How to Belay - Top Rope | Ep.10

All right welcome back to belay master class in previous episodes I explained every single piece of gear involved in sport climbing so now you know how far you can push it and when it could fail and now we can put all of that in practice. In this video I will start from top row belaying and then in the follow-up videos I will cover lead belaying and my mega study on soft catches where I'm gonna compare different techniques to give a soft catch and challenge some of the old myths and then later some sketchy billying situations and before I begin two quick notes first of all I'm not gonna talk about how to use bullying devices in these videos because I covered that deeply in this video so if you are new to climbing this is a prerequisite before you continue watching and the second one I will try to illustrate imagine you want to take your friend for a ride with a car but you don't know how to drive chances are you wouldn't just watch a YouTube video here now I'm demonstrating the steering wheel ah I got this let's go while YouTube is great for gathering information you still need an experienced person next to you when you're practicing your skills. All right! Let's do some top roping shall we? So the first question which goes from my mind as a belayer is what's at the anchor and actually most of the people ignore this question and you shouldn't I'm not gonna go too deep into anchors in this video but as a bare minimum you should make sure that you're not gonna top rope on a single quick draw and in a situation where you cannot see the anchor if it's hidden or too far for you to see it you should ask a person who set the top rope if it's safe to the top rope on it. Next we need to decide which end of the Rope we are going to use for climbing and in general there are two situations one like this where one end of the rope goes through the quick draws while the other one goes straight to the anchor and the second one is where both of the ends go straight to the anchor this case is more common in climbing gyms where the walls are not overhanging. So let's say this is the anchor of our route and the rope is already clipped in. In general you want to avoid your rope from twisting, so if you know from which side your climber will be approaching the anchor it's a good idea to believe from the other side so if the climber is coming from the right delaying on the left strand of the rope makes more sense while sometimes the anchor might be facing the wall in that case it's better to belay on this strand which goes out from the wall and let the climber approach closer to the wall if you do this then there is no way to twist the rope. However, if you would delay on the rope which is closer to the wall and you go far away now you can twist the ropes as the climber is approaching. While outside like we are today it's more likely that somebody did the route on lead and in that case you will have one of the ends going through the quick draws and in this case you have to evaluate the risk of human bowling. If the route is overhanging and the climber is on the rope end which goes to the anchor that might end up in unnecessarily big swing out. The same happens if the root is traversing to the side here even getting back to the root might be very complicated. So to avoid such problems it's best to climb on the rope which goes through the quick draws in this case as the climber moves up she will need to unclip the quick draws but in the case of the fall it's much easier to get back to the root also in case this is not the last climber climbing this route as she finishes the route on her way down she should back clip in the quick draws so that the next climber could enjoy the same setup so if the route is traversing climbing on the rope which goes through the quick draws is recommended however if the route goes in a straight line you can also climb on the other end of the rope the benefit of that would be that now as the climber moves up she won't need to unclip the quick draws anymore but the drawback is that now she will have two ropes in front of her potentially getting in the way of climbing. All right back to us Charlie is ready to climb and since this route is slightly overhanging he's gonna climb on the end which goes through the quick draws and the next question for me is where do I stand as a belayer. Normally the most comfortable position is directly under the anchor because if he takes a fall all my weight is being lifted up if I would be standing somewhere far if he takes a fall I might be dragged forward a little bit this is more of an issue for lightweight delayers not for me but other things to consider is that you don't want your rope to rub against your climber or if there is a sharp edge of the rock maybe going into different position might reduce the friction of the rope so in general be smart about your placement. And the last thing before my climber starts climbing what we have to do is a body check and most of the people do this part incorrectly and I think partially because even of the name of the body check what I mean is if I would just check my body and my buddy would just check me we would for sure fail at some point so instead of body check I like to call it a system check and this is what I mean. So I start by checking my harness that it's not twisted and my buckle is good then I check my carabiner to make sure that it's locked then my belaying device to make sure that it's inserted in the correct orientation and then I start tracing my rope to see where my rope goes. Aha! It goes to the anchor I know that the anchor is safe then I trace the Rope back to my climber and then I check the knot of my climber and then I check my climber's harness and I can see that he could tuck this little piece away but apart from that everything looks good. So the main point is to check everything from my harness all the way to the anchor back to my climber if I don't do that I'm not even sure if we are tied in the same rope and I've been in this situation in a climbing gym where my belayer was like yeah I gotcha you're safe to climb and then I look into myself look where my rope goes and then I noticed that my belayer is belaying me on different rope than I am on. And another very common mistake which is linked with our egos is when you're checking your partner and your partner is using a knot but you're not familiar with usually it happens if some bowline variations then instead of saying yeah! looks good you can go you should say hey I'm not familiar with this knot could you please double check it yourself this is much safer than pretending that you know what you're doing and finally if your belayer has long hair or some loose clothing you should take care of that because if it gets into the playing device while you're lowering the climber self-rescue is really hard out of that situation I've been there and I've seen a lot of girls getting in trouble alright so now we are finally ready to climb but Charlie wait a little bit go down so before the climber goes up it's super important to establish a good communication between your climber and your belayer so before my climber goes up he has to say climbing! And I have to respond climb on! Because if we don't do that my climber might start climbing and I will be doing something else and not be belaying him and he doesn't know that and as a climber you don't have to even look back is my belayer with me you just say climbing! You have a response climb on! And you know that your belayer is with you okay climbing! -climb on! And here again if you're climbing with somebody much more experienced you might trust them so much and think that we will always watch you and neglect this communication but we are all humans we can get distracted so having this little mantra of climbing! / climb on! And then you start climbing can save you from a lot of troubles and then you don't have to look back if your belayer is with you you heard him saying climb on so while the climber is low on the route you as a belayer have to pay extra attention because there is a lot of dynamic rope between us and dynamic rope well stretches so in case the climber takes a fall you want to take and at the same time sit in the harness this stretches your end of the rope and minimizes how low the climber will fall. So in this case the route is not long so the climber doesn't go down that much, however, on longer routes the stretch can be massive and I've seen in climbers actually hitting the ground and hurting themselves and this can be avoided very easily by actively taking during the fall of the climber also if the route is very long and there is a lot of dynamic rope and there is a chance that the climber can fall close to the ground it's a good idea to pre-stretch the rope and keep the climber a little bit tighter in the beginning however, it doesn't mean that you have to do this on every single route and as you gain more experience in delaying you will learn when and how tight you want to keep your climber alright let's continue now the best player is the one that the climber cannot feel so do not try to help the climber by keeping the constant tension on the rope because in that case the climber cannot feel his balance very well and I actually might even pull him off the wall in situations where it gets overhanging or the root starts traversing to the side also when the climber finishes the route there will be always this question did he do the road himself or I kind of helped him so unnecessary in other words the climber should feel me only if he asks for it but at the same time there should be no unnecessary loops of slack dangling under his legs now if the climber needs your help he is gonna say Take! Gotcha! and here it is important to let the climber be the boss if I see him pulling up it doesn't mean that he wants to climb he said take I continue taking until he says climbing or something else so don't try to guess what's in the mind of your climber instead listen for his orders okay climbing! whooo! You picked an easy route then I picked an easy route? - You picked an easy route for this. Well, what else are you gonna top rope? It was sarcasm it's not easy Okay, unclipping! -Yep! yep am I climbing this bit -Yeah! He said there's a heel hook here Yeah! My eyes that good Come on! -Take! ah! So my climber is done and he's ready to go down and for that he has to say lower me! and I have to respond by saying lowering! lower me! lowering! and here is the trick don't try to lower like this where I am because I am going down into the bushes instead of that I stand up and I walk forward a little bit so I'm not dragged across the floor if you are very lightweight belayer you want to go all the way under the anchor and then the gravity does its job you can lower comfortably and you have to look up at your climber don't be looking somewhere else because your climber might hit something on your way down and you will not see that how is your nice and easy 7A top rope experience? Very top ropey! -Very top ropey. So instead of this Anna wait a second stop now and I start walking forward don't lower him just walk forward as she walks forward she is actively lowering the climber and now finish him finish lowering him down finish him is this easier Yes! all right now the most common mistakes of top roping first one is not taking hard when your climber is falling close to the ground the second one is constantly dragging your climber up and not letting them explore the joy of movement on the wall next issue is a little bit more serious if your climber is really inexperienced and maybe stressed as he is climbing up if he is unclipping the quick draws as he goes up when he reaches the top there is a chance that he will try to unclip the last protection point as silly as that sounds it happens and I actually had such scary situation where I used to do this pre-clean top rope setup where once my climber reaches the top the only thing they need to do is to remove this quick drone and then we can go down however one time somebody else led the root and left the top rope like so and once my climber reached the top out of habit she automatically unscrewed this quick draw removed the rope, let it go and yeah! But luckily she was standing on the ledge and we were able to communicate and fix this situation but I want to stress that these things happen and finally the most accidents in top roping happened during lowering when the belayer loses control of the brick hand and for example if he's using a grigri pulls really hard on the lever or simply lowers too fast and then burns the hand with some bling devices so yeah don't lower too fast there is nothing cool about that you are heating your equipment and you're wearing it down faster. Alright, so this was the introduction to top roping and the next video I will start covering lead billing and for now huge thank you for Mammoth and for my patreons for supporting all of this video series and if you are benefiting from it a lot and you want some karma points I've heard some rumors that there are karma points in that website and yeah hope you enjoyed this one enjoy climbing and see you in the next one!

Channel: Hard Is Easy

Views: 51,959

Keywords: How to belay, belaying outdoors, belaying indoors, how to secure a climber, secure a climber

Id: w5ybJwZPZAQ

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023