Climb Harder Or Better

Another couple of sessions climbing with my nephew. It was fun; much more two climbing partners out for a few pitches than last time when I just set ropes for him and belayed. I got him using a Gri-Gri to belay me with and it turns out he can catch lead falls, something that inspires a lot more confidence in me.

He tries hard, for a relatively short period of time. Peaks early, as a climbing buddy of mine would say. He started leading this time and did much better than me leading every route we climbed. I must admit it was tough to get on the sharp end after him as even the grade 11 we climbed looked burly climbed in his usual style.

As with most new climbers he is obsessed with climbing harder. Unfortunately, climbing harder does not necessarily mean climbing better and the only sure fire way to climb harder is to focus on climbing better. Often that means stepping back a number of grades from the highest grade you have managed to thrutch and thrash up. A hard concept to explain to a testosterone driven young male anxious to perform well before his peers. A number grade is easy to brag about, climbing well is a much more elusive concept, although we all know it when we see it.

Nate Droilet, a US climbing coach writes about the importance of climbing well as a stepping stone to climbing harder. Climbing is a somewhat unique sport because the temptation is to make every climbing session about performance, most commonly conceived of as climbing the hardest grade possible. This is uniquely dissimilar to other sports like golf or tennis where players go out and practice individual skills and save performance for designated games.

Rock climbing, however, requires engrams of literally hundreds of different moves because every climb is different. Thus proficiency requires more than just jug hauling your way up the grades, you must develop not only the physical strength and flexibility to master thousands of different movement patterns but also wire together the nervous system to move fluidly into one move after another.

It will be interesting to see how he progresses. I suspect that he will plateau rapidly unless much more attention is given to technique and much less given to climbing the hardest grade possible.