Ideas to improve your climbing pt. 2 — Adaptability
While there is abundant information about physical preparation for climbing, there is very little concerning the mental and technical aspects and almost nothing regarding skill acquisition in climbing. Ideas to improve your climbing is a three part video series that sheds some light!
Adaptability is the most important ability for every climber!
When climbing you have to recognize when to continue your course, and when it’s time for a change.
This vitally important recognition and ability to make crisp, swift decisions in your best interest is called adaptability.
Adaptability is the most important ability for every climber!
Above are the only two climbers that could decipher the dyno in the bouldering World Cup finals. While they use slightly different strategies, they arrive at the same conclusion after their failed attempts.
„I have to throw my right hip towards the wall to prevent the swinging right leg peeling me off the right hold!“
Even with all their knowledge and experience though, they still don’t know if they are considering the right solution, but through their practice they are tolerant of ambiguity and comfortable with uncertainty.
By having a healthy appetite for a continuously improving mindset geared at bettering themselves and always remaining open to new ideas, they’ve become expert problem-solvers.
In this installment of Ideas to improve your climbing, I want to look into improving your Adaptability to better deal with the infinite climbing situations you might be facing.
Before we start, let’s quickly consider what might stand in your way of becoming a truly adaptable climber. What are the enemies of adaptability?
As an example, top-down, control-based coaching discourages individual initiative and reduces autonomy. Command-and-control coaching leads to anxious athletes who are hesitant to take the initiative or trust their own judgment.
There is a large range of sporting activities each requiring a set of skills. Skills have many characteristics that can change in different situations, which makes classifying them difficult. Accepting that skills cannot be neatly labelled, we place them on a continuum.
The Open and Closed Continuum
is concerned with the effects of the environment on skills. Open skills require that movements have to be continually adapted.
Climbing is a predominantly perceptual movement pattern that often requires fluid adjustments and variation of skill. When projecting a climb, you learn when to do what and this climb becomes more and more a stable, predictable environment for you. Climbing this climb is considered a closed skill.
Bouldering and on-sight climbing needs more adaptability than speed climbing. This is one reason why some red-point or speed climbers struggle in lead or boulder comps.
Closed skills take place in a stable, predictable environment in which the performer knows exactly what to do and when. Skills are not really affected by the environment and movements follow set patterns and have a clear beginning and end. The skills tend to be self-paced, like in Gymnastics.
There is not a whole lot of ambiguity or uncertainty in these activities and Athletes and coaches know exactly what they are doing.
Our adaptability is compromised as our level of perceived stress increases. Thinking times are reduced and instinctual reactions increase.
Since climbing used to be dangerous, it is traditionally taught in a Closed-to-Open Progression. The belief is that movements have developmental stages and should be “mastered” first and then put into open/chaotic environments. Technically efficient movement comes first; exploring the environment comes later. This is a typical progression in a closed-to-open skill training program. This structure of this training program is often idealized as a seemingly linear process.
From my experience though, skill acquisition is a messy, non-linear process. It is very complex, with multiple layers of possibility, where skills might appear and disappear depending on context and circumstance. Movements emerge as a result of self-organization when climbers are exposed to different levels of environmental complexity.
Develop your skills through play and exploration and practice tasks which encourage exploration promote adaptability!
Skilled climbers are operating at the edge of their ability. They make mistakes, explore options and engage at the edges of their ability; trying, failing, trying again, failing again.
Explore while you are practising like children playing, : intently focussed, moving and perceiving, making decisions and problem-solving. You are building on what is necessary for skill development in the context in which you are operating.
Rather than “I must try and do it like this.” your internal dialogue is “I wonder what will happen if…?”
Spatial awareness
is your body’s position sense and the key to successful movement. Every time you move, your body performs an intricate masterpiece. Muscles team up to create a kinetic chain, and these groups of muscles work with other groups of muscles. This is achieved by our sensorimotor system — the combination of the sensory — , that is, what you see, hear and feel and the motor system.
The sensorimotor system organizes how the sensory system will impact movement and vice versa. Motor control is the regulation of movement with our nervous system.
In the nervous system there is a “closed loop” system of sensation, decision, and reactions. Efferent nerve fibers carry nerve impulses away from the central nervous system towards the muscles.
Afferent nerve fibers arrive at a particular brain region, as opposed to efferent projections that exit the region. They bring information from our different senses.
Climbing is traditionally taught with an emphasis on the motor side of things. Coaches try to teach you the actions — how to grab holds, how to dyno, how to mantle, etc etc etc.
While this is helpful, without being aware of the sensory side of things, you’ll never climb at your full potential.
Consider the sensory input as information and you’ll find a cornucopia for im performance. After all — If you don’t feel, hear or see anything, how can you activate those muscles?
Managing Degrees of Freedom
When you are trying to learn something new, the unlimited degrees of freedom and the notion that you can do ANYTHING you want can be intimidating. There are just too many factors to juggle with, which often leads to paralysis by analysis. A task that is too open can result in nothing actually getting done. Contrast that with a very specific task, in which you freeze degrees of freedom by constraining your options. When the boundaries of the task are clear, you gain the freedom to FOCUS on being creative within those parameters without worrying about everything else.
By how much you constrain your options, you decide how challenging a problem is, the cartwheel on the right is really hard because of the wall overhanging. You’ll be amazed how much creativity often comes from CONSTRAINTS, rather than from having complete freedom. I challenge you to play with this idea of thinking inside the box… just find a box you want to explore first!
Become Omnidextrous
(Omnidextrous — Able to use all limbs with equal precision; both hands and both feet.)
Contralateral control
is the arrangement whereby most of the human motor and sensory fibres cross the midline in order to provide control for contralateral portions of the body. That most people favour one hand or foot for some tasks and the other hand for other tasks, so called cross dominance, makes things even more complicated.
Bilateral integration
the communication between the right and left cerebral hemispheres, which allows the two sides of the body to move together in coordination with one another. Competence in Bilateral integration and crossing the midline dramatically increases a climber’s options in complex movement sequences for additional reach and following through across the body.
Crossing Midline
The midline is an imaginary line drawn from the head to the feet that separates the left and the right halves of the body. Crossing this midline means that a body part, for example hand or foot, is able to spontaneously move over to the other side of the body to work there. On the brain level, the left and right hemispheres of the brain need to communicate well together in order to coordinate movement. For becoming an Omnidextrous climber, training on symmetrical, mirrored arrangements of potential contact points are ideal.
Unfortunately, there are not yet a whole lot of symmetrical hold- or volume sets on the market. The Train2climb coordination wall is the most advanced option in this regard right now. It is amazing what discoveries you can make with this wall.
Even if you don’t have access to a strictly symmetrical set-up, you should start to practice challenging climbing moves in both directions, left to right and right to left. You might discover, that one side or direction feels easier and that you struggle moving in the opposite direction.
There are video apps that allow you to compare your efforts with overlays and split screens give great insight into issues you may have.
Apart from these realizations, it is long known in physical training that changes in the neuro -muscular system during unilateral exercise reaches and changes the same body part on the other side. This phenomenon is called “contralateral effects”, “cross education” or “cross-training effects”.
Cross education (CE)
of strength occurs when unilateral strength training produces performance improvement of the untrained contralateral limb.
Practicing on symmetrical set-ups therefore not only improves your contralateral control, but also prevents gaps in your physical preparation.
Mixing and Matching trajectories
In climbing, rotation is power.
Often we perceive movement linear, but at the level of the joint, there is no such thing as linear movement. There are muscles that pull on tendons that pull bones in arcs and circles. By understanding this we can see linear motion as a finely choreographed sequence of arcs and rotation, that when pieced together create a straight line.
Translational and rotational kinetic energy are exchanged in a “whip-like” transfer. We distinguish these as ‘point’, ‘loop’, ‘backward pendulum’ and ‘parabolic’ transitions. The different transitions form a continuum rather than distinct types.
Climbers utilize the transfer between translational and rotational kinetic energy to control the dynamics of their swing. Rotational Power timed right makes those arcs and rotations create powerful trajectories.Struggling to identify and use rotations and trajectories is a major reason for failed attempts in climbing. In these cases either the rotations work against you, instaed of fasciltating the movement, — or, the timing is off. Off- Timing often occurs when a swing reverses its direction and so, also reverses what it can do for your movement. The reversed rotation suddenly works against you.
Competent climbers trust the moment of inertia and utilize the distribution of the mass around the axis of rotation.
In this example above, timing and the patience to wait for the apex of the rotation before reversing the rotation is key.
But how to learn to Mix and Match trajectories?
From my experience, exploring rotation and trajectories needs to be approached with a beginners mind and a go-with-the-flow kind of attitude.
Be in a relaxed hang and try to get a swing going, initiated by a limb. Or your head. See what happens. How long does it take you to fully turn around?
Expand from that, try to flow into the next swing. Mix and match trajectories.
Agility
Agility is the ability to take different positions. Agility can thus refer to both mental and physical stirs and impulses.
In climbing, Agility is the ability to maintain and control ideal body position while quickly changing direction through a series of movements.
Agility is a neuromuscular skill consisting of movement and reaction aspects. Muscle strength also plays a crucial role in agility, especially in adolescent athletes.
Agility has two major components, cognition and change of direction speed. The cognitive aspects include perception and decision making, and change of direction speed is affected by both technical and physical factors.
Perceptual and decision making processes associated with agility performance are trainable. To prepare for unforeseeable worst-case scenarios in situ, use these or similar agility exercises to build physical antifragility.
The amount of variance in our exercise selection is infinite, focus on simplicity and pragmatism. There are variables as entry velocity, cutting angle, trunk alignment you can manipulate.
Proceed with caution, high magnitudes of torque act on you in all planes and directions while twisting and turning. You need to learn to decelerate first and built a proficient deceleration capacity in all planes and directions.
During agility tasks, you need to use your eccentric strength to decelerate or brake momentum and your isometric strength to maintain a stable and efficient intersegmental alignment to not leak energy through potential weak links during the transition period. You also must use your concentric strength to reaccelerate in the new direction while effectively controlling the center of gravity relative to your contact points.
These moves create stimuli our passive structures will adapt to.
Speed and agility should be of primary emphasis throughout Adolescence. As a coach or parent, you want to use these window of opportunity because if you neglect them, agility is a lot harder to train when we get older.
Take the various activities in my videos as a starting point and expand with similar exercises, where generic pattern recognition, hand-eye/foot coordination, and decision-making skills can be tested and developed.
The Agility pratices shown here would be considered low level plyometrics. Plyometrics drills are commonly used by athletes that require the stored elastic energy and reactivity of the body to produce force rapidly.
These moves are characterized by a quick stretching of the muscles followed immediately by a strong shortening to produce movement. This stretch is very transient in nature, and not the same as what you would perform when doing flexibility training. Instead this rapid stretch occurs when hand and feet land on the contact point and absorb the forces from the landing of the hop or jump.
In order to maximize the benefits from this type of training, you must land with good body position, and in a smooth and controlled manner move like a hi-bounce ball, and redirect your body to the designated contact point.
You might want to re-visit the momentum chapter of the previous installement for basic progressions from low-intensity to higher intensity and from simple drills to more complex exercises.
