; 6b or 7c? What can you onsight 100% of the time? What can you always redpoint in a day?

Odds are it’s pretty much the same. But even if I has risen by half a grade or more, try dividing that grade increase by the number of regular sessions you have through the year. Wall sessions particularly all kind of merge into one. Let’s say you did 200 sessions at the wall and increased half a grade. That’s 1/400th of a grade per session improvement. Not great, for an intermediate climber anyway.

Next year, what sessions could you dream up that would crank that fraction up a bit, or a lot? A session with a good coach. A change of climbing wall. Finally attacking the overhangs you’ve avoided for no good reason. What about a whole year of ONLY overhangs?

You can afford to miss a few 1/400th of a grade sessions for the sake of something else. How about a whole week of practicing leader falls? One after the other, every day. 200 leader falls in one week. What would that do to your onsight grade? A lot more than another year of your regular climbing wall session.

My guess is that if you spent the entire next year doing climbing sessions that were nothing like you’ve ever done before, next new year you’d be counting a bigger grade increase. And anyway, what’s to lose by changing everything? Seriously. Another year of same old...

Have a great 2011 climbing year.

A rehab story

2010-12-11T19:41:00.001Z

A Rehab Story from Jacob Fuerst on Vimeo.

Nice story of Josh Wharton coming back from a serious injury. For me this is a nice reminder that the diligent work of rehab exercises, no matter how much of a drag (swimming with old folks!), pay off. Also, the rehab is just as much about overcoming the psychological challenges as the physical/practical ones. Like myself in the past and lots of others, it strikes me that the injury ends up making you feel more positive about your climbing in the end.

Thanks to Andrew's blog for the heads up on this.

Boulderer's transition to route climbing

2010-12-03T13:28:00.000Z

Ross asked me recently about making the transition to routes from an apprenticeship in bouldering. With ‘bouldering only’ climbing walls becoming ever more popular, there is an increasing body of young climbers who have an entire apprenticeship on them and make a difficult transition to route climbing after a year or two.

These climbers get pumped really easily on F6s even though they can boulder Font 7s. Their initial feeling is to blame lack of endurance fitness, which is of course a part of the problem. But a few weeks of racking up the route laps will see a lot of progress in fitness.

The bigger, but less understood problem is hidden in their technique. These guys have spend 100% of their climbing time trying to learn to pull as hard as possible, on 3-10 move boulder problems. The technique of route climbing - to pull as gently as possible - is a totally different technique. You can’t learn it overnight.

Often, they want to find a training solution to climbing routes that still involves using the local bouldering wall - i.e. Circuits. That’s fine in theory, but it’s definitely the hard way. The reason is that to learn to climb efficiently for routes, saving energy as opposed to climbing explosively, is best done on long pitches that take 2 minutes to several hours (as in winter climbing). So the best thing to do is get out and climb some big routes, tons of them.

Fiddling with a wire placement for five minutes will always teach you how to relax and find the most efficient position much more effectively than doing circuits or lots of easy problems. Even a week of sport climbing will get you further than months of trying to learn route climbing technique on a boulder wall. Get out and climb at a standard that allows you to do 12 x 30m routes a day or more. That’s 2500 metres climbed in a week minimum - hard to achieve in the boulder wall. By the end of a week your movement and style will be so different.

Training for winter climbing - some thoughts

2010-12-02T23:17:00.000Z

Donald King ready for a big pitch of weirdness on Unicorn VII,8 Glencoe

At this time of year, especially with the deluge of snow, everyone is suddenly psyched to get in their best shape for winter climbing (what? you mean you haven’t been training for months?!).

It’s funny to me how much the prevailing memes about training for winter climbing have changed since I started climbing. In the early nineties, some misguided old souls still trained for winter by walking up hills in the October sleet and bivvying out to harder themselves up. That, together with eating some extra pies to put on a good ‘storm coat’.

Fast forward to 2010 and everyone talks about nothing else apart from dry tooling, dry tooling, dry tooling. Who is right?

To gain some insight, consider the recurring training-for-climbing mystery of the underachieving board beast. ‘beasting’ is all the range right now in bouldeing. Get on the ‘beastmaker’, get ‘beasting’ and ‘beast’ your way to success. Except the strongest lads that are permanent furniture under the steepest part of your local climbing wall somehow aren’t the ones climbing the hardest climbs. ‘beast’ and ‘best’ are linked, but not the same. Right now in bouldering, technique is undervalued. I don’t see it changing for a few years yet. The attraction of the simplicity of pure strength training is too tempting for angry young men of the climbing wall.

Along with the rise in availability of dry tooling in the UK at least, comes a swing in the same direction (pun wasn’t intentional) - towards looking at the whole sport through the lens of how hard you can pull on ice axes. If you’ve ever been to a dry tooling comp, you’ll witness some eyebrow raising displays of lock-off strength, not usually from the winner of the comp. The winner won’t be the weakest thats for sure, but they’ll be the one who magically climbed the problem with the method that you just would never have spotted, and neither did anyone else (especially if they were too busy unleashing the beast).

The pie eating, sleep out in a seet storm method represents the opposite extreme, both are probably equally ineffective at getting you up hard winter routes, if you use them in isolation.

So my appeal with this post is not to use either pie eating, bivvying in your garden or pull-ups on ice axes in isolation. The best winter climbers are the ones who have an uncanny knack of getting up just about any sort of weirdness you throw at them. In fact, if I could do only one type of training for Scottish style winter climbing, it would be to go and climb weirdness of all shapes and sizes.

The cruxes of winter routes are always weird. So if you melt your technical climber brain into that of neanderthal with nothing but ‘pull up and pull harder’ in the movement repertoire, you’ll fail. Winter climbing done well generally feels like a yoga workout in the cold. You’ll do a move you’d never even thought of before on every pitch. Train for this by climbing the weirdest things possible and do it well. Climb chimneys, loose rock, wet rock, slabs, V-slots, flared offwidths, sentry boxes, buildings, drainpipes, bouncy castles - whatever you see, climb up and over it. Only when you have the cat-like ability to climb any sort of feature that nature throws at you, will your tooling power really count.

Now that’s out of the way, some points about dry tooling:

1 The movement is very fast, similar to rock climbing. This is nothing like real mixed climbing. Climbing problems you have wired accentuates this problem and you’ll not develop either technique or endurance in the right way. Making up new problems on the spot and changing them constantly helps slow things down and keep you hanging on longer and learning to relax and save energy. The ice holds in the video below are one novel solution to this problem (a lot of people ask me where you can get hold of them - here!). You need to keep clean technique to make upward progress. Rushing at it will be terminally counterproductive, which is exactly the drill you need for the real thing.

2 People who do a lot of tooling tend to do it on roofs a lot and get hung up by learning roof tooling specific footwork tricks. That’s great if you are training for the cineplex, but if VIIs on Scottish mixed cliffs is the objective, then the key technical skill is to learn to keep the axe still no matter what other body part you are moving. The hooks on hard winter routes are poor and directional. It’s lack of awareness of axe movement as you reach ‘in extremis’ that causes a lot of the falls in real mixed climbs.

3 Be aware that most indoor tooling on resin holds is just hooking. That’s great practice, because it feels scary at first and once you are comfortable with thin hooks it’s a great confidence booster. But when I wee climbers who tool a lot on real mixed climbs, they miss all the obvious torques, steins, axe head and shaft jams and a myriad of other ways to use your tools that beardy mixed climbers from the 80’s were proper experts at.

4 Dealing with hooks on real mixed climbs often involves a bit of ice as well. Often the hook relies on a tiny bit of ice or frozen moss to work. If you mess around with it too much by taking your axe off it and replacing it, or just plain whacking the hell out of it, you’ll waste it. Learn to know when you have to use the first time placement or nothing. You’ll probably have to train that skill ‘on the job’. But the odd hour snatched on road cuttings or climbing thin-ice boulder problems at ground level while you wait for the roads to clear will teach you a huge amount about this kind of thing.

5 Falling off in mixed climbing is generally not cool. I’ve definitely noticed a trend for people falling off mixed routes more readily than when I started climbing. That’s all fine if you really know how to place safe gear in icy cracks. But if you don’t know what you are doing, don’t go throwing yourself off icy cliffs too readily. Be careful to keep the big separation in your mind between the dry tooling wall and the big scary real mixed climbs.

Review: Racing Weight

2010-12-02T21:29:00.000Z

Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald is the first dedicated book for athletes on maintaining an optimal body composition. I first heard about it a few months ago and raced to get hold of a copy. As soon as I read it I bought a stack of them for my shop (right here) as I felt this is a must have book for any climber investing time and effort into manipulating their weight for climbing. I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while to explain why.

First off, climbers will notice that this is a book aimed at endurance athletes like cyclists and runners. Why is that important? Because their training is totally different to ours. Aerobic athletes need to burn larger volumes of calories for more hours than climbers do. But despite this, much of the book is relevant to us and even the bits that aren’t help to inform what us climbers should be doing in our nutritional regime.

Fitzgerald has all the credentials to write this book - a successful athlete (triathlon), nutritionalist, coach and professional writer. Although he references the scientific literature throughout, the text is still easy to read if you aren’t a sports scientist and is both well laid out and clear in its messages.

The discussion early on comparing the sizes, shapes and demands of many different sports was very illuminating. We are totally not alone in our challenging nutritional and physiological needs as climbers. While endurance athletes have one killer advantage in the weight loss game (that their sports use up a ton of calories), they also struggle because any caloric deficit interferes seriously with training intensity. If they don’t eat really well at all times, they get unfit.

Fitzgerald outlines in excellent and convincing detail how many angles we can come at these problems using the content, volume, timing and quality of our diet. I learned a great deal about all of these different components, as well as reinforcing a lot of what I had previously learnt in my own study of this subject.

I’d also read a lot of research in recent years about the tactics of appetite management, perhaps the ultimate nemesis for those permanently adrift of their fighting weight. It was fascinating to see an up to date review of all of this in one place. An excellent chapter and surely useful to just about anyone never mind just athletes.

The only place I’d like to have seen an extended discussion was that of intermittent fasting - an increasingly popular protocol in several non-cardiovascular sports that depend on low body fat percentage. Fitzgerald essentially dismisses it as unsuitable for endurance athletes due to the inability to fuel daily training sessions. This totally makes sense. But given that a lot of the book seems to be written with a wider audience of athletes or the general public in mind, I was surprised that more space wasn’t given to it. I suspect that lack of solid research on it’s effects on sport performance was the main reason. It does however leave an opening for someone else to discuss this aspect (or better still research it!) further with a greater range of sports and applications in mind.

As a coach myself I observe climbers constantly applying bits and pieces of nutritional tactics from all kinds of sources; pseudo-scientific diet books aimed at the mass market, knowledge adapted haphazardly from other sports, out of date knowledge or simple unconscious habits. In my view, every climber who cares about training or knows their body composition could be better should read this text.

It’s in the shop here.

Tactics: Climbing in the cold

2010-11-28T22:46:00.000Z

On my main blog I just added the video above about a new 8b I did in Glen Nevis. It was climbed in temperatures of Minus 2 or 3 with a light breeze. I thought it would be a good idea to write a post about working around the cold for doing redpoints like this. The tactics are fairly simple:

1 Start off very warm. Make sure you wear enough clothing so you arrive at the crag at the point of overheating. This way, by the time you’ve faffed and put your gear on, you’ll be at the right temperature to start climbing, instead of freezing already and ripe for an injury or at least a cold pump. If there's no walk-in, you'll have to go for a good 10 minute run in your duvet instead, even if you just got out of a warm car.

2 Warm up on the project. Go bolt to bolt, still dressed in your warm clothes. Make sure you finish by doing a medium difficulty link that gets a bit of a pump on and leaves you feeling a little overheated.

3 Lower down and don’t stand still. It doesn’t matter (for most people anyway) how big your duvet jacket is, if you stand still in the cold for any length of time, you’ll struggle to keep warm enough muscles and fingers to go for your redpoint. Ideally your light pump will have been recovered from after about 15 minutes. During that time don’t stop - get everything ready, blow on your hands, run and jump around. And then get your shoes back on and go for it. You don’t want your heart rate to drop towards resting at all in the whole session.

4 If you do need to stand still, usually to belay. You’ll need to fully warm your body up again. Walk off for a good ten minutes and then power back up the hill to arrive at the crag really hot. By the time you have your shoes on and tied in you’ll be set. Jumping around at the crag to re-warm doesn’t usually cut it. It follows that sport climbing sessions in the cold are much better done in blocks, i.e. Your partner belays you for a whole session with warm-up and redpoints before switching and they re-warm by walking somewhere else for their session. It’s pretty hard to do it swapping belays without a lot of aerobic work in between.

5 Hands - They’ll start off warm from a gloved and duvet clad walk-in. Keeping a warm core is by far the biggest thing you can do to stop them getting too cold and to rescue them if they do. Ideally you don’t want to have gloves on after your warm-up because it’ll soften your fingertips too much. Instead, keep the heart going and jam your hands in your roasting hot armpits to keep them warm before you go for the redpoint. If they aren’t roasting hot, go back to point 4. If it’s short route (like 15 metres) you’ll be fine, but any longer or with a shake out during the redpoint and numb fingers will be a problem even if you started off with hot hands. A ‘teabag’ style handwarmer in your chalk bag is often enough, and was used in the video above. Make sure you open it at the start of the session as they take a good while to reach maximum temperature. You might want to supplement it with the armpit treatment on your shake out if it’s a really good rest.

So, nothing complicated really. Where people go wrong is they just cant resist the temptation to stand still if they start to feel cold, or they go for a jog but not nearly for long enough. Enjoy your cold rock sessions!

Avoiding pulley injuries - the hard and easy ways

2010-11-18T23:20:00.001Z

In the comments of my last post, John asked about how to avoid crimping all the time and hence reduce the build up of stress and microscopic damage that leads to pulley tears.

Of course there is the short answer of ‘just openhand everything’ and you’ll get better at it. When it comes down to it, that’s what you have to do. It’s not easy to take the temporary drop in climbing grade while you gain openhanded strength. Most climbers who’ve not had pulley injuries yet are miserably weak at openhanding and really have to take a hit. But it’s your choice - it’s only your ego you have to beat.

I’ll make a very detailed case in Rock ‘til you drop not only for why you must do it, but all the ways you can make it easier on yourself. However, since you’ll have to wait a little longer for that, here are a few headlines for now:

- ‘It’s just training’. The biggest enemy of changing habits like crimping is that climbers are always trying to compete, even in training. When you go to the climbing wall, you cannot bear to do something differently to normal because you’ll have to take a grade hit for a while. And maybe your training isn’t going perfect anyway so you are trying extra hard to the standard you’ve become accustomed to. There is only one way around it; stand back and realise that you are just training. You are just pulling on plastic blobs. Who cares what the number is? If you think other people do, you’re kidding yourself. Sure it’s ok to compete once in a while. Climb openhanded most of the time, and allow yourself to crimp when it really matters. If you don’t, you’ll only have to later when your broken pulleys won’t let you do anything else.

- Get off the starting blocks. If your openhanded strength really is that spectacularly rubbish in comparison to your crimp strength, you could get yourself off the starting blocks by a little supplementary fingerboard work with a 4 finger and 3 finger openhanded grip. Use the protocol I described in 9 out of 10. After 10 or 20 sessions you shouldn’t have to take such an ego hammering blow when you climb for real with an openhanded grip. But don’t forget that the subtleties of the movement are realy quite different than when crimping; getting comfortable with openhanded needs both the strength part as well as actually learning how to climb with it on real moves.

- Know the score. A lot of people I’ve coached reckon they just aren’t cut out for climbing openhanded. They usually invent a reason like the shape of their hands or the length of their fingers. Rubbish. If it feels weak, it’s only because you’re weak. And the only reason you’re weak on this grip is because you don’t do it. I challenge anyone to climb solely openhanded for 20 sessions or more and still tell me it doesn’t work for them.

- Do it on easy routes first. Very experienced or expert climbers have a disadvantage in that their habits are very set and egos expect very consistent performance. But the advantage they have is that a lot of the movement decisions are quite automatic. Someone who climbs 8a+ can probably do a 7c while having conversation. So there is room on easier routes during warm-up or mileage climbs to concentrate on learning a new technique like openhanding.

Crimp everything and you will suffer for it down the line. Don’t worry about it too much - most people have to learn to openhand the hard way (post-injury). But injury is arguably the most wonderful motivator for changing the way you climb. That’s what happened to me. At 17 I scoffed at openhanded climbing. 5 years of constant pulley injuries later I couldn’t believe how much better it is than crimping on the vast majority of holds.

Injury therapy in Margalef

2010-11-12T17:48:00.000Z

About a month ago, on the crux sidepull of Muy Caliente E10 6c, I tore a ligament in my DIP joint of my left index finger. I spent the rest of my week long trip there climbing openhanded on it, or at least not using my thumb on half-crimps. Thankfully none of the other routes I did needed any crimping.

After I got home, I spent the next three weeks climbing solely openhanded on my board, bouldering outside or sticking to slabs on trad, even if pretty hard slabs. The tear was immediately painful on crimping, slightly painful on half-crimps but totally fine openhanded. This was all going fine, although the intensity of training on my board was probably still a bit much for it. What is always needed in this situation is a change of scenery.

A couple of weeks hard climbing in the steep walls and roofs of Margalef was exactly the therapy I needed. The point here is that the injured part must be relatively unloaded for a good several weeks to give it a chance to progress and form a strong scar. But doing nothing tends to cause that healing progress to falter. Choosing climbing that will keep everything moving, responding and basically stimulated means healing progresses faster. So the goal is to look for a type of climbing that is kind on the injury but lets you climb hard and keep your fitness. In the case of this particular injury that simply meant climbs that don’t need crimps, or at least that only need them rarely and you can get around it. A lot of the time it’s exactly the same with pulley tears.

In two weeks of pocket pulling on routes F8b and up I didn’t aggravate the injury once but gained fitness and gave the finger a good stimulus to heal. It totally worked, and now at the end of the trip it’s feeling painless testing it on hard crimping.

Of course that doesn’t mean it’s gone. I’m sure if I spent a week crimping my way up some British limestone face climbs, it would soon go backwards again. It just means it’s made great progress, and with a few more weeks of the same and no mistakes, it should be getting more and more resistant to full normal climbing.

Tactics: Anticipation

2010-10-17T23:58:00.002+01:00

In observing climbers I’m always looking for running themes that tend to characterise successful climbers versus the unsuccessful ones. My definition of unsuccessful here is not defined by a given grade but just by failure to make continued improvement over time, almost irrespective of the type or intensity of training they do. Above a certain (fairly low) level of regular climbing time, climbers should tend to get better, just by learning better tactics. How does this happen?

The core skill needed, and missing from so many climber’s fundamental approach to climbing is that of anticipation. In a nutshell, anticipation as a tactic is simply thinking “If I do this now, what effects will it have later?” It could be later in the move, later in the attempt, the climbing day or even in your whole climbing career.

This fundamental basic approach is visible in so many fields not only of climbing but also in task management generally. People have a tendency to knuckle down to the immediate task and allow themselves to be distracted from the wider need to step back every so often and re-assess which tasks are appropriate and how everything is going. “I’m too busy getting on with it to stop and have a re-think”. Successful people either inherently do this or have taught themselves to remember to do this.

In climbing, it’s most obvious in mountaineering situations. You start of the day with a given plan and a long series of small tasks that make up the entire day. The problems start when the unpredictability of mountaineering changes the constraints in real time. Usually this affects you by slowing you down or tiring you out more than expected. Climbers get into trouble when they are too busy following the ‘old’ plan that they either don’t notice the new constraints (weather changes, snow, difficulty, errors etc) or fail to anticipate their effects on the old plan and update it with a new one.

Yet the same thing happens in so many aspects of climbing, including rock climbing movement and even things like planning your training. Part of the natural tendency for us to behave like this I’m sure comes from our aversion of the status quo changing or of loss.

Measuring the constraints that affect your plan for anything you are doing requires you to face the fact that the desired outcome, or route used to get to it, might not happen like you hoped or expected. It might no longer be realistic at all. Or perhaps it never was, but it’s taken going part-way down the path for this to become obvious. Either way, it’s easier just to keep your head down and stick to the plan. But it’s more likely you’ll fail eventually with this approach. And fail more painfully - with more time lost and effort expended.

For some reason, good climbers, athletes or people in general seem to be able to get past the uncomfortability of the idea that although you might want the plan to work out just as you want, it just isn’t going to happen. In the same way that throwing out old clutter or starting anything with a clean slate gives a weird sense of refreshing bold clarity and therapeutic freedom - the old no longer seems important once you’ve let it go.

Summary: Are you blindly following your own plan without reflection? Is the plan still appropriate based on what you are learning on the way? Do you really know it needs changing but are resistant for no obvious reason?

NB: The opposite problem - of failure to stick to any plan for long enough to actually get anywhere - is less common but just as ineffective. I’m thinking of climbers that keep looking for another hold when it’s obvious there is only one real choice. Or climbers whose only measure of progress seems to be when you actually get to the top of the route (and so never try hard ones for long enough to actually create a chance of doing them).

Lessons from health promotion

2010-10-07T21:49:00.002+01:00

Mark makes the simple but seemingly obvious point about why the health promotion sector has been roundly failing to get people to change their habits. If you don’t have time to click through the stories, the short version is that the most senior elements of the medical profession are still attempting to get people to take control of their own risk behaviours for health - smoking, drinking and getting fat - by issuing a ethical and moral appeal direct at the individual. Mark points out that it cannot work on it’s own. We are social beings and it’s too hard to act individually swim against the tide of what everyone around you is doing.

Kids that go to boarding school end up with totally different accents from their parents - almost permanently. Go on a holiday where there isn’t a culture of sitting around, drinking, eating and not doing much (like a mountaineering trip) and you’ll probably come home a pound or two lighter, without even trying.

Some goes for your sport performance, training, whatever. The best way to get into a national team is to spend a stack of time with everyone else who is doing the same. I feel that it’s not necessary to make this a permanent move. It’s about hardwiring a new set of habits, norms, standards. It takes a bit of time to get there. But once you are there it’s possible to operate in isolation with only sporadic refreshers. In other words, beyond a certain point you can partially insulate yourself from settling for a second rate effort at being good at sport, even if you regularly train with others who do.