Ticking routes - get creative with positioning

An obvious one but get the comfiest position you can find when stopping to relax, recover and shake out, or even clipping. Above the tricky clip on Tidal Wave, the classic route in Thailand, is only easily possible with your feet wrapped around the tufa blob....

Make sure arms are straight when relaxing, clipping a bolt or placing gear. Locking off the arm is a highly inefficient (the bicep being one of the most inefficient muscles in the body) so relax, straighten out the arm (even on steep terrain) and get creative!


Or below, don't forget to look behind!

Common on a lot of European and Asian limestone, random sticks of tufa dripping behind you - don't forget to check they're not about to snap off....

p.s. every time I go looking back for pictures, I realize I miss traveling to new crags and trying new routes! :)

Ticking harder routes - "letting go"

Following on from the previous post on just attempting harder routes than you've previously tried and the size of holds on real-rock routes, I thought I'd continue this theme of motivation and how to improve at climbing for people of all levels. I'm using the excuse of the 8a last week I was on purely as it's a good reference point for comparison, but this should all transfer to any grades that you're improving towards.


Following on from last week, I'm referencing the concept of relaxing on routes. And in a timely manner, Dave MacLeod talked about this on his Online Coaching blog last week so it's perfectly apt that it proves I'm not making this up :)

"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."

Having a lot of experience on routes (A lot more than bouldering), meant that I didn't struggle as much with this while in Spain, but it still took a couple of days climbing to adapt to the economy of movement required for route climbing.



"Letting Go"
One of the most important aspects of route climbing, sport or trad, hard or easy is that you just can't pull at 100% all the time over 10's of meters of rock. Your arms/body will power out and you'll be off before you know it. The nature of staying within capacity is that you need to stay below a threshold somewhere around 70-80%% of your maximum. Below that your body is able to naturally recover and, for simplistic terms, get blood moving through the arms. (I'm being very very simplistic here, for more information, I recommend doing some research on Aerobic and Anaerobic training - or just buying one of the climbing training books I've mentioned before).
Strange as it sounds but you need to learn to 'let go' on holds, use the "minimal force" that Dave talks about above. A natural tendency for all (especially those coming from bouldering*) is to grab a hold and grip it with as much intensity as possible. In bouldering it makes sense, you don't want to slip off, but for routes, all that leads to is the magic 'pumped' senstation we all know and love/hate.
But ideally what you need to learn is to relax on the hold enough that you're solid on the hold and comfortable, that you can get your effort level below that threshold where you can start to recover. This is obviously something to practice, the easiest being to just go and climb routes, concentrate on learning to shake out on holds that you imagine yourself recovering on. At the bouldering wall, a good way of simulating it is to go and climb multiple problems back to back - it'll force you to think about energy conservation as you can't just sit around on the mats immediately after completing a problem!


Essentially, you need to 'train' the body to be efficient. Especially before the route season, consider spending some time learning to 'let go'........ Ideally, you'll do this by tying in with a rope and actually climbing routes (by far the easiest method


This isn't to say that you won't be giving 100% at times on routes either, but it's learning to only use that 100% effort when it's really required. Hope that makes sense!




*I actually suffer from the opposite syndrome to this 'letting go' issue - I've spent so much time doing routes that learning to pull at maximum intensity is quite hard (anyone who has watched me bouldering in the past couple of months will have noticed I'm taking time to adapt to bouldering :)
Again, it's the same concept - go and spend time bouldering more to get the body to adapt to the idea of pulling with everything it's got. As route climbers, it's especially important that you do this to improve your overall strength and power.....

Ticking harder routes - get on them! and hold sizes

The 'rest' on Mar de Ortigas, 8a

While in El Chorro, I managed to get in and tick another 8a at the end of the trip. I'll be honest, it was a bit of a surprise it came so easily as I thought I hadn't been doing that much climbing the past couple of months with the new job. In the end it took 3 redpoint attempts (so did it on my 4th go after going on it once to try out the moves). Since it's the start of the year, and I can see loads of people getting active with fresh motivation after the Christmas splurge, I thought it was worthwhile to put some thoughts down on screen to give some perspectives/motivation for others aspiring to climb a harder grade (be it at any level).

Get on them!

The biggest thing you could do is just get on the harder routes! So many times, it's easy to think they're too hard, you're not good enough, etc and avoid trying the harder routes. All I can say is that you'd be surprised, so long as you go on them with an open mind, a willingness to try, and some keeness to share the information between others who are going to try it also, you will be fine. I'm not trying to say get on something wayyy harder than you've climbed but you could definitely go a grade or two above what you've done before.

As part of this, you also have to accept the idea of practicing, or redpointing, a route. While many people in Ireland avoid it while away on a sports trip, usually under the excuse that they don't have much time and want to spend doing new routes, everyone can benefit from trying harder routes because it brings up your onsighting ability which means you'll have even more routes to onsight!

I'd be willing to bet that most people in Ireland could easily climb a couple of grades harder if they tried redpointing a couple of routes......

Hold Sizes

While at climbing walls, it's easy to get into the habit of using massive footholds and pulling either monster holds/jugs. On harder routes, you will not get this type of holds unless it's really steep! I'm going to use the above photo as an example. This is the rest point on the 8a at the 4th bolt.

You can tell the angle of the rock by the quickdraw above my head (10 degrees or so overhanging).

As you can see in the images below, these are my hands and my feet:

left foot in a slot that was a mono for a handhold, right foot on a small edge

As you can see from the feet, they are much small than resin holds on an indoor wall! That's not to say it's impossible but remember to spend time on vertical to overhanging terrain with small footholds. In time and with practice, you will (not might, will!) learn to recover and rest on holds of these types. It also means you need to spend time getting very accurate with your feet, accurate and specific foot placements are critical.

handhold is a medium sized hold, very incut and positive. Right hand is in chalked sidepull in top right of image.

From the image of the handholds, you can see they are good, very good. Having said that, they are not massive juggy holds that you will find on any climbing wall in the world. Again, spend time on medium sized holds if you can to build fitness. At it's most extreme, the best climbers in the world can recover something smaller than a one-joint edge, so for 'normals' like the rest of us, it's possible to build up to the point of recovering on most holds.

In short, hopefully this gives some pointers into what is expected of harder routes.

And in short, as described in watching the Adam Ondra movie recently, you can adapt this quote to how to climb a harder route for yourself:

"You must work very hard to become a natural golfer." (as said by Gary Player, golfer)

If you practice at your local climbing wall on smaller holds, prepare with a bit more intensity, your grade on routes (be it trad or sport) will most likely increase this year.

Later on in the week.....'letting go'

Hope that helps!

El Chorro

Sean on 7b+

Loads of photos can be found here - thanks Claire!
Since it's that time of year I'm sure I'm meant to talk about New Years resolutions and the like, but since I know that statistically most new years resolutions fail before the end of January, I'll leave it at that (suffice to say, if you're making a resolution, wait until February or March when the doom and gloom of January has worn off*!). My only resolution was to start the year off climbing so myself and a great gang bailed for the balmy weather of El Chorro for New Years. People keep telling me there can be epic rains and snow at this time of year there, I've been there twice and barely seen a cloud so I find it hard to believe :) Still though, in typical tradition I did make sure to climb at the shady crags for the week and a half, I'm not one for climbing in the sun - one of the fundamentals of climbing for saving skin!
In the end, about 8 days of climbing involved about 40-ish new routes climbed of all grades. Strangely, my favourite line of the trip was my hardest - this is pretty unusual. Example: my favorite line of 2011 was a seven (or was it six?) pitch 5+/6a at Orpierre - a third pitch of delicate smears, and a final pitch out a steep overhanging corner to a wild finish and a stunning belay above the valley floor. Just shows it's not all about the hardest grade to do the best moves.

This trip also reminded me absolutely about why I love going to different locations for climbing. I got to spend some time with some close friends from Sheffield, Holland and Moab (USA). I'd no idea any of them were going to be there but it's always cool to arrive at a crag in a random country and realize you know some of the people. Different perspectives, ideas, motivations, cultures all blend me into a better person. Of course, we gained some additional friends, this time Montreal (Canada) was the new location, Felix spent his whole time raving about the crag of Rumney (Dave Graham's old stomping ground) - it's now on my list of places to go.

As ever, routes were tried, everyone was going well. Most importantly, I think we all came back having learnt something and renewed motivation for the year. Am I motivated after the trip? definitely! bring on more activities - psyche!



* or else read this great article about writing training goals from Jack Geldard....

When one decides to start training, it is sometimes done with a rush of enthusiasm or psyche. This psyche is not self-discipline, and a distinction must be made between the two things. Your psyches tells you that you can train 6 days per week. Your psyche tells you that getting up at 6am and going for a run in the cold and dark mornings of January is totally within your capability. Basically, your psyche is full of shit. Even if that psyche can last for a couple of weeks, it most probably can’t last for long enough for you to finish a real training programme for climbing.

New Years Resolutions

It's getting to that time of year so personally I know I'm thinking about what I'm going to be thinking about and aiming for next year.

It's easy to go with the attitude of going to the wall, or going out doing routes/mountains/whatever with no focus whatsoever. Just turning up and doing whatever you feel like, seeing small bits of progress every once in a while. The closest anyone gets to a plan is when it's a couple of weeks before the summer or before a trip, they run off to do some mileage at the local wall to gain some stamina....

But like all in all other sports, it's easy to integrate some rough plans and see even better gains - it all  revolves around the fact that your body gets bored of the same stimulus. Go to the wall day-in-day-out and just go bouldering, you're body will stop adapting to the same repetitiveness after a few weeks and you'll start to slow down in your improvements. Not completely stop improving, but your body just doesn't adapt as quickly. So variation is key.

Because I have a preference for route climbing (and bolted at that), I follow a rough variation of the systems as advocated by Eric Horst's book and numerous other plans - adapting to a block of fitness at the start to develop the basic adaptions to the body, then a few weeks of strength work, then a couple of weeks of power work (think dynos/campusing or explosive type of movement) and then a couple of weeks of trying hard routes (or intervals) if you see it mentioned online before going on a trip. I don't completely drop all other activities when I'm focusing on an area but will just reduce the amount I'm doing of it so my body can develop overall at the priority - e.g. I'll reduce the amount of climbing I'm doing massively when doing strength work as I don't want to be too tired from the aerobic work - so perhaps 75% of my week is strength work and the other 25% is a variation of general climbing, etc.

Another method of stimulating improvements is just modifying the amount of climbing you do. You normally go and do 10 routes at the wall? What if I was to tell you that in some other countries, they do 10 routes as a warm-up, and then do another 10 routes of difficulty, and another 5 to warm down? Why not try and increase the amount you do in a session by 10% every time (e.g. do 11 routes the first night, 12 the next, etc.) until you've increased by 50% and then start trying 10 harder routes and increase again. Variation is key!

This isn't for all, but perhaps you've been looking for an excuse to progress (at whatever your favorite discipline is) and this might be the time to think about it?......