Tactics: Anticipation

In observing climbers I’m always looking for running themes that tend to characterise successful climbers versus the unsuccessful ones. My definition of unsuccessful  here is not defined by a given grade but just by failure to make continued improvement over time, almost irrespective of the type or intensity of training they do. Above a certain (fairly low) level of regular climbing time, climbers should tend to get better, just by learning better tactics. How does this happen?

The core skill needed, and missing from so many climber’s fundamental approach to climbing is that of anticipation. In a nutshell, anticipation as a tactic is simply thinking “If I do this now, what effects will it have later?” It could be later in the move, later in the attempt, the climbing day or even in your whole climbing career.

This fundamental basic approach is visible in so many fields not only of climbing but also in task management generally. People have a tendency to knuckle down to the immediate task and allow themselves to be distracted from the wider need to step back every so often and re-assess which tasks are appropriate and how everything is going. “I’m too busy getting on with it to stop and have a re-think”. Successful people either inherently do this or have taught themselves to remember to do this.

In climbing, it’s most obvious in mountaineering situations. You start of the day with a given plan and a long series of small tasks that make up the entire day. The problems start when the unpredictability of mountaineering changes the constraints in real time. Usually this affects you by slowing you down or tiring you out more than expected. Climbers get into trouble when they are too busy following the ‘old’ plan that they either don’t notice the new constraints (weather changes, snow, difficulty, errors etc) or fail to anticipate their effects on the old plan and update it with a new one.

Yet the same thing happens in so many aspects of climbing, including rock climbing movement and even things like planning your training. Part of the natural tendency for us to behave like this I’m sure comes from our aversion of the status quo changing or of loss.

Measuring the constraints that affect your plan for anything you are doing requires you to face the fact that the desired outcome, or route used to get to it, might not happen like you hoped or expected. It might no longer be realistic at all. Or perhaps it never was, but it’s taken going part-way down the path for this to become obvious. Either way, it’s easier just to keep your head down and stick to the plan. But it’s more likely you’ll fail eventually with this approach. And fail more painfully - with more time lost and effort expended. 

For some reason, good climbers, athletes or people in general seem to be able to get past the uncomfortability of the idea that although you might want the plan to work out just as you want, it just isn’t going to happen. In the same way that throwing out old clutter or starting anything with a clean slate gives a weird sense of refreshing bold clarity and therapeutic freedom - the old no longer seems important once you’ve let it go.

Summary: Are you blindly following your own plan without reflection? Is the plan still appropriate based on what you are learning on the way? Do you really know it needs changing but are resistant for no obvious reason?

NB: The opposite problem - of failure to stick to any plan for long enough to actually get anywhere - is less common but just as ineffective. I’m thinking of climbers that keep looking for another hold when it’s obvious there is only one real choice. Or climbers whose only measure of progress seems to be when you actually get to the top of the route (and so never try hard ones for long enough to actually create a chance of doing them).

Lessons from health promotion

Mark makes the simple but seemingly obvious point about why the health promotion sector has been roundly failing to get people to change their habits. If you don’t have time to click through the stories, the short version is that the most senior elements of the medical profession are still attempting to get people to take control of their own risk behaviours for health - smoking, drinking and getting fat - by issuing a ethical and moral appeal direct at the individual. Mark points out that it cannot work on it’s own. We are social beings and it’s too hard to act individually swim against the tide of what everyone around you is doing. 

Kids that go to boarding school end up with totally different accents from their parents - almost permanently. Go on a holiday where there isn’t a culture of sitting around, drinking, eating and not doing much (like a mountaineering trip) and you’ll probably come home a pound or two lighter, without even trying.

Some goes for your sport performance, training, whatever. The best way to get into a national team is to spend a stack of time with everyone else who is doing the same. I feel that it’s not necessary to make this a permanent move. It’s about hardwiring a new set of habits, norms, standards. It takes a bit of time to get there. But once you are there it’s possible to operate in isolation with only sporadic refreshers. In other words, beyond a certain point you can partially insulate yourself from settling for a second rate effort at being good at sport, even if you regularly train with others who do.

Thoughts from technique classes

Some themes that commonly emerge when coaching movement technique with climbers. Thanks to Rick Marland for the pics from Big Rock at the weekend.

The nature of climbing walls - look at the layout of the holds on modern climbing walls. In the main, setters tend to space the holds fairly evenly leading to the sort of position I’m in here, with limbs all at different levels. This makes quite pleasant continuous movement. But keep in mind that a lot of rock types have more patterned arrangements of holds; holds together in breaks with long reaches between and sometimes on good handholds but miniscule dinks for feet or vice versa. If you are training for this, watch out that your regular diet of climbing contains at least some movement like this.

Note also the three finger ‘pocket’ grip on the left hand. Climbers in their early twenties or younger don’t use it much, relying on the crimp much more. They haven’t had the pulley injuries yet - but they will! When we go to the campus board they can’t even hang on it openhanded. Older climbers use openhanded much more through necessity - too many pulley injuries. The serendipitous discovery is that once you get over the initial weakness, openhanded is a much stronger and less tiring grip on more than 50% of holds.

I’m pointing at the left foot in this picture. It needs to be pressed hard against the wall to complete the preparation to move the right hand. Although it doesn’t have a foothold to go to, it’s doing one of the most important jobs of all the limbs here. By pressing directly into (not downwards) the wall, it holds the upper body upright, preventing it falling outwards as the right hand reaches. 

Beginners miss this, experienced climbers do it intuitively but rarely with enough force or often enough and often the foot is systematically placed in the wrong spot. In my classes I show how the flagging foot should be placed various different types of move.

About to pull in hard with the left foot to get in position for the hand move. Climbers are generally too passive with the lower body. It’s natural to focus your aggression on the tiny handholds, because pulling really hard with our fingers is not a natural activity. It grabs our attention. Pulling hard with the feet in rock climbing is a learned skill. You have to force yourself to do at first.

Comparing rockshoes. The move in the second picture was impossible for some because they couldn’t get any weight on the foot on a small foothold. The reason was purely that the shoes were poorly fitting or worn out so the sole had no stiffness left. It’s easy in your normal climbing to convince yourself that this isn’t happening or it’s importance is small. But when we all try the same move and all the chaps who are not as strong can to the move easily it is an illuminating experience and climbers start talking about choosing a good pair of new shoes.

Thanks to pain...

Leah from the THXTHXTHX blog reminds us that pain has some superb qualities and is worth listening to if you work your body hard. Listen in good times and in bad, and take a moment to make doubly sure you do listen on those days when the immediate holds all of your attention.

Review: Vapour Velcros and how to use rockshoes

A couple of months ago I reviewed the Instinct slipper which I’ve since been wearing for all my indoor bouldering. Next up on Scarpa’s new rockshoe range is the Vapour Velcro. These are aimed as a more all-round use boot and are hence less aggressively turned down than the Instinct. As is usual for my reviews, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent to talk about how to choose and use rockshoes generally...

Turned down shoes (if you don’t know what the term means it’s basically that the toe box is curled slightly downwards) are the cause of much debate and polarisation among climbers. Some think their only useful for steep climbing, or if you climb hard. Others cannot understand them at all! The first big problem that a lot of people have is that turned down shoes feel downright weird when you first try them on in the shop. 

Book publishers know that no matter how much we hear the old adage about not judging books by their covers, we all do and will always do. Likewise for rockshoes. We can’t help but judge them by how they feel standing on a flat shop floor without being broken in, despite the fact they will probably feel completely different after a session of climbing and standing on actual footholds. If you want to get more performance from your rockshoe, you’ll have to get beyond how they feel in the shop. Most will never heed this advice, which is too bad…

The other problem is that turned down shoes require an actual technique of their own, distinct from traditional flatter soles. Watch some youtubes of leading and bouldering world cup comps. Watch in particular the climbers moving up vertical ground. Watch carefully how they place their feet. See how as they pad their toes downwards onto the foothold, they continue to drop their whole foot down by an inch or so after the toe has made contact. As they do this, watch the downturn of the boot bend back to a normal position. Once in the normal anatomical position, the foot can produce both power and control, but the elastic energy of the downturned rockshoe being stretched has added to the support. A flatter shoe has to provide that support by being stiffer, and that stiffness can come at the expense of sensitivity.

A case in point - Recently I climbed the famous death defying slab route Indian Face. My ascent was just before the Vapour Velcros came out, and I wore a pair of Scarpa Stix. Some climbers asked me why I would wear an apparently turned down boot on a smeary slab climb? The implication is that turned down boots wouldn’t smear well because they don’t bend back enough to make full contact with the smear. But they do! You just have to let them. This is a limitation of climbing technique, not the versatility of the boot. 

So what should one do about this problem of choosing shoes. Well, manufacturers tend to run boot demos around the country from time to time. They aren’t so popular these days as people are turned off by being marketed to during their climbing time. Of course the events are designed to get you hooked on the shoes, but they also save you from making expensive mistakes in buying shoes that don’t work well for you. My advice? Make an effort to keep track of boot demos near you and use them. 

Anyway, back to the review. When I got my new Vapour Velcros through from Scarpa I was all set to get them moving on some trad terrain straight away. But the wettest Scottish July in a decade made sure I tested them out on my board first. Out of the box, they feel very comfortable and indeed not so aggressively turned down. But support on small edges and tensiony steep ground still felt good on my standard tests on my board’s hardest problems. 

On my first outing in them on trad I filled one of them with enough blood I had to pour it out after this injury in preparation for the climb. Thankfully I was able to wear them for the first ascent of the Usual Suspects - a 5 pitch E9 7a first ascent was a good trad test I reckon. And they felt great. Precise and powerful on a 7a drop-knee crux at 50 degrees overhanging, and then supportive on tiny slippy quartz dinks on the pitches above. The heel felt not to hard on my achilles even after 6 hours of hard continuous climbing, but the velcro cinch was good enough to keep in snug for pulling hard on heelhooks. Not as good as the Stix for bat hangs but then there aren’t too many routes that require this! They have softened up a bit since and feel great on granite smears.

All round climbers will love these and they’ll be perfect for sensitivity on indoor routes and problems. With the luxury of having a few pairs, I’m still wearing my Instinct slippers for long board training sessions for the combination of 100% tension grab and soft comfort on the toes. I’m wearing Vapour Vs for indoor and most outdoor routes for comfort and that little bit more support on long pitches. Enjoy..

5 ways to sabotage your training session

If you wanted to learn how to mess up your training and stay as crap as possible at climbing, or better still injured and disillusioned with your sport, you could learn any of these five habits that you’ll see in fellow climbers all the time. Guaranteeing failure to improve at climbing is a lot easier that guaranteeing success, which is why so many people manage it with the following:

1. Wait until you are tired. Slower reactions and lazy movements will add more peak forces on working tendons and joints, giving you more microscopic tissue damage. So you can add the same damage as you would with a heavy training session, even though you burned out after a short time and gave up. Because you only measured the training load as route grades X volume, you wont notice the extra damage and fail to rest long enough. Repeat for several sessions and you have an overuse injury.

2. Listen too closely to fear. Could be fear of falling, or fear of failing. Doesn’t matter. The research shows that we are driven by fear of loss. It worked well at the time our brain architecture was being designed by evolution, a few years back when something stealing your food or worse still eating you meant it was game over. But the trait causes some big problems in modern life. Like in sport climbing when falling is safe but still feels terrifying. We are scared of the wrong things and worse still when we expose ourselves to them in the wrong way (too much too soon) we become hypersensitive to them. A crippling negative feedback cycle. Slow, incremental exposure to scary things like competitive situations, pressure to succeed when you’ve invested a lot in a goal, or even just taking a lob is the way to conquer. Try and shortcut it or skip the training and go straight for the performance and you’ll fail spectacularly.

3. Do the same as last time. Humans love routines, so this one couldn’t be easier to slip into. Successful training is about maximising the total load on the body across the different energy systems, muscle groups, techniques etc. Working on one while the other rests allows you to fit in more stimulus per unit time. If you do the same routes, on the same length of wall, same angle, hold type pattern of session intensity you’ll manage to overtrain a few systems while detraining the rest. Worst possible place to be. Ever wondered how olympic athletes absorb 10 times the number of training hours you do, but have less time out to injury?

4. Compete like it’s a competition. It rarely occurs to amateur athletes that there is a difference between competing in training and competing in competition. Mainstream sports are pretty messed up, but if there’s one thing they are good at it’s knowing where the difference lies. The (superficial) goal is competing in competition is to win the game, be the best, outdo the other guy. So you have to bend over backwards, go that extra mile, ignore pain, tiredness and not look over your shoulder, just focus on the finish line. Competing in training is about learning from the other guy. So the point is for you to watch them, not for them to watch you. But if they are watching you while you show off your skills, they can catch up faster by assimilating what you do and adding it to their individual strengths.

5. Get angry. I don’t mean simply release the tension of a big effort with a power scream - that’s fine. I mean get ANGRY! Kick the wall, tear your hair out, have a rant at the hold that moved, the heat, the grease, the duff beta you got off me and the guy who was watching and made you feel nervous. That will distract you nicely from the things that might actually make a difference.

Basic technique - saving energy on trad

I’ve not posted on basic technique for a while, so here is something that my own summer of trad has been reminding me of recently. In trad climbing, the actual climbing bout is not just a little bit longer than sport or bouldering, it’s WAY longer. 20, 30 60 minutes instead of seconds up to a few minutes on many sport climbs.

The implications of this are very important. Most of us train for trad on short steep sport routes in climbing walls - this is fine - we need the endurance for the crux sprints even during long routes. But the movement is very different on trad.

The amount of time searching for handholds, footholds or gear, or resting takes up the vast majority of the total climbing time. Actually making moves is quite fleeting between long periods on the same holds. If you’ve ever edited a piece of video of a climber doing a long trad route you’ll readily appreciate this!

Let’s go through the pictures (BTW these are from our Triple 5 trip to St Kilda - nice route eh?):

A rare moment of actually making a move. Note bent arms, trunk close to the wall and shoulders pulled back in tension. On a climbing wall route, you move almost continously by comparison and your body tends to adopt this sort of position a lot - like maybe 60% plus of the time.

So what? You get into the habit of staying in this position. If you can’t find the hold or need to clip gear, you just freeze in this position and sort it out before continuing seconds later. Because the climbing bout is short, it doesn’t matter too much. In fact, the moves are probably hard enough that it’s actually more efficient not to set up a full resting position, just to go back to ‘progress’ mode a few seconds later. Next photo >>

In trad, not only will you have to make these stops between moves many times more than on a short climbing wall route, but they might be of much longer duration. So the climbing style has to change. You can always tell a very experienced trad climber when the adopt the position in the picture 2 almost immediately when they have to stop on a pitch. The hips are in, back arched and leaning back on straight arms. The maximum amount of weight is on the feet, but you can lean back a bit to scan the rock ahead more effectively. Next picture >>

The other common position in trad is when searching for footholds. In this case, the shoulders are in, drooping from straight arms and the bum is out to give a clear view of the  footholds.

If you haven’t been tradding for a while, you often have to remind yourself to take these resting positions immediately by conscious reminder and accentuating them, so you fall back into the habit. If you haven’t developed the technique at all, long steep trad pitches will feel a lot harder than they should. But even a delay of a few seconds in assuming these positions will really add up as you might use them 100s of times in a single long pitch.

Glycogen dumping (and why it probably won’t work for you)

Tim just did a new E10. Looks fantastic. He mentioned in his blog post about it that he used glycogen dumping to help him close the deal on this long term project of his. He had been asking me the previous week about strategies for making yourself a bit lighter for a hard redpoint such as dehydration. It’s really hard to get dehydration to do anything other than make you feel ill. But carrying less glycogen up your route is a strategy that is occasionally useful. Talk of this ‘new’ (it’s actually very old) strategy peaked some interest and various emails asking me to explain it. It’s really simple, so I’ll explain it in two sentences.

For each gram of muscle glycogen, the body has to store 3 or 4 grams of water. If you eat less the day before your big lead you can deplete the store, lose a few kgs and maybe get a small but crucial advantage.

The explanation of why it probably won’t work for most climbers needs more words, but is really worth reading, so you don’t waste your time, energy, food and chances of sending.

The first and biggest reason why it won’t work is that people will try to use it to replace ‘real’ preparation. The real reason why Emmett climbed his E10 is because he’s Emmett. This accounted for 99% of the success, the new strategy only making up the tiny difference which was crucial in this case as it sounded truly at his limit.

That 99% - ‘being Emmett’ - is what most people should really be concentrating on; learning how to go for it without hesitation, without fear of falling, with every shred of effort you can muster. It’s the tactics of learning to know your body, mind, strengths, weaknesses, equipment, conditions etc unspeakably well through endless consideration, planning and testing over years. It’s the boring old stuff - the hours of training, the getting over the excuses that get in the way of getting the hours in.

The second reason why it won’t work for most people is that their technique, especially foot work is not good enough for small differences in weight to make a noticeable difference.

The third reason is that it won’t work if you overuse it, or use it when you aren’t already really really close to success. This technique by it’s nature depletes your energy reserves for the session. So it’s good for one, maybe two all out redpoints in the day and then a good recovery. It causes a reactive glycogen loading afterwards (indeed it’s used for carbo loading by endurance athletes) so using regularly has the opposite effect. If you are still working the route and aren’t ready for a pure redpointing session, you’ll just burn out after a short session. Depleting the glycogen store to really low levels takes much longer to recover from.

If you are thinking I’m trying to put you off, you’d be right. Used well, it can be useful once or twice a year for your career best project, and only in addition to your very best in the real methods of preparation and good tactics. The trouble with tactics like glycogen dumping is that most people use them (subconsciously) to replace real effort, real thought, real preparation. It’s such an easy psychological trap to fall into, and most the time, we do fall in.

Don’t do what they do

Remember that being a successful athlete, not matter which arena you compare yourself in (peers, amateur, professional) by definition means doing what other people wouldn’t.

Lots of people model their technique, training and tactics on what their peers are doing. But if you want to get better than them, they are exactly the wrong people to look at. 

The modelling can be conscious and deliberate, but most of the time you actually do it subconsciously. So wake up! The greatest success you can hope for by doing what everyone else (in YOUR world of peers) does is to assimilate the same level of mediocrity they have. More about all this in my book.

While we’re on the subject of role models, an important point about them. Yes they are useful, even essential to help you get more out of yourself, so long as you chose the right role models. But keep in mind it’s the approach they have that you’re copying, not the exact actions. Their life, physiology, schedule, resources etc can never fit with yours. So don’t try. So the question is “What would they do if they had this (my) circumstance right now?”.

And one other thing… Good role models in sport are ones you can actually find some details about - someone you can feel you know through seeing them, reading about them or even better, being coached by them! If it’s someone who never speaks, blogs, writes coaches, it’s pretty hard to ask the question above and get near a useful answer.

You have two choices, pick a better role model, or ask them to keep in touch more. Interview them for your blog or your favourite website and ask them all the questions you want in one go. Just an idea.

The middle way of rock movement

Cubby throws in another drop knee, Glen Etive

A session with Mr Cuthbertson got me thinking of changes in movement fashions in climbing since I started. Where Cubby dotted his feet around miniscule smears on blankness, I tended to swing and heelhook. Cubby was obviously leading world trad climbing in the early 80’s, often on routes that were hard because they were completely suicidal. When he got into sport climbing at it’s birth at venues like Malham in the mid eighties, the fashion was for precision. Climbing like a gymnasitc performance, with effortless grace. I have this idea that even grimacing and grunting was not really ‘in’.

Fast forward, and watch a modern climbing film like Progression. Quite a difference - Ondra is racing up the rock before you can blink. The American boulderers are leaping with feet off and one hand as you reach the for the remote control to turn down all the yelling.

The popularity of bouldering and the influence of famous climbers has tended to make climbers move faster and more aggressively, with less foot moves per hand move. What does this mean? It adds efficiency because you get through the moves quicker and more momentum is used and more aggression is good for realising the maximum force you can produce. But it loses efficiency by getting less weight on your feet throughout the whole move or sequence and adding a lot of swings into disadvantageous positions that must be countered with muscle power.

You might have guessed the punchline already - somewhere in between is best. Race up the rock or leap wildy for holds if your technique is quick enough or you have shoulders like Daniel Woods. But if you are more average in your build, background and climbing ability, someone like Fred Nicole or the female climbers in the world cup competitions would be better movement role models.

One other thing… One positive trend in modern rock climbing is that crimping everything is much less in fashion than it used to be. Thats definitely a good thing for all out tendons.