How to learn climbing technique

[Music] would you trust the absolute consistency of your climbing technique to put yourself in this position knowing that just one little mistake would mean death i obviously do although i accept that the probability mistakes is never totally zero we're all human to me the fact that free soloing is so scary to actual rock climbers is actually a testament to the there's a really huge range of technic learning outcomes with different exposures to technique training so how do you learn technique such that free soloing isn't really that big a deal in this episode i'm going to explore that after i focus on finishing this climb our performance in climbing is a product of the decisions that we make or allow to be made for us if you make the right decisions then i think that learning good climbing technique is not all that difficult it should feel like swimming with the tide i think the easiest way to lay this episode out is to just list things that i think are important ingredients for technique learning and i suppose i could separate them into practical things and then the principles that underlie them so i'm going to start at the practical end and then zoom out to the principles that explain why they work later on in the video and hopefully that will reinforce why it's worth considering all of the points that i'll discuss as we go along remember that each of these components is not sufficient on its own to produce improvement they're kind of like a recipe i think in that it takes the combination of them to make anything happen at all if you cherry pick which ones you're comfortable with that might give you slower progress or even none at all none at all because their combination works in a catalytic fashion i without the catalyst you can expose yourself to all the training you like but nothing happens what i'm going to do here is start with what i actually do and then later focus on how to do it so the first one is to do on-site climbing i hugely enjoy projecting climbs over multiple attempts and if you know anything about my climbing history then it's pretty obvious that this is my favorite style of climbing however my foundations of technical ability and climbing were only partially built on projecting on-site climbing played a huge role as well which is more important is impossible to answer so i i really can't tell you that you'll have optimal results by splitting your time with x percentage on red point climbing versus on-site climbing all i can really say with any confidence is that both are important i'll expand more on why on-site climbing works later on based on the concept of timely feedback but here i just want to draw a simple distinction between what happens in on-site climbing versus projecting in on-site climbing we're faced with an endless string of new moves that we've never seen before and we've got to try and process and solve them move by move classifying them into types of move that we've seen before and then fine-tuning the details from second to second as we're actually executing the moves the easier grades well below our limits we can take a bit of time to do this and it gets harder and harder closer to our limit and there's more time pressure that time pressure increasingly forces us to read and execute moves with intuition without letting clunky conscious thought interfere in every detail but we can still record those moves in our memory for later conscious analysis and i want you to hold that thought for later on so the combination of the newness of each move in on-siting and the sheer volume of them gives us a big exposure to problem solving and importantly we get feedback on our technical decisions every time we either solve a move and keep going or mess up a move and fall off that feedback is like the fertilizer that makes our ability growth we've got to see that that is where the value is and really cherish it i think however there is a limitation with on siting if we do a move in on sighting we don't get the feedback on whether there was an easier way to do the move we may have made it to the next hold but that's not all there is to climbing we don't know if we used more power than was really needed to do that move and that's power that could be saved for the moves still ahead and this type of feedback is where projecting really comes in red pointing or projecting or whatever you want to call climbing that involves falling off and trying again until you make progress gives us a type of technical feedback that is really important rather like on-site climbing it can deliver feedback on your technique via the signal of success or failure on a move but unlike on-site climbing it has the advantage of showing you over repeated attempts on that move that fine-tuning some aspect of the movement whether that's the sequence or the movement style or the use of power and or the intricacies of the balance and the body positioning and that can make the difference between a a move feeling desperate or easy projecting is just experimenting trial and error and learning what you can from that error and hopefully internalizing some increased level of technical awareness and skill that you can then carry forward to future claims but there's still more to it again in projecting the difficulty often lies in linking together a sustained sequence of moves and that's often beyond you even when you can actually do the individual moves and when you're at that stage in projecting you have to then go back and revisit each move even easier ones and ask yourself is this really the easiest way to do that move using the very least amount of strength less experienced climbers might do this quite late in the process when they get close to link in the claim and i would say that experienced red point climbers are asking this question from the get-go and if you watch high-level climbers working roots at the crag you might see them repeatedly refining easier sections of claims even though they already look like they're effortless but if they can make that sequence feel like i don't know nine percent of effort rather than ten percent then that's a little bit of energy that's left over to spend on the red point crocs higher up the side effect of this refining is that you're always learning still more about technique learning the real details if you watch my previous video about the difference between breadth and depth and movement technique you'll see why i think of this as deepening technique and i will summarize that later on in this video as well again i can't give you a prescription for how much time to spend on site climbing versus projecting all i can really suggest is that you think about which you're worst at and attack that without going too far to the extremes and definitely not knocking extremes i'm definitely not someone who thinks that balance and everything is optimal by default it's not sometimes going to the extremes is exactly the way but this context i don't think is one of them i do think that always projecting routes that are at or even beyond your ability or always on siting on terrain where you really fall off i don't think either of those extremes is optimal rather i think a broad base of on-site climbing together with a decent proportion of time devoted to claims that take maybe a couple of tries an hour of drives a session or multiple sessions that's actually better for covering your bases in terms of exposure to feedback on your movements at different levels okay we've already grasped that getting some sort of feedback on whether a movement worked well or didn't work well is the important thing for extracting learning out of a move that you made on the rock and with that in place it follows that doing lots of moves is important claim lots and lots of moves and secondly claim them on varied terrain and this really shouldn't be news to anyone that volume of practice is critical and yet people still get drawn into the temptation that there might be shortcuts to this the fact that climbers tend to keep improving for decades is testament that large numbers of moves are needed to reach expertise in our sport and the related fact is that climbers can still climb at or very close to world-class level at a more advanced age than in other sports is also a testament to just how technical a sport climbing actually is we're really playing a long game so you should get on the path and start moving i don't stop but don't expect to get very far unless you consider the points later on in this video broadly speaking sport climbing and bouldering lend themselves to slightly different movement patterns and if you see someone climbing it's often possible to hazard a decent guess about whether they are mainly a trade climber or a sport climber or a boulderer obviously your climbing style needs to reflect what you want to get good at and what you do however even in bouldering it quite frequently as an advantage to be able to move like a root climber at least some of the time and also vice versa i've seen many tribe climbers whose lack of bouldering experience really lets them down on some hard cruxes and i'm not just talking about the strength aspect here i mean the style of execution of the moves i don't think it's an accident that the consistent podium finishers in top level comp climbing are often good at both root and boulder climbing okay i made a whole video on technical repertoire so i'm just going to summarize the point here climbers have a repertoire of climbing movements this concept is slightly flexible but i still think it helps to think about technique in this way you might think of that as technical breadth they also have a level of skill with which they can execute the movements within that repertoire and you might think of this as technical depth obviously you should chase both technical breadth and depth and if you find yourself climbing with friends and think and thinking wow i wouldn't have thought of doing the move in that way or i've never seen someone do that before and if that happens a lot then that could indicate that you need to work on breadth of your technique and hopefully it meant you also just learn something new that broadens your technique conversely if another climber essentially did exactly the same move as you but they just did it better then maybe you have something to learn about the understanding or skill or consistency or the precision of the execution of that given movement skill and i think if you keep this distinction in mind in your day-to-day climbing it really helps to direct your efforts and technique learning from client to climb and from move to move okay the next thing is to learn from both success and failure timely meaning immediate or nearly immediate feedback is crucial for actually gaining technical learning from a given number of moves that you do failing on moves and then subsequently succeeding as your best way to get that feedback as we already discussed it doesn't stop once you can actually do the move how easily you can do the move is just an important source of feedback and in order to tap into that source of feedback you need to tune into how the moves feel and what proportion of your strength that you use to actually complete them this is not really a straightforward thing for one thing your level of strength is changing constantly and if you've been trying the same route for the whole session then your strength might be a fraction of what it was two or three hours ago you need to factor that into your judgment about how well you're actually doing the move or if the sudden comes onto your project you might feel like you're suddenly doing the moves badly but was it that or was it just a lack of friction and even very experienced climbers can be illustrated by these confounders all the time i know i certainly do so you might need to hold on to those judgments quite loosely come back to the same claim after a rest day and a fresh breeze and your technical method for the moves might seem just fine and you don't need to limit yourself to just learning from how you do the moves yourself you can also learn from other climbers other climbers are a fantastic if not essential resource for learning and refining your technique claim with other climbers ideally better climbers than you and even better climbers who are physically weaker but can still outclaim you it's also good if you climb with a range of climbers with different movement styles and you'll soak up all of their different technical expertise but note that this is also a double-edged sword you'll also soak up their errors and bad habits and you'll have to try and differentiate between their positive and negative technical attributes and that is not an easy task as well as actually sharing claims with climbing partners i also think that it's valuable to just watch good climbers on video such as on youtube i certainly watch a lot of climbing myself i try not to do this passively because it probably won't have any effect you really have to engage with what you're watching and try to solve the next move for the climber you're watching before they do and really grapple with the differences between your style and theirs whatever you actually can but i want to note here that although watching video of climbers is useful it's definitely one of the weakest forms of technical learning and i would say that it's an adjunct and not a substitute for sharing moves with good climbers on real claims one huge problem with observing and learning from other climbers is objectivity it's desperately hard to see your own biases and to step outside the stories that you tell yourself that lock you inside different technical styles or weaknesses in general this is why in professional sport a coach to assist the athlete is almost ubiquitous sometimes the coach is covering both two quite distinct roles which is planning and adjusting the physical loading on the athlete as well as shaping and refining their movement technique as well to do the former the coach needs a solid understanding of exercise physiology and the physical demands of the sport but to do the latter they need really deep technical awareness and for this technical coaching it's still not essential that the coach is an expert level climber themselves although their technical skill often makes it makes that kind of a given if you do work with a technical coach then do choose them carefully they're likely to have quite a big influence on you and you want to make sure that that influence is as good as it can be choosing a coach is not an easy task and if you read the autobiographies of famous athletes from all sports you'll soon see that how changing the coach can really make or break the career of the athlete remember also that not all climbing coaching is actually formal far from it an important class of technical coach who is often helping you for free is just a technical mentor and in climbing that's likely to be just the really experienced and amazing climber that you happen to know or climbs at the same climbing wall as you if you can get to know them then they can impart a goldmine of expertise onto you and often it doesn't actually take all that much effort on the part of the mentor because your errors can be quite obvious to them and good advice tends to flow freely from them most of the time the biggest hurdle for some is just getting over the hesitation of actually climbing with them but here's a news flash even good climbers can be introverts and might be just as shy as you are about developing climbing partnerships learning starts with observing and to observe your own climbing technique you need to be quite tuned into it all the time ideally this becomes an automatic rather than particularly effortful habit although i still recommend directing effort towards it i like to try and notice how much concentration i'm using on how well i climbed each move on the last bit of climbing and if i'm doing something like trying a boulder problem then most of the time i have some different thing that i want to try on the next attempt or some aspect of a move that i want to focus on such as how the foot is placed on the foothold or which actual foot sequence you use not always though sometimes if i slip off or i just hit hold badly or the breeze stopped or just made a mistake then i would repeat the same experiment again because i've not really given it a chance the point is that i'm reminding myself to observe and reflect and experiment all the time in moves essentially i'm disciplining myself not to just thrash away the claim with no particular plan there always should be some experiment otherwise there's no learning taking place i do think you can overdo this though and i've seen climbers get stuck trying to grasp what happened on an attempt on a claim and they're unable to gain any resolution to that question because they don't have enough information to work with and really all they needed to do was get back on the claim and try the crux in all the different possible ways and after that the answer might well be obvious and require much less effortful thought so a bit of a balance is required in this aspect okay so now i'm going to zoom out a bit from the moment to moment activities that we do to learn climbing technique and to the underlying principles that actually drive those as habits and this is getting into the territory covered by my first book which tries to get you to identify and challenge the habits you have and whether they really set you on a path to improvement or to stagnation in your climbing in climbing i think it's important to truly value technical mastery whether you personally achieve it or not is actually not even relevant but the appreciation of the wonder of a move done well using as little strength as possible is what drives all the habits that i've just listed earlier in the video that appreciation for the value of mastery as a thing in itself is what removes the sense of effort needed to actually implement those habits on a daily basis instead i think it actually makes it an effort not to learn technique it makes it actively frustrating if you feel that you should be able to do a move but you can't then it's a source of frustration not only can't you do the move but you can't understand why you can't do it and that's certainly frustrating for me an issue though is that sport in general tends to value results rather than principles the most inspiring climber for me isn't necessarily the one who claims the highest grade since that has some inputs that are not really under the climber's control and we're just just down to good fortune but i like to see technical mastery as an expression of a basic passion for climbing rocks a physically weaker climber who nonetheless claims something extremely hard is to me the ultimate expression of good climbing and that is really inspiring to me strength is also valued in sport and it's valued in climate culture too and i value it myself and i spend a lot of time trying to get stronger but the point here is that in climbing culture at the moment i think that the pendulum has swung just a little towards focusing on and valuing strength compared to when i started climbing where i think technique was maybe slightly higher valued on one level this has been absolutely great for the sport and the levels of strength that climbers have now is just mind-blowing my own physical strength at 44 years of age is actually better than when i was in my early 20s and all of that's great but as well as embracing the developments and physical training in climbing i like to think that i never really let go of that really strong appreciation for seeing climbers doing hard moves making them look easy and really not using as much strength as others either by getting more weight on their feet or by using ingenious sequences or momentum or just attention to detail and my vision for my climbing is to try as much as my abilities allow you to model myself on those technical masters and just try to be like them that core mission is what all the habits and commitment flows from and why i think it's so pivotal to actually have those core values in the first place so our core tenet of learning technical expertise in any discipline is the combination of hours of deliberate practice together with the timely feedback on what works and what doesn't and we know from research in other fields that where timely feedback on decision making is absent or if it's inconsistent it takes a lot longer to gain expertise and in fact expertise might even be impossible to gain one observation that i became aware of quite early in my climbing life was that there were these people that you'd see in the climbing wall all the time and you knew that they'd been climbing very regularly for decades and it was also clear that they were in quite reasonable physical shape and yet they just weren't that good at climbing and they actually had plateaued at quite a low grade and at first i was kind of confused by that and it struck me that if you could answer the question of why these people's progress actually stalled then you'd have some basic but quite important insight into what drives technical learning and so in looking more carefully at these people i did notice a common theme which was that these people claimed quite passively and they didn't really analyze if they fell off a climb when they got lowered down you could ask them why they fell off and they'd answer i have no idea and you'd say what hand did you have on the hold where you fell and they say i can't remember and what will you do on the next attempt and then say i don't really know i'll just try again thinking about these questions just wasn't a part of their climbing routine or at least a very big part and for me it's absolutely central i'm not saying that there's anything wrong with climbing passively like this there's lots of reasons to climb and improving the climate is just one of them but i think it does potentially explain why these people don't reach high levels of technical expertise on the whole when coaching climbing i've experienced people question whether they can justify to themselves the effort to analyze their own climbing on a constant basis on top of the act of actually just climbing itself and it's true that it is an effort and that the rewards of expertise are actually proportional to the effort that you put in however i think if you learn to both enjoy the activity of questioning and analyzing your climbing and the you enjoy the effort of doing it in the same way that physical exercise is unenjoyable despite the fact that it's effortful as well and even more than that i think it can even be relaxing i find that actually losing myself in a process of figuring out moves is part of why climbing helps me to detach from life stresses in my outside life and why climbing feels like a kind of renewing activity i'm sure you'll have noticed that some climbers who live close to a big climbing gym sometimes don't climb quite as well out on the crag as their ability inside their local climbing gym and there are many possible reasons for this but one is obviously just the simple limitation of climbing the same types of climbs on the same boards and angles there's just not much to push these climbers out of their comfort zone on a regular basis and obviously your climbing center can't replicate the variety of the cracks or even the variety of resin climbing holes that exist so whatever you can try to go to new places go to new cracks go to new climbing walls and any opportunity you can just get out of your comfort zone and anytime that you realize that you've kind of nailed a certain style of climbing then resist the temptation to keep raiding that wave for too long and try and switch to something that you're bad at so we've gone through many of the key tenets of technique learning there and most of them are pretty obvious and pretty simple it's the implementing them that's the hard bit and this was the challenge that my first book tried to draw attention to people can know what to do but knowing and doing are not the same thing actually setting up the habits that reduce the effort level needed to implement those components of technical learning that we've discussed is really the key to this you try you're trying to set up your life so that you can access lots of climbing varied enough climbing good mentors to learn from and people also who encourage you not to stay in your comfort zone for too long some lifestyle factors can just be a decision that you make in an instant and others might be a lifelong project it just depends on the factor we're talking about for example one day you might reach a level of curiosity that forces you in an instant to walk up to a good climber in the wall and ask them how did you do that move and that took a moment of courage the first time you did it but when you realized that they were perfectly happy to show you maybe the next time it was a bit easier and maybe by next year that person is now your training partner and you've made major progress conversely arranging your career to increase your weekly fee climbing hours in order to raise the number of moves that you're doing on a week-to-week basis that might be a multi-year project and it may depend on what you're willing to give up elsewhere regardless of how long or difficult the adjustment to is to your lifestyle then the main thing is to actually just get started and get moving on it it's very easy for big lifestyle factors like your job or the place you live or your weekly schedule and to seem a bit too daunting to actually tackle and just to focus on the small stuff instead i say that you should attack the hard stuff head on wherever you can in all probability it will yield transformative results rather than incremental ones and and if i look back on my own climbing career i can think of many decisions like this that i was glad that i really made and i know i should have made a bit sooner i'll just give you one example i set a goal of climbing all the climbs at my local crag than barton rock where i started climbing not some of them but all of them and that task was infinitely more difficult than if i'd said it as at 95 percent of the claims but that was a real catalyst in propelling my climbing forwards it forced me to go out of my comfort zone a lot so i think that the components of learning climbing that we've just been discussing would explain why some climbers have claimed for thousands of hours more than you have and yet their improvements stalled many years ago and it also explains why some climbers have such amazing technique that they make climbs seem almost effortless and they can confidently do them in situations where a technical error would cost them their lives and just to reiterate from earlier if just introducing one or two of those components might not yield any improvement at all and would explain a plateau in your technical learning it's only the combination of them that make the learning explode a bit like fuel oxygen and spark remember that being in that space where the learning happens is going to feel uncomfortable and humans tend to follow comfort and so putting yourself in the right environment environment to learn might actually feel a bit counter-intuitive because it does have that discomfort possibly what's needed is a shift in perception such that you start to enjoy the mental discomfort of learning technique in the same way that you might enjoy the physical discomfort of training and i think i can see that tendency quite clearly in all the really great climbers that i've ever met maybe if you can develop that acquired taste for that kind of discomfort then i think you'll be on a path to good technical learning okay that will do it for now i'll see you in the next episode if you're subscribed to the channel

Channel: Dave MacLeod

Views: 105,306

Keywords: rock climbing, bouldering, bouldering wall, climbing technique, climbing training, climbing workout

Id: XdSTJBe8Fd4

Length: 26min 34sec (1594 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022