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A simple drill for getting better about hand and foot placements is to climb a boulder problem and not allow yourself any sort of placement adjustment. Basically wherever you grab or step on a hold, you have to use it just like that. If you do that for a little while you'll get a lot better about it.
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Apr 1, 2019 01:41
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I've also found it super useful to finish a problem, then descend using the exact foot and hand placements you used going up. Having to do them in reverse later really forces you to be cognizant about your movements!
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Apr 1, 2019 03:03
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enraged_camel posted:I've also found it super useful to finish a problem, then descend using the exact foot and hand placements you used going up. Having to do them in reverse later really forces you to be cognizant about your movements! I've been trying to downclimb more boulders, not necessarily with exact food & hand placements in reverse, but I have noticed how much easier/more difficult some moves are coming down. I do want to try sticky hands/feet though, I realized I don't really think through my movements so much as just try poo poo and see how it feels.
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Apr 1, 2019 03:27
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Hauki posted:I've been trying to downclimb more boulders, not necessarily with exact food & hand placements in reverse, but I have noticed how much easier/more difficult some moves are coming down. Are you me? I'm now at the point where I can easily do V2's in my gym and most V3's I can get done if I try them a few times. At this point it feels like my limiting factor is my technique so I'm gonna try a bunch of these drills and see which ones improve my climbing.
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Apr 1, 2019 15:00
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good videos for technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkfUqdr-0zk
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Apr 1, 2019 18:54
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I’m thinking about getting into climbing for a few reasons. I love hiking and camping and another outdoor fun thing is always welcome. I have friends who do it, I have climbing walls in my city, mountains within a few hours and I’ve just always loved climbing on things. The catch is that I’m very much afraid of heights. Can anyone else relate? I’m not going to totally freeze or pee, but I get very scared up high and would like a hobby that lets me work on that. I used to be very afraid of flying, and now that I faced that poo poo and became a pilot, it’s become one of my favorite things. I don’t want climbing to be another thing that I’d love but can’t do because of fear.
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Apr 1, 2019 23:17
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Rolo posted:The catch is that I’m very much afraid of heights. Can anyone else relate? You will be surprised how quickly you stop caring about it and just trust the gear, especially indoors. I do not like heights at all, and just climbed one of the highest walls in my gym (which I believe has the highest walls in the country) and didn't think about it once. It was refreshing to realize. Early on I definitely had to compose myself and be like "there's no reason to spaz out" but easier said than done.
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Apr 1, 2019 23:30
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I agree that trusting your gear makes the height seem much less daunting, and if you start with bouldering you can really ease into taller routes.
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Apr 1, 2019 23:52
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BlancoNino posted:I agree that trusting your gear makes the height seem much less daunting, and if you start with bouldering you can really ease into taller routes. My wife is an entry level climber and HATES bouldering because she doesn't want to be up at all without a top rope!
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Apr 2, 2019 00:02
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I get scared bouldering 15' off the deck. 20' fall 80' up on a rope though? NBD.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:06
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I usually have people just sit back on the rope down really low or take falls on the rope from only a little ways up to build confidence in the safety system. I do the same thing with people afraid of bouldering, practicing jumping down safely form progressively higher up.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:55
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That's why I boulder, because top roping scares me even if it's completely illogical. I do plan on top roping once every couple of weeks to eventually get rid of that stupid fear though. For the moment I get up 3/4 of the wall, get scared and then downclimb uhuhuh. I really don't mind jumping down from the highest overhanging wall at the boulder gym though, even if that's probably 10x more dangerous.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:26
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Rolo posted:I’m thinking about getting into climbing for a few reasons. I love hiking and camping and another outdoor fun thing is always welcome. I have friends who do it, I have climbing walls in my city, mountains within a few hours and I’ve just always loved climbing on things. if you're at all mind over matter type person you might be able to work it out bouldering. a few people ive brought were casually afraid of heights and falling until id climb up and do a couple bad looking falls and be totally uninjured
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Apr 2, 2019 05:07
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Getting over a fear of heights, barring some horrific experience that influenced that fear, is really easy. You just keep climbing higher. Sometimes you might not be able to climb higher and that's OK, because you can climb higher the next day. But it's honestly just a question of continued exposure that'll help you get over things.
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Apr 2, 2019 11:20
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Yet another Black Diamond April Fools joke that I'll be buyin myself... https://www.blackdiamondequipment.com/en/honnold_spatula_landing.html
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Apr 2, 2019 12:35
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I'm not afraid of heights but when I started climbing I would get the usual nerves about halfway up the wall and decide I wanted to come down. What helped me was climbing routes that were extremely easy for me, like 5.5s that were well within my physical ability. Without needing to pause to think about placement (especially foot placement that often required looking down), it was easier to get higher up. Once I was within 5-10 feet of the top my competitive drive took over and I was just like "gently caress you, you're finishing this". And over time I got rid of the fear. One other thing that helped was using the autobelay when the gym wasn't busy, climbing halfway up, and just jumping off. Over and over. And over. Good luck.
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Apr 3, 2019 16:11
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My friends and I are interested in doing a 3-day climbing/camping trip to Colorado sometime around the end of June. Any suggestions for locations? We're mostly interested in bouldering and top-roping, although we do have a few lead climbers in the group as well.
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Apr 4, 2019 23:37
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Sounds hot. Independence pass would be good.
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Apr 5, 2019 02:23
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Staunton should be good that time of the year.
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Apr 5, 2019 03:48
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tortilla_chip posted:Staunton should be good that time of the year. Yeah but basically that is Denver.
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Apr 5, 2019 03:49
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My crimp strength is a joke and my pinch/Sloper grip is pretty good since judo grips are pretty similar. This is super annoying because as soon as there is a crimp, I lose almost two grades and it really sucks to be kept away from cool problems because of a single crimp. I know hang boarding is off limit for now and regular climbing will improve my hand/tendon strength, but should I focus on crimpy problems to help develop strength? Is it better to do crimpy stuff that you can’t hold on, or bigger crimps that you can manage? Mix of both? I could « just have fun » but I’d be doing pinches and slopers all day.
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Apr 5, 2019 16:56
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KingColliwog posted:My crimp strength is a joke and my pinch/Sloper grip is pretty good since judo grips are pretty similar. This is super annoying because as soon as there is a crimp, I lose almost two grades and it really sucks to be kept away from cool problems because of a single crimp. Hang boarding doesn't have to be off limits. Just warm up appropriately and don't overdo it. If you've identified crimps as a weakness, hangboarding can be used as an effective tool to fix that.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:43
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I’ve been climbing for a month so I thought I should stay off. If you wouldn’t mind showing me toward a beginner appropriate routine or may be something I could do at the end of my session while I cool down and stretch that would be amazing. I almost feel bad spending a bunch of time on cool pinch problems that I really enjoy because I feel like I really need to be doing crimpy stuff. KingColliwog fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 5, 2019 |
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Apr 5, 2019 18:48
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I wouldn't advise hang boarding at the end of a session. That's a good way to hurt yourself. You want to warm up, hang board, and go home. It's boring as hell, but if you do that once a week you'll likely see notable improvement in the holds you're practicing on within a month or two. I don't have a particular routine immediately linkable, but most of them are something like: Pick 6 hold positions, and for each one: Hang (straight armed) for 10 seconds (or until you fall), 6 times, with 5 seconds rest between each hang. Rest a minute between positions. Keep a log of your hangtimes so you can mark progress.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:28
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If you've only been climbing for a month your tendon strength likely isn't developed enough, even if your muscles can strength. I would recommend against hangboarding - there's no real way to rapidly increase your tendon strength, and it's better to just spend more time climbing. As you improve your footwork and technique, you will find that it makes a much bigger difference than hangboarding.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:39
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KingColliwog posted:I’ve been climbing for a month so I thought I should stay off. If you wouldn’t mind showing me toward a beginner appropriate routine or may be something I could do at the end of my session while I cool down and stretch that would be amazing. Tendon strength takes time, you'll get better at crimps over time by just climbing and resting. If you've only been doing it for a month you're really rushing into hangboarding.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:43
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KingColliwog posted:I’ve been climbing for a month so I thought I should stay off. If you wouldn’t mind showing me toward a beginner appropriate routine or may be something I could do at the end of my session while I cool down and stretch that would be amazing. It's cool man, you'll get better eventually, just climb more. Unless you have mutated super hands you'll quickly start running into slopers which are just as challenging for you as the crimps you're having problems with. Grades are only a guideline and you should be (and it sounds like you are) grading the routes personally based on your strong and weak points.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:52
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You can start by doing dead hangs to ease yourself into hang training.
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Apr 5, 2019 20:21
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Thanks for all the inputs I appreciate the answers to my newbie questions Good, I’ll keep on trucking then I guess. It’s just annoying to have one aspect of rock climbing be terribly weaker than everything else because my background developed most other aspect pretty well and not being able to focus my training on that weak aspect at all. At least I can work on technique. That sticky feet/hand drill someone suggested as been « fun ». Kasumeat posted:You can start by doing dead hangs to ease yourself into hang training. I’ve been dead hanging and active hanging on pull ups bar for over a year already a few times a week for non climbing reasons so I got that covered. KingColliwog fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Apr 5, 2019 |
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Apr 5, 2019 21:04
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Ooh discussion about when to start hangboarding for noobies, my favorite! Citing lack of tendon strength as a reason not to hangboard as a noob doesn't really make sense. What do you think is happening to your tendons when you're climbing? And when you try that new problem that looks super fun but just has one tough crimp on it but if I can just power through then I'll probably send?? The key advantage of the hangboard is the ability to subject your tendons (and muscles) to forces that you can control both in terms of overall load as well as loading time -- e.g. you can use a pulley system to remove weight, and you can slowly sink into the hang as opposed to rapidly loading your fingers as often happens in actual climbing. This is the same reason that the hangboard is the most effective tool for pulley tendon rehab & conditioning. Yes, if you are careless in hangboarding then you're going to subject yourself to injury risk, but the point is that it's easier to be careful with a hangboard than it is with a random set of boulder problems with your buddies shouting VENGA underneath you... A pulley system is probably the most trustworthy & measurable way to control the loads on a hangboard, but might be overly complex for a true noob. You could also rig up a resistance band, or be tricky about where you put your feet, like instead of fully hanging have your toes on a chair or box (or bathroom scale to measure load!) set underneath/behind the hangboard as if simulating an overhang (puts more weight on your fingers than just standing, but less than fully hanging). The main reason not to hangboard as a noob is that it can be a bit of a zero sum game with your overall time dedicated to climbing, and any time spent hangboarding is not time spent practicing actual movement on the climbing wall and getting better at the skill of climbing, not just the strength. This is where I think it comes down to individual decisions and tradeoffs. Such as: - How much free time do you have to climb/train each week? If you have unlimited time, it might not be a bad idea to start hangboarding earlier than later. If you can only get into the gym 2x per week, then it's not worth taking time away from actual climbing - How motivated are you by measurement & metrics? For some, this makes hangboarding fun in and of itself (you can make your own spreadsheets!). For some, this makes hangboarding extremely boring and antithetical to why they climb in the first place - How sure are you that climbing is going to be a long-term/lifelong pursuit at this point? The work you do with fingerboarding now will probably pay off in terms of tendon and muscle strength gains in months or years, not days or weeks. Takes some honest self appraisal, but if you think you'll be done climbing within a year or two, it's probably not worth the trouble to start hangboarding. If you know that you're hooked for life, then again, might be worth considering - How much do you trust yourself to be smart about it and not overdo it? Being smart = reading a ton online and books first and foremost, and maybe talking to some more experienced climbers/trainers at the gym if you think they're trustworthy. The reason I hesitate on the latter is that a lot of really strong climbers subscribe to really unhelpful ideas about training, and are probably going to be less reliable than the major figures in hangboarding protocols (Anderson bros, Eva Lopez, Steve Bechtel, Steve Maisch, Eric Horst...) Depending on the answers to those questions, I think some folks could certainly justify starting hangboarding a month into climbing even if they're only scratching at 5.10, but realistically this probably is more an exception than the norm. For others, it might not make sense to hangboard even after a decade of climbing and sending 5.13. If you do decide to start sooner than later, I'd definitely recommend getting a book or two on climbing training, and would absolutely encourage you to always, always, always err on the side of less volume & intensity than you think. Again, the mindset for hangboarding is to do the work now and reap the benefits in a year due to fingers that are stronger AND more resistant to injury, not to do the work now and reap the strength benefits in a week with fingers that are a little stronger.
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Apr 5, 2019 22:35
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For a new climber looking to get stronger, bouldering is the way to go. You can get stronger fingers by having to grab small holds and work on technique/skills at the same time.
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Apr 5, 2019 23:03
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gohuskies posted:For a new climber looking to get stronger, bouldering is the way to go. You can get stronger fingers by having to grab small holds and work on technique/skills at the same time. He's already bouldering. I agree with sharks eat bear. Hang boarding can be useful, but you will have to trade short term loss of climbing time for long term strength gain. You also won't see immediate strength gains from hangboarding, since tendons rebuild very slowly. Patience is a necessity.
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Apr 6, 2019 01:22
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Here's climbing superhero Dave McLeod's view for what it's worth. http://onlineclimbingcoach.blogspot.com/2009/10/to-crimp-or-not-to-crimp.html TL;DR: crimping is needed to get strong at crimping Crimping on boulder problems can be much safer than crimping on a fingerboard or especially a campus board...but only if your technique is good. Poor footwork, leading to sudden foot slips, or a violent climbing style will make it just as dangerous as campusing. the vast majority of climbers crimp far too much and would seriously benefit (in both performance and injury risk) in developing their openhanded grip to a point where they use it more often than crimps and are at least as strong openhanded as crimped Are there other ways you can use the holds? Even with beermat edge crimps, you can often use them open handed by pressing your thumb into the underside of the hold to increase the pressure through your fingers. Like a pinch grip in a way.
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Apr 6, 2019 12:57
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quote:Crimping on boulder problems can be much safer than crimping on a fingerboard or especially a campus board. This part doesn't make sense to me. If I'm in the middle of a problem my crimping technique is probably going to be less controlled than if I'm on a hangboard. Also, from reading the article it looks like he's using 'crimp' to talk about closed-hand crimps for most of the article. He advocates getting strong with open-hand strength instead and doesn't make any recommendations about quantity/type of training for that. Siamang fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 15:29
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Dave Macleod has put out some amazing content on climbing training and performance, but he’s also said a few things I think are flat out wrong. Saying that crimping is safer bouldering than hangboarding is one example. He’s also said the hangboard is only useful to train max strength/recruitment, which is just silly.
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Apr 6, 2019 20:47
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IMO hangboarding for a newbie is a waste of time. I run a local climbing meetup (~600 members) and I've seen, and advised, my fair share of newbies. For most of them, what holds them back is stuff like fear of heights, as well as lack of experience and good technique, and not lack of strength. In fact, being strong can be very counterproductive for a newbie, because strong people can climb more difficult problems despite their poor technique, leading them to believe they are better than they actually are. Our meetup occasionally gets members who participate in other sports, and they can just power through all the easy stuff and feel good about it. But they tend to be the ones who plateau the hardest later on though because they never learned how to climb properly. I say this as someone who has climbed alongside dozens of newbies several times a week for a period of two years. I tell every newbie I talk to the same thing: climb lots of problems as frequently as your body can take it (at least twice a week if the goal is to improve at all, and 4-5 times a week for people in their 20s, 3-4 times for people in their 30s). Once it is lack of crimp strength that is holding you back, you'll know (usually 1-1.5 years in). Then you can start hangboarding.
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Apr 6, 2019 23:11
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KingColliwog posted:Thanks for all the inputs I appreciate the answers to my newbie questions how fit are you/how much do you weigh?
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Apr 7, 2019 08:46
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enraged_camel posted:Once it is lack of crimp strength that is holding you back, you'll know (usually 1-1.5 years in). Then you can start hangboarding. Why wait? It makes more sense to do light hangboarding to train crimping strength and reinforce your tendons slowly over a long period than to hit a plateau later on and suddenly go hard on the hangboard to make up for a lack of strength. The former is going to be way safer on your tendons.
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Apr 7, 2019 14:44
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Baronash posted:Why wait? It makes more sense to do light hangboarding to train crimping strength and reinforce your tendons slowly over a long period than to hit a plateau later on and suddenly go hard on the hangboard to make up for a lack of strength. The former is going to be way safer on your tendons. You're going to build tendon strength by just climbing. Plus then technique and general fitness can improve.
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Apr 7, 2019 15:58
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I went to the gym twice yesterday and didn't die like I thought I would. The second time I was only able to finish problems that were 1-2 grades lower than my usual level, but I still had a ton of fun and did some interesting problems. I was super tired and sore at the end of the day yesterday, but today I'm feeling pretty good.
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Apr 7, 2019 17:37
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