Positive thinking is not necessary

On the crux of Fight the Feeling 9a in Glen Nevis. For a long time I thought I was just not good enough to do this route. In the end, that thought didn’t matter. Photo: Lukasz Warzecha

A lot of folk ask me at my climbing talks about my mental tactics for climbing. They ask both about how I have been able to be confident, composed and tenacious on hard routes especially when they are badly protected. And they also ask about how I have been able to stay committed to progressing my climbing through setbacks of the hard routes I have attempted, or through injuries I’ve had in training or from accidents.

In the past I have struggled to give a good succinct answer, because it’s not something I find I have to give much conscious effort. It feels like it comes naturally. However, I have come to the conclusion that this does not mean that this ability is something inherent to me. I now think that I have, by accident, adopted an effective approach. It is not a positive thinking approach.

It’s a big subject and one I will explore in more detail on this blog in future. But for now I will try and summarise it.

The cult of positive thinking, both in society and in sports psychology, is looking increasingly like it may be among several major diversions from the path of progress of sport and health in recent decades. As a short term strategy, it can have some transient worthwhile effects. Unfortunately, the longer term effects of relying on positive thinking as a mental strategy seem to go the opposite way.

In my own climbing, I have often heard climbing partners, friends or even folk interviewing me express surprise at how ‘negative’ I sound about my chances of success on a project, or how my preparation is going. They worry that I am talking myself into failure by not thinking positively. I even attended a course (not by choice!) where the tutor taught us to rigorously identify and eliminate any negatives from our discourse about our activities. He wanted me to eliminate even the mention of falling. This struck me as ridiculous!

I do think it is possible to talk yourself into failure and have seen it done many times by climbers capable of the climbs they feel have beaten them. However, it does not follow that positive thinking is the solution!

The positive thinking paradigm, in summary, suggests that by using positive visualisation, we create an image that we are more likely to live up to in the real event. Unfortunately the research shows this approach is ineffective. Positive thinking appears to reduce motivation and self discipline. Moreover, it tends to kill the critical thinking that underpins learning of complex skills. A practical example of this is when coaching climbers to overcome fear of the most basic form of climbing fall - falling onto mats at an indoor bouldering wall. Unless you also consider what a badly executed fall looks like, how can you even visualise ‘good’ falling and landing technique. If positive thinking allows you to believe the fall will be fine when you jump for the last hold, the fall, should you miss, is that much more undermining for the confidence since you did not expect it.

In my own preparation for climbing situations of all types, I have found that I take care to examine the negative outcomes as well as the positive. I look for the problems and the weaknesses. But all this focus on the negative does not mean that I think or talk myself into failure. Quite the opposite. I deal with the problems at the time when they should be dealt with - in the preparation stage.

In this way, when I tie in at the foot of the climb, I know there will be no surprises, no confronting fears or unexpected doubts once I start climbing. All that is left is the effort. I find that the moment I step off the ground, I feel completely free to give my best effort without distraction or hesitation and in full acceptance of both good and bad scenarios should I succeed or fail on my effort. Not all performances are so cut and dry and ideal like this. I’ve succeeded on plenty of hard routes where I felt unfit, unprepared and totally gripped. I climbed them fully aware of the low probability of success and felt very pessimistic throughout. It made no difference. I had decided to try just as hard regardless of how I felt about my situation.

It is odd that the notion of focusing on your weaknesses is uncontroversial for physical training, and yet avoided in mental training in favour of positive thinking.

The funny thing is, I find that this ‘negative’ thinking is in fact the default approach for lots of people. Moreover, people often find that when they consciously try to think positively, it feels hollow. Try standing in front of the mirror and saying “I can climb 9a” out loud. Feel any closer to that goal? So if people naturally default to the right path of looking at the problems, why isn’t it working and why have people been searching for a different solution?

I find that many climbers I’ve coached go wrong at the stage right after thinking about the problems. They visualise the negative scenarios, the weaknesses they have, or their fears. But at this point they fail to move on to the next stage: taking action to eliminate/mitigate them. They keep their focus on the constraints pushing on them, rather than what they can do to alter those constraints. In the midst of this mental cul de sac, positive thinking becomes attractive as it allows you to bypass the hard bit of training - behavioural change and effort to address, rather than block out problems or weaknesses.

Another way to look at my point in this post is not that positive thinking is right or wrong, just that it is not really necessary, not that important. Any successes you have on the cliff are a direct product of your motivation for the climb and preparation put in. The perfect preparation would be to focus on all the potential causes of failure right up to the moment the success comes. 

To me, this is why you see climbers explode in a whoop of delight when they grab the finishing jug. Until this moment, there are still mistakes to be corrected, weaknesses to be eliminated, self-discipline to be executed. Forced reminders to believe you can do it are just a distraction. Of course you can do it, if you meet the demands of the task. But surely you are going to need all of your focus on meeting those tasks to make sure you maximise the probability.

Sure, a determined mindset can make a huge difference in the moment of a crux move, or last move of a hard climb. But whether that mindset is positive or negative may not be the important thing. I find they are often just two sides of the same coin; “I want to get to the top on this attempt/I’m scared I’m going to fail on this attempt”. Both are really a distraction from the one thing that will actually make a difference: Focusing on what you can do right now and executing it.

In summary, If you have focused on the problems, and then moved on to addressing them with rigour, positive thinking is not necessary. A determined performance with 100% effort can exist just as easily in any state of mind, positive or otherwise. The key point is to give that effort regardless of your state of mind.

As an epilogue, here is a basic example of this thinking in action.

Thought example 1. (in training): “I’m not good enough, I’m going to fail.”

Positive thinking action: “You will succeed, you are strong and tough and you can do this.”

Critique: Note that if you really are good enough, strong, bold, tough etc then you are perfectly entitled to think that way. But the paradox is that you will have no need to, since you will not feel like you are going to fail in the first place. And if you discover that have unrealistic expectations of failure, then addressing whatever underlying problem you have, such as fear of success, is the way forward, rather than a forcing a few positive thoughts that don’t feel right. If the positive statement doesn’t match the reality, it only distracts you from the task in hand.

Realistic thinking action: “Do something about it before it’s too late - Get that climbing coaching, build that climbing board, get on that fingerboard every day, lose that stone of fat, practice and perfect that falling technique.”

Thought example 2. (at the last move of the redpoint): “I’m not good enough, I’m going to fail”

Positive thinking action: “You can do it, get the jug”

Critique: The thought offers no practical help. It merely starts an argument in your head at exactly the wrong moment!

Negative thinking action: “Be decisive, full commitment, pull down like hell on that crimp”

And another point about fear of falling

I’ve posted on this blog several times about fear of falling, and of course written a whole book section on it in 9 out of 10. But further elements of this complex issue of mental training continue to challenge so many climbers, certainly if the number of emails I get on the subject is anything to go by.

One aspect that just came to mind while reading another of these is the issue of focusing your mind too much on the problem of fear of falling in the process of trying to address it.

So the problem of excessive fear or anxiety in leading may arise subconsciously.  By the time you realise that it is actually a big limitation with your climbing, it may already be quite a large and engrained issue. So you need to stare it in the face and look at the roots of it to first understand its origin and then change your habits to reduce and eliminate it.

But the subtlety of how to approach this effort seems to be important. I notice that some climbers seem to view their fear of falling as a foe in which they are in a constant battle with. Given the time and difficulty involved in overcoming fear of falling for a proportion of climbers, I can completely understand why it must feel like this. Nevertheless, viewing it along these lines could become self-defeating.

Fear is a healthy and and entirely natural human emotion. Again we have to go back to the difference between the actual risk, and the fear we produce from it. Sure, we can swallow fear in a moment of truth. But this is not a training strategy. The training strategy is to alter the inputs that result in the fear. You’re not trying to squash the fear, you’re trying to change how you think, plan and act on the rock so the fear needs not arise. The fear inputs can be reduced either by resetting your sense of what is actually fearful, such as by gaining familiarity with practice falls, or by reducing the sense of uncertainty about your position on the rock, by learning all the countless tactical tricks of leading.

Although you must face the problem directly to get to this stage, you must be careful to maintain attention on the pleasure and satisfaction of leading, as opposed to a constant battle against fear. When people have asked me about the boldest leads I have ever done, I’ve always come back to the same basic idea that the desire to experience and complete the climb simply overwhelmed any fears I had, no matter how serious they were.

You must give active energy to thinking about why you are motivated to have the experience of leading difficult rock climbs. What positives are there. When these elements are front and centre in your mind, the fears are naturally pushed to the side, or rather put in their place.

One thing out of your comfort zone

Video above: One thing out of you comfort zone, each day.

Una on Twitter was asking me about recovering leading confidence after a bad fall. She felt she was still struggling, even following the advice in 9/10. Was there anything more? In a practical sense, not really. The advice I laid out in the book about progressively exposing yourself to more and more challenging leading situations is the easiest, if not only way to do it. But that’s not to belittle it. For some people, it can be an enormously difficult thing to do.

Therefore, the response is to take it seriously as such. A huge problem needs a huge response, in the form of dedicated and relentless application of training over a long period. Here are six common pitfalls with building up leading confidence after a knock:

• Expecting too much. The apparent unfairness of confidence is that it takes many exposures to build it up, but a huge chunk of it can be wiped away in one go with a bad fall. Patient application of the training is definitely required. No perceptible difference may be noticed for many training sessions. The other problem is that it is harder to measure than pure finger strength. Even if you are making gains in mental confidence, you might not notice until this add up to something quite substantial.
• Measuring the wrong thing. Lots of people measure the success of their training based on time. “I’ve been working on my leading for two months and I’ve not noticed any changes”. However, if you were only leading for two sessions per week, that’s only 16 training sessions in two months! The result may have been different with 5 sessions per week.
• Failing to complete the training. Practicing leader falls indoors is just one small part of gaining leading confidence. If you are training for something like trad climbing, you need to have plenty of safe falls, as well as real trad leading. Lots of it. One without the other tends to be ineffective. Yet a lot of climbers complain of lack of time and opportunity to get on real rock, especially at this time of year with dark nights and poor weather. Unfortunately, this is the excuse that separates those who succeed and those who fail. We are training mental confidence in leading - the climbing standard does not need to be high, the rock doesn’t need to be dry and the sun needn't be shining. Get a headtorch and a Gore-Tex and go climbing! You think people don’t do that? Sure, it’s great if you live somewhere like Scotland where you can go mixed climbing all winter - a perfect training ground for leading confidence (people were quick to cite it’s effect on me when I downgraded The Walk of Life from E12 to E9 a few years ago). It’s true that winter climbing makes climbers mentally tough. But if you can’t access this, just go to the crag and climb at the level you can in whatever conditions you find.
• Kidding yourself. A big problem with training your leading confidence is kidding yourself that you are going out of your comfort zone when you are not. Recently I climbed with a chap who was climbing well but leading confidence was his main weakness. He was more than capable of taking proper leading falls and building up a ‘go for it’ attitude in his outdoor leading. But when backing off from a lead, he said “I need to go back to the climbing wall and do more practice falls”. They won’t work. He was choosing them precisely because he’d already mastered that level. They were now inside his comfort zone, an easy option. Finding the right intensity of experience to build up your confidence is not easy. But it is just as easy to undershoot and unwittingly stay within your comfort zone as it is to overdo it and maintain a state of poor confidence.
• Asking for failure. When it comes down to it, leading combines the skills of common sense problem solving, mental toughness and practical skills. Many climbers focus too much on the mental toughness part. Young lads are especially good at overriding their fears and just going for it and everyone can do this to an extent. Overriding fears is good if it’s irrational fear, In other words, when your mind ought to know that you have a solid base of practical skills and well developed problem solving approach. Far too many climbers push on with the fear conquering without developing that base of skill in parallel. This is asking for failure, because you will put yourself in situations where you are genuinely unable to wield control. Good leading is about having more control. It is also about having control over fear, as opposed to having no fear. Excess of irrational fear, and lack of healthy fear both lead to loss of control, in different ways. Take care from every training session to learn new details about the practicalities of leading - dealing with gear, ropework, falling technique, anticipation and planning etc. Don’t just focus on being fearless.
• Not really wanting it enough. This aspect is underestimated in sport and training, surprisingly. Those who want it badly enough simply do not rest until they find the right path through the training to get to the goal routes they cannot live without. Rather than throwing up their hands after experiencing lack of progress, they jump right in and make plenty more errors until they find a formula for progress. Inevitably, we never get the balance of training 100% perfect. No one does. But burning desire to move forward and get to the next level is a crucial catalyst in letting you absorb the stresses and knocks of pushing outside your comfort zone. It creates resilience in people that are not inherently made of hero stuff. So, sometimes a clear conversation with yourself about exactly what this means to you is the fuel you need to get you through anything. What if you have that conversation and realise you don’t want it badly enough to push yourself through all the challenges? Hurry up and do something else then! Life is short.

Training the mind has some similarities and some important differences from training the muscles. It is similar in that it is a ‘plastic’ tissue. Train it appropriately, and it will change. The difference is of course it’s vast complexity and especially how the layers of thoughts, emotions and basic programmed responses all mix together. Mental training demands careful consideration to make sure you are applying a sustained progressive overload, but getting the size of the stimulus just right.

My approach as a youngster was just to climb one thing that was truly out of my comfort zone, every time I went climbing. Every time, no excuses. If it didn’t give me a dry mouth and a small knot in my stomach, I knew it wasn’t really out of my comfort zone. 

NB: The notes above are NOT a guide to what to do to improve your leading confidence. They should be read in the context of applying the advice in 9/10.

Mental training, 3 simple mantras

Natalie Berry stepping out on her first E4 trad lead.

There are now several books available on the difficult subject of mental training specifically for climbers. If you add in the wider sports psychology literature out there, you could read yourself to death on this subject. And yet I’m not convinced that all that literature has made as much impact as the equivalent literature on physical training.

As I observe climbers these days I see more and more physical strength and fewer tough performers who can get the most out of themselves when it matters. Why is this? It’s debatable. Maybe it’s because mental training is inherently less quantifiable, so less likely to get done? Maybe it’s because the cognitive habits we form are so hard to break and the impact of a book on it’s own is rarely enough? I also sometimes feel that the complexity of trying to explain performance psychology makes the literature hard going, maybe even self-defeating for some.

While writing on this subject elsewhere, I thought of a few simple messages I tell myself while preparing to climb or actually on a climb which distill these complex ideas down to a tool you can use in the heat of the moment. I hope they are useful to at least some of you:

“If it felt easy, it wouldn’t be hard, and I’d want to try something harder”

“Nobody cares about this effort except me. So relax, you’ve got nothing to lose by just trying and trying hard”

“There are no prizes for holding back”

More on practice falls

Keri emailed to ask about clocking up her practice falls to gain leading confidence. In part 3 of ‘9 out of 10 climbers’ I detailed how essential falling practice is for a large swathe of climbers and highlighted the main reasons for lack of progress in confidence training.

One aspect that Keri picked up on that I hadn’t covered properly is what to do when you don’t have full confidence in your belayer for taking regular falls. I have of course learned the hard way not to be so trusting of belayers I’ve not climbed with before.

Keri’s point was that first, some belayers might not be the best at fielding your falls, but more importantly, even belayers who are pretty competent most of the time become distracted and might not hold your fall very well. 

Like most training problems, liberal use of common sense is the solution:

- Although it’s important to get unanticipated falls in (i.e unanticipated for both leader and belayer), it ought to be fine to remind your belayer that during the session you’ll be taking some falls. 

- ideally, fall off hard routes where both you and your belayer are expecting to see a fall. Do it all the time, year in year out.

- If you are going to take a planned fall, do take a squint at what your belayer is doing just before you let go. If they are making a sandwich (it’s happened to me more than once), then a gentle reminder to pay attention will help. You don’t even need to say ‘watch me’ if you don’t want to. Just a little tug on the rope, or a grunt of effort usually wakes them up. However, don’t get carried away. I’ve climbed with some climbers who become so worried about their belayers they hardly concentrate on the climbing at all.

- A related, but more subtle point is about the monotony of indoor leading. You do route after route, and familiarity with belaying breeds the tendency to become distracted. The skill of a good belayer is to allow themselves to pass the time of belaying without ever completely zoning out. It’s a bit like driving your car. Sometimes you daydream, but hopefully never that much that you can’t snap back into full concentration in a split second when a decision or action is required. Even if you have a conversation with the belayer next to you, a glance upwards every couple of seconds is essential and will go a long way to reassuring your leader too.

- If you are climbing with a competent, but less than expert belayer, you can choose your moments to take practice falls a bit more carefully. Falling from the second or third bolt might not be a good idea. However, you do have to ask yourself - if you don’t have confidence in them to hold your fall at the least favourable moment on the climb, what happens when a hold spins or you do simply slip off?

- Don’t be afraid to coach your belayer. If you feel they are not aware or understand key moments of danger for the leader such as clipping the second bolt, paying out rope effectively, or how to read their leaders body language to anticipate clips or falls, teach them. It might be a long process, so don’t go overboard. Many gentle reminders many be required.

- Communicate with your belayer before, during and after your lead. Things like “I think I’ll be clipping the third off that big sloper, so give me plenty of slack there” or “ I like a little more slack so I can clip quickly, but watch me up there at the crux”. So many problems are avoided by good communication between climbers. If you decide to clip early, shout for slack. If you are belaying and see your leader struggle or anticipate a clip or a fall, say something to remind and reassure them that you are watching. Even a quick ‘ok’ or ‘go on’ really helps. The belayer is still part of the climbing team.

Go to an indoor wall and you’ll see plenty of examples of belayers (and leaders) who are not really there. They are climbing to switch off. They pay out slack only when the rope tugs tight, they have no idea how their leader just did the crux so they know the sequence for their go. If you climb with someone like that, you have a few options; climb with someone else, practice your falls with someone else, or try to subtly gee your switched off climbing partner up a bit. Climbers respond to each other’s demeanor quite readily. If you are energetic, attentive and communicative during your climbing and belaying, your partner is more likely to be too.

A final point is that even when everything is perfect, the danger of both climbing and falling can’t be completely eliminated. This is balanced against the fact that practicing falls makes you a safer and better climber. Exposing yourself to some risk is inevitable. However, if you take all the precautions you can to make your practice falls safer, you can make it a perfectly acceptable part of becoming a better climber.

When there's nothing left to prove

I read a comment from a very accomplished climber the other day saying it was getting difficult to find the motivation to train, or most specifically to find a reason to keep training. This is an interesting question for older athletes who have done all they ever dreamed of doing in their sport. Why would you want to spend huge amounts of time and effort chasing tiny gains when there is so much more to life there in the background?

In competitive sports I can see why it would end up being an ‘all or nothing’ relationship with training. But in climbing it’s a lot more complicated than that. For young climbers, competition and proving yourself might well be a strong motivator. Training is essentially easy when you are in your twenties too unless you really have some badass goals and don't accept less than getting them. It mostly feels like a flowing river of improvement. All you have to do is jump in and you flow along from training to results. So there is enjoyment just from going with the flow and gaining the gains that are there for the taking. Later, it becomes more like trying to swim upstream and takes a lot more effort for less gain. So you really have to want it.

So why would you? Motivation is obviously a personal thing and everyone news to have their own mindset. For me, training for competitive reasons has long dropped off the bottom of my list of reasons to do it. There are 2 reasons why I like to train these days.

First and foremost, it’s to climb the lines I’ve seen and want to climb. So it follows that without the lines to fire the inspiration, the motivation to train dries up. So it’s quite important to live in a place where there is one line after another to try. 

Second, it’s because training itself is, or at least can be, enjoyable in itself. In recent years I’ve become more and more aware of that small changes how you train determine whether you really want to do it, or it becomes a chore. For instance, if I go for a run, I want it to be on a new mountain I’ve not explored, not a treadmill. So it kind of comes back to matching the training with my original motivation for starting climbing - to explore impressive and nice outdoor places. If I train indoors, I want it to be on nice holds, in a good temperature, with good people, and sometimes, on my own. To me, the feeling of having made a gain in training and having that sense of feeling light and strong is one of the most powerful feelings in sport. I still like it just as much despite the fact it’s more fleeting and much harder won than before.

Running uphill: 3 mental strategies

‘Proper’ runners might laugh at this post, but for the majority of us, who find running uphill hard or even desperate, we have to find some mental strategies to make it easier. The post came from a discussion with a (non climbing) friend who had just started doing a little running and felt it was very hard to actually keep running and that hills were a ‘stopper’. He was under the impression that it would be different for me because I was a keen sportsperson, albeit in a different sport. I don’t think I convinced him that I had exactly the same feelings, every time, and that I found short easy runs harder mentally than big long hill runs.

Probably the main thing that keeps me running uphill is that I tend to do it in beautiful mountain scenery, often exploring new places I’ve never been before. Treadmill running in a gym is, for me, the ultimate motivational nemesis. I find it almost impossible to sustain it for any length of time unless I have a serious word with myself and feel it’s really worth it for my training. Even when I’m in a hotel in a flat place with no opportunity to do any other exercise, I can only clock-watch my way to about 30 minutes and then it all seems totally pointless. I think if you really have this feeling, it’s best not to fight it too much. Stick it out while you can for the sake of the fitness maintenance/energy expenditure or whatever your training requires and then go and do something more fun. 

However, most of the time we are somewhere in the middle of the motivational continuum. We don’t hate it enough that it’s just not worth the gains, but we don’t love it enough that it’s no mental effort to keep going. What to do?

I have three strategies for keeping running uphill when I’m tired, unfit or just not really enjoying it. I just naturally adopted them without reading from anyone else so I’m sure these have been well described before elsewhere. Which one to choose simply depends on what kind of mood you’re in. It is also possible to use them all at once!

1. Gun to your head. You are running uphill and although you’re not collapsing with extreme fatigue and lactic acid agony, you are simply finding that the desire to stop and walk is getting much stronger than the desire to keep going and get a good workout. Imagine that someone is holding a gun to your head and will kill you if you can’t run another ten steps. Count them inwardly as you do them. Now if they repeat the threat for the next ten, could you keep going to save your life? Of course you could. And so on… Once you get over the ridiculousness of the idea, it helps you get perspective that the desire to stop isn’t nearly as strong as you thought and that you’re perfectly capable of overcoming it, if you really want to.

2. Absolutely no stopping. This one is not so grim as No. 1. One of the problems with keeping going on a hard run is that the decision to stop or keep going keeps presenting itself over and over. If you decide to keep going, the voice in your head asks “Will I just stop?” all over again in another few minutes or even seconds. So over the course of the run you have to summon the willpower to make the right decision many many times. This gets tiring, and leaves you open to make the wrong decision sooner or later. A compounding factor is the norms you set up for yourself. If you normally stop and walk by this point, you feel like you’ve ‘done enough’ as you have in the past and the temptation to give in gets even stronger. Making one irreversible decision at the outset is one way to cut away all of this decision making hell. Decide at the start where you are going to run to and that you absolutely will not stop to walk under any voluntary circumstances, at all. Then, simply adjust the pace to however slow it takes to uphold the decision. It might be dead slow. But it doesn’t matter, it’s still better than stopping. Quite apart from the physical training, it’s excellent mental training in self-discipline. In the event, the knowledge that there’s no way out of the task except getting to the end usually provides motivational stimulus to keep going as fast as fitness allows. The positive vibe of setting yourself up with such an iron cast decision and being able to fulfill it, no matter how slowly, also makes you feel good and tends to make you go as fast as you can. You have to really mean it though. If you allow yourself to negotiate with your own resolve and find reasons to overrule it halfway through, you might as well have stayed at home. That said, don’t feel too bad if you do fail to uphold the strategy. Just set a more modest goal next time and make a more steady progression.

3. Be somewhere else. ‘Detachment’ is a well known and effective strategy for dealing with fatigue and desire to slow down or stop in endurance sport. Think of those moments when you’re driving and suddenly realise that you can’t remember driving the past three miles. That’s detachment. It’s quite amazing how you can assess the road and traffic and respond accordingly while seemingly giving your complete mental focus to your daydream. Basically you wan’t to recreate the same effect while running to make the time pass quicker and the pain and fatigue seem much less noticeable. There are loads of ways to enter this state, and you should experiment to get better at it. For instance, one way is to think of a part of your body that feels good. Maybe your fingertips feel good after a rest day from climbing. Focus your mind’s eye on them and drift off into a word of daydreams about past and future climbing sessions. Another way is to focus on something mindlessly hypnotic, such as the trees going past, or the blocks of pavement, or the sound of your feet splashing on wet ground. Whatever seems nice. Good music in your ears is one of the easiest methods to detach and keep going. This is probably Apple’s greatest contribution to society! By contrast, attempting to enter into an analytical thought pattern about some question that needs serious brain power is a risky strategy and often pulls you right out of the ‘bubble’ and your fatigue hits you hard. If you’re used to it, fine, but for most people, a ‘go with the flow’ daydreamy type of thought pattern works best, even if your body is working at high intensity.

All of these are skills in themselves that take practice, just like it takes a lot of training sessions in a row to start feeling fit. So don’t kick yourself if it doesn’t work first time or even close to it. And finally, two things to remember: 

1. Most folk find it this hard, it’s not just you.

2. Running back down the hill always feels great!

Confidence de-training

I went bouldering outdoors for the first time in two months yesterday. Lochaber deluge enforced indoor training regime. I was shocked at how tentative I was and worried about bad landings after so long falling onto big friendly climbing wall mats. Note to self, and anyone else in the same situation:

Too much time above big mats destroys your boldness and ability to fall properly outdoors on poor landings. Not much you can do about this other than be aware of it and take care to give some time to retraining when the rain stops.

Training the ability to try

If you see people in action during training (it’s easiest to observe in a traditional weights/cardio gym), it’s not hard to notice that theres a massive difference between the majority who are having a ‘light’ session to say the least, and the much smaller proportion who are really working their bodies hard.

As an aside, If you do see those people in the gym who look like they aren’t trying - don’t scoff inwardly (or outwardly!) at them - not everyone goes to the gym to work hard. Some people exercise to relax and wind down. And remember you don’t see what other workouts they get up to. You might be surprised!

Sometimes folk don’t have the right peer group to influence them to learn to try really hard, sometimes, they just haven’t found the right motivation, or more likely they just don’t realise how hard they could be trying. This is not something that applies to some and not others. Everyone has room to really grit their teeth and work themselves harder.

It’s true in many cases that the best athletes are the ones who are trying hardest. It’s not always the case for various reasons and it’s too simplistic and misleading to view athletic success purely as a product of effort. However, that doesn’t change the point that if you can find ways to try harder, you’ll go further.

I talked a lot about how to do that in my book, but one thought for your training sessions over the Christmas period; Before you go for your session, or have your next attempt on the problem, or circuit, or route, imagine what it would feel like if you were to try harder than you’ve ever tried before. Think about how your fingers would feel crushing down on that little hold. Think about how you’d grab the next hold and start pulling lightning fast and concentrate on keeping pulling with maximum force right through the move until your feet swing back in. Think about how sore your skin and arms will feel on that last circuit and how you’ll detach yourself from it and keep right on slapping. Think about the mindset of those climbers who inspire you by their amazing feats of climbing. What do you think goes through their mind when they train? They are people on a mission! They have learned to love their training and they feel satisfaction that every last grain of hard effort takes them closer to the routes they are on the mission to climb. So what's your mission?

Now repeat through the whole of next year!

Leading confidence - a worthy enemy

Recently I’ve been coaching a lot of sport climbing and spent lots of time trying to get climbers to recognise that leading confidence is placing a huge barrier in the way of improving almost any aspect of their climbing.

What I’ve noticed is that climbers with leading confidence issues are desperate to avoid tackling it despite appearing quite highly motivated to make changes in most other areas of their climbing skills. Taking the first step in attacking leading confidence just feels so painful and scary. It’s more comfortable to convince yourself (and try unsuccessfully to convince me!) that it’s unattainable due to past bad experiences with leading or that it’s not actually an important weakness.

Next time you lead a route, notice what thoughts are running in your mind during the climbing. If most of the time is spent thinking “I’m scared, try to calm down… I can’t get to the next bolt, the last one is too far away, I don’t want to go any higher… what will happen if I fall” then very little progress can happen in your climbing. Fear is paralysing your ability to focus on the rock and the moves, and therefore your ability to learn.

In fact, your climbing standard might be doomed only to go down. Every time you toprope, you reinforce the feeling that toproping is normal, leading is abnormal. And when you do lead and take a fall, you have never learned to fall cleanly and your scrape down the rock rather than leaning back and letting the rope take you will wipe away even more of your confidence. A downward spiral basically, of climbing feeling progressively more scary and unpleasant until you eventually feel you just aren't enjoying doing it at all.

Improvements in confidence come in small increments, from forcing yourself to lead more and more and not ignoring learning how to fall nicely onto the rope. But what I’m realising is that many folk stall before even getting onto the road to improvement because they have yet to actually see it for the huge problem it is.

Leading confidence is not a small detail of climbing. For many climbers, it’s the biggest challenge climbing will ever throw at you. Beat it, and many more skills will unfold beyond and become attainable. Respect it as a worthy enemy and give it effort and energy accordingly.

Footnote: Leading is not essential in sport climbing. I often say to climbers that if they never want to lead and always toprope routes others have lead that’s totally fine. Climbing can be whatever you want it to be. I’m sure there are plenty of folk that do just that and probably get on very well because they can get on with actually enjoying their climbing. However, although I’ve said this to many climbers I’ve never actually met any who have decided to reject leading. In fact, often I’ve noticed that just by recognising that leading is an option (not an imposed rule) and it’s their choice, they choose to attack leading and if they follow the right steps (part 3 of the book) progress is almost guaranteed. 

A jump from being too scared to lead hardly at all to leading consistently can be achievable within a few sessions for some, just because the shift in attitude from leading as an unpleasant rule to a worthy challenge is so powerful. That’s what happened to me also - at 16 and too scared to lead. My attitude changed and I jumped from Severe to E2 in a week.

If I only knew now what I knew then

I’ve written a lot on this site and recently in my Coachwise series on the MCofS site about the crippling and often hidden consequences of fear of failure on your climbing (or any skill you are trying to learn). Here is one message for young climbers, and one for adults.

There are some revealing comparisons to be made between the dynamics of fear of failure in adults and youngsters as they learn climbing. Apart from the lucky few that discover the power of focus before adulthood, focus is the main problem for young climbers. In fact most young climbers reading this post will probably have judged it too involved and switched off already. Kids at the wall try a bit of this and a bit of that, and if it takes longer than three seconds to find the correct footholds and body position they lose patience and jump for the hold and let their light bodies swing out below them. Adults look on with jeaslousy at how they hold on and keep going with such obviously poor technique. But of course they pay for such reliance on temporary lightness when they grow into heavy adult bodies and have to learn good footwork with slow learning adult brains.

So the best young climber after the first few years will end up being the one who learns to focus earliest.

But what adults gain in knowing how to discipline themselves and focus on both immediate and longer term tasks, they lose in fear of failure. They become all sensitive that strangers at the climbing wall, their mates or the coach will see them wobble, flail and fall. Without knowing they are doing it, they size up potential climbs to try based on likelihood of embarrassing themselves, rather than anything else. The result? An ever narrowing comfort zone that feels progressively more unpleasant to be outside as the feedback loop plays out over time.

Kids, on the other hand, are learning everything for the first time, they are not yet masters of anything. So failing, grappling, and trying again is all they know. As soon as adults become masters in any one field (such as their job, academic field, driving, whatever) they like that feeling and settle into it’s comfort. Sadly, this makes it much more difficult to learn other skills at the optimum rate.

The best (and happiest) adult climber is the one who learns to focus before being an adult, and doesn’t forget that failing repeatedly is normal.

Beating fear of falling (in 5 sessions)

I’ve talked before about fear of falling - how climbers underestimate how much it’s limiting them, and that the only way to beat it is to attack it head on with falling practice. 

But I want to make another point about falling practice. Most climbers vastly underestimate how many practice falls will be ‘enough’ to beat their fear and learn to be relaxed and confident in their leading. 

Because those with a fear of falling problem find falling practice so unpleasant, this tendency is even further amplified by the constant temptation to feel like you’ve done enough. If you have to ask, you almost certainly haven’t.

Treat falling practice/fear of falling removal exactly the same as training some other variable like gaining finger strength - it takes sustained repetition over time to lift above square one and make any progress up the ladder. A bit here and there goes nowhere.

So just as it takes hundreds of sessions of pulling on small holds to go from novice to strong fingered advanced climber, it takes many hundreds of leader falls to go from falling averse nervous leader to confdent relaxed leader.

Hundreds of falls, year in year out.

Not a couple one night you are feeling brave and then never again. 

A second point is that many who fear falling and try to practice it compare themselves to confident ‘fallers’ and think - “they only fall once or twice in a climbing day, so that will be ok for me to do as well”.

But we have to go back to the basic training principles - overload and reversibility maintenance. Those who are confident may be so naturally or by having many falls in their climbing history. They don’t need to train it now, just maintain their current level because their weaknesses lie elsewhere. So just a few falls is fine. In training, just a little work is needed to tread water, but a pile of work is needed to move up the ladder.

If you have a problem with fear of falling, you need to do much more. You have to be going faster than those who don’t have the problem in order to catch up. 

Try a controlled and safe fall from the end of every single route you do at the climbing wall for 5 sessions in a row. Routes vertical or steeper, and a trustworthy belayer are among the pre-requisites for this being a good idea. Not one or two, every single one. So hopefully that will be between 25 and 100 falls with the bolt well below your feet. 

Now thats a chance to make more progress with your leading confidence in 5 sessions than perhaps you could in a year or two of trying to get around the problem by getting stronger so you can feel less scared on a given grade by just holding on harder.

The Sharma scream

It’s funny how quickly and readily fashions spread through climbing. Lycra, slang terms like ‘Send it dude!’ and... 

Screaming.

In the eighties, when the French really were the kings of ‘French Style’ climbing, as sport climbing was then known, their ideal was to climb like a ballet dancer, with effortless panache in the movements, a totally straight face and not a sound coming from your lips. 

Now, thanks to films such as the Dosage series, the fashion tends to be to slap your way up that granite boulder like a wild animal screaming at the top of your voice.

The obvious question is, which is best (for performance, not looking cool). The answer comes in two parts. Firstly, somewhere in between is best. Secondly, where you should be on the continuum between straight faced ballet dancer and screaming bull terrier depends largely on who you are.

Chris Sharma, being the most famous (and possibly loudest) exponent of the psyche scream has made screaming while climbing a talking point, and I’m sure, more fashionable. He does it, so it must be good, right? Well, listen to Chris talking off the rock, and you’ll see he is a pretty chilled out type of guy. When asked about his screaming, he says it helps him raise the necessary level of aggression to unleash his full power on the holds. 

When I observe others taking up this deliberately aggressive climbing style, it sometimes has poor results - poor timing, overly basic movements, not much weight on the feet and inefficient use of energy on a route/problem.

What’s going on here? In a nutshell, for those who are inherently calm and make clear, calculated and efficient movement decisions in their climbing, some extra psyching up can help them get more out of their physical capability, but just on the hardest moves. In other words, in small doses.

For those who can very easily deliver a lot of focused aggression in their climbing, more psyching will yield little more power output but incur a big drop in efficiency of movement.

The great skill of climbing is to be able to switch from moment to moment between screaming to get maximum power on a very powerful, but technically basic move, and calm focus the next instant to perfectly aim for a tiny foot of handhold.

The climber that most influenced me was Fred Nicole with a quote (from memory of a magazine article) that “it’s not so much the level of strength but the timing of it” Fred went on to explain that the climber that could use is strength at the exactly correct moment would be the best.

Onsight confidence - a holy grail?

Justin asks:

“I regularly find the difference between success and failure on a route can be distilled down to state of mind on the day - the confident relaxed approach to just go for it that sees you through the crux before you know what's happening as opposed to the doubt, hesitation etc that can lead to panic, missing obvious sequences, placing too much gear then falling off. Working a route removes the unknown which makes it very easy to stay composed - but do you have any tips for attaining / maintaining the right frame of mind for a hard onsight attempt?”

There are several strategies to help create a relaxed confident frame of mind for an onsight, but here are my top five:

Don’t get too built up - Often, getting excited about an onsight you’ve been looking forward to for ages can pile on a lot of unnecessary pressure. It’s not so bad in sport climbing because if you fall off a nice 7b, there are a million others in the sea, but in trad it can be worse if there are not so many rotes of that style/grade that lend themselves onsighting. So, the challenge tends to be to not think too much about specific routes you want to onsight and more about a general level. When you think about specific routes, it’s all too easy to let failure scenarios take over your imagination and destroy your composure on the actual attempt. It’s usually better to think about the result (success/failure on a specific route) as little as possible, and just to focus on how you are climbing generally. It might be better for some people to not prepare too thoroughly for the day of the attempt - anything that increases the sense of occasion might place more subconscious pressure on you. My tactic has always been to convince myself I don’t care whether I fail on the route at all and just go for broke. I just focus on climbing the next move or section well and nothing more. Hopefully you find yourself at the top?!

Think of past successes. The trouble with onsighting is it’s impossible to visualise the moves based on actual experience of doing them (obviously you have to when reading the route from the ground). So all you have to go on is past successes. So it pays to play back the feelings of confidence and good movement you had in previous onsights that went well. The more similar the route to wheat you are aiming to onsight next, the better.

Get familiarity. Your best onsights will tend to happen during a run of a lot of similar climbing. In redpointing it’s often not too important to have done a lot of similar routes recently. But for onsighting, the more you are immersed in every aspect of the routine of onsight days and climbing, the less the ‘shock of the new’ will make you worry about success/failure and the more you will just centre your focus on the immediate job in hand - the next move.

Get trust in your gear - There is no easy way to do it, falling onto gear, especially unanticipated falls will give you the largest single jumps in climbing confidence you’ll ever have. So a good tactic is to try ‘bold but safe’ routes where there tends to be harder climbing and a bit run out, but above very good gear. If you try a lot of them near your limit, you’ll experience that sickening feeling of realising you are about to fall and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s only sickening at first. Once you have experienced it many times, you’ll be able to recognise it for what it is and not let it destroy your focus on fighting through that last move to the resting ledge. It will also help you for future routes to accept that a gear placement is totally reliable and you’ll beat the tendency to stop right in the middle of the crux in a fruitless search for more gear when it’s unnecessary.

Break routes down - The more you look at routes and break them up mentally into a series of short hurdles between rests/gear, the less you’ll feel the choking sense of taking on something huge. Start off with the aim ‘just to get to the first gear’ or the crux or whatever the natural break in the route is.

The common theme is all of these points is that the conditions for confidence are created in advance, sometimes a long way in advance. It’s nearly impossible to magic confidence out of panic in the moment of an onsight. Only well grounded tendency to have confidence over the long term will be able to bring your focus back from the brink. Start now.