I want you to imagine two climbers, and see if I can put an idea in your head about how they will perform on the wall. They are of equal strength and technical skill. We are considering their language and body language to predict their performance.
A serial climb hopper is someone who has numerous projects on the go, they often get to 1 sticky point on a climb and they get frustrated, after a few more attempts they move on to another climb, rinse and repeat.
Am I good enough to compete? People who fear this question get stuck in a cycle: train harder until something goes wrong > don’t compete > comp announced > train harder…
Committing to certain moves on the wall can be challenging, when you hit that point of fear or feeling stuck. We are going to offer a bit of perspective on this and some tips to work through it.
Sometimes you may be strong enough to finish your projects but can’t quite make it. If you have good projecting principles in place and you get to the point of doing all the moves then what is the issue?
Slab climbing can be some of the scariest climbing out there in terms of solely looking at the wall structure. One look at a slab climb and the brain goes “CHEESEGRATER!” It’s this alert system of self preservation that makes slab climbing so scary.
Looking across a group of youth athletes doing drills, I could see everybody practicing the skills with varying levels of focus, intent and ability but there was one of the crew that was failing on a move then repeating and failing and repeating and failing again and again.
I was having a conversation the other day with a climber who had been climbing for about 6 years, and they asked me: “Ash, why is it that I can pull that hard but in comparison my climbing grade is low?”.
I think that in terms of progress in anything there are 2 major areas of focus: getting better (deliberate practice), and trying harder. Often we get stuck in either camp, but both of these areas can become a trap.
The thing with conditioning is it is inter-generational, it or parts of it are passed from one family member down to their children, onto their children’s children and on until someone identifies it, accepts responsibility for it, and works through it.
Throughout our lives some of our greatest memories are those times we thought to ourselves “H*ly sh^t” or those moments where we had a huge paradigm shift, those Ah Ha moments of overcoming adversity.
I was recently working with a talented young climber who I set a challenge. This climb was what I would class as particularly anti-style but well within climbing grade and ability if the time was taken to working it out.
Some thought about mindset around: Nervousness or Excitement, Happiness and Struggle, Fear and Reality, Frustration and Self Worth, Competitions and Results.
