4 new titles in the shop

We’ve just added four great new books and DVDs to the shop. The first three books are all major contributions to the literature on improving at climbing and I’d recommend getting hold of all three. Well done to the authors of all of them who have made a great contribution here and no doubt these books will be the first step to many hard ascents and goals realised in the future.

Gimme Kraft: The Cafe Kraft gym (Kraft = strength btw) in Nurnberg, Germany has gained a great reputation for coaching a string of fantastic climbing talents over the past few years, most notably, Alex Megos who became the first climber to onsight 9a. Their coaches have put together a new book and DVD detailing the principles and exercises they have used to help their talented young climbers become super strong and fit beasts.

So the book is very focused on physical strength and endurance training, both on and off the climbing wall. It provides a great and easy to follow manual for sharpening up weak areas in your strength. This is particularly useful since it can be hard to choose or adapt core strength routines from other sports for climbing.

Both the book and DVD show clearly how to do the basic strength and endurance exercises and the DVD contains many interesting interviews with climbing legends about training and climbing performance. 

Training for the new Alpinism: Steve House and Scott Johnston’s new book on training for alpinism is a much awaited and weighty addition to the available literature on training for climbing. It is the first book to focus solely on alpinism and brings the field right up to date. It is very much training focused (as opposed to skills focused), which is both it’s greatest strength and weakness.

It contains clear and extensive sections on the basic principles of sports physiology, but with the discussion relating directly to climbing in an alpine setting. So you no longer have to learn and then adapt the principles used in other endurance sports to effectively plan your training regime. It also has great and focused sections on strength, mental skills, nutrition, altitude, schedule planning and choosing your training goals. It also contains some fantastic contributions from other world class alpinists, sharing what they have learned about the most effective ways yo improve your alpine climbing.

Its focus on physical rather than technical skills training means there should probably be more than just this book in your training library. However, it joins a collection of titles that are essential reading for climbers who are serious about improving.

The Trad Climber’s Bible: The skills for trad climbing are about as broad as in any sport. This is especially true if you wish to climb in many different settings - hard, technical single pitch climbs, big walls and and alpine faces. The Trad Climber’s Bible comes at the challenge of passing on these skills from a different angle from most instructional manuals.

I jumped at the chance to order it in for the davemacleod.com shop simply because it was authored by the American trad legends John Long and Peter Croft. I was fascinated by how they had approached the challenge of writing about trad skills. They have written the book in a narrative style, with many stories and anecdotes from their combined 70 year experience of pushing their limits on trad all over the world.

Some of the sections, such as those on ‘fiddling’ and ‘embracing the weird’ made me smile as they highlighted the sheer range of unusual skills that are nonetheless essential to be a successful trad climber. It’s a big, thorough, entertaining and inspiring book which will provide much food for thought and arm you with many more skills to throw at your next big lead. Excellent photography throughout and great value for what has clearly been a huge project for the authors.

Wideboyz II: The Wideboyz, Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker, have decided to turn their hand to finger cracks, with the goal of repeating the hardest and most famous of all finger cracks - Cobra Crack (8c) in Squamish. In their own Wideboyz style, they convert their offwidth training den into a finger sqaushing setup and proceed to train, hard. Still, Cobra Crack put up a good fight! Entertaining as ever, and a reminder that focusing and trying damn hard goes a long, long way.

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.

Modern trends in city dwelling trad climbers

Following on from my last post where I said people often email and tell me what grades they climb in different disciplines and ask how they can improve. Of course it’s a very complicated picture, but sometimes it’s not so hard to pick out some obvious clues.

One very common clue to identifying weaknesses is the balance of strengths, or grades across the disciplines. Lets take a wee look at these in turn.

How many pull-ups can you do on a first joint edge (small campus board rung) on different grip types? Based on my observations as a coach, for about 7/8 out of ten climbers, they will do much better using a crimp grip than either four or three fingers openhanded. If thats you, you’ve found a weakness to train. Simple! Keep climbing openhanded on almost everything until you strengths on each grip type match. If you don’t, it’s your loss. If you do the hard learning about why it’s important as I stressed in the last important, you wouldn’t need any convincing why you need to go to all this trouble and spend a couple of years breaking your crimping habit.

A second one that stands out a mile with trad climbers who live in cities and spend a lot of time climbing indoors is their grades. A common one these days is “I climb F7a, Font 7a and HVS/E1” or at a higher level “F8a, Font 8a and E4” To me as a coach this now sounds normal because I’ve heard it so many times. But to me as a climber I think “What?!” 

A friend of mine is convinced if you can do Font 7c bouldering , you should be able to do F8c routes so long as you do any sort of decent stamina work. And it’s probably true for a lot of routes. As for trad - the crux of a benchmark E9 like Parthian Shot is Font 7a!

So what is all this saying? Climbers are often WAAAAY too stuck in a “climbing harder equals being stronger” paradigm and have completely forgotten to value tactics and technique. At most busy city climbing walls, if you come in every night for a week, you will come across a guy who can really climb well, but is weak as a kitten. He’ll consistently flash a certain grade on any type of terrain, every time. Yet he/she is much weaker than you. That person is your coach. Befriend them, watch their every move and ask them relentlessly what their background is. Copy it.