Ideas to improve your climbing, pt. 3 — Perception / Action

Udo Neumann
Nov 5 · 11 min read

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!

Akiyo Noguchi

“The problem in football is you learn how to play the wrong way round — first execution, then decision making & perception last. I’ve lost many top players because their head was on the ball. They were not seeing what was around them.“

Arsene Wenger, Top players have radars in their heads

Agility has two major components, change of direction speed and cognition.

We ended the last installment with exercises for improving your agility. As you might remember, Agility has two major components, change of direction speed and cognition. Change of direction speed is affected by both technical and physical factors. The cognitive aspects include perception and decision making. Perceptual and decision making processes associated with agility performance are trainable.

This installment of Ideas to improve your climbing is about best practices of improving perceptual and decision making processes.

Visualizations

Higher skilled climbers use the kinematic information from the environment and apply a motor response quicker and more accurately than lower skilled climbers. The difference often already starts with the visual search behaviors occurring during pre-ascent inspections of a route or even an exercise and during the climb.

Focusing on functional vs structural features of an exercise or climb gives higher skilled climbers useful informational variables for action and helps to optimize perceptual-motor skills and climbing performance.

This link between the stimulus and motor response is often referred to as perception-action coupling.

Perception / Action

It is a cycle in which Knowledge -> directs -> Exploration -> samples -> Environment -> modifies -> Knowledge and so on.

In the words of James Gibson, from whom this insight stems,

“We must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive.”

The goal is to link body and environment through perception and action.

My hope with this installment is that the next time you struggle with finding a solution for a climb, you not only ask what is inside your head; but also ask what your head is inside of’.

Exceptional physical abilities and cognitive skills such as attention, perception, working memory and decision-making are necessary for climbing at the highest level. Improvements in performance are only achieved when perception/cognition and physical training are coupled.

The stimulus will dictate the motor response, thus the need for you to expose yourself to context specific stimuli in order to produce desired motor responses that will occur in your climbing goals.

Gaze Behavior

Visual–Vestibular Integration

Our eyes are often called ‘windows to our soul’.

This sentiment reveals the deep connection between the eyes and being human. They provide us with vision, the most dominant of our five senses that uses over a third of our brain, and are therefore an essential part of our interaction with the world. Neuroscientists researched that the use of the gaze is very task-specific and that humans typically exhibit proactive control to guide their movement. Usually, the eyes fixate on a target before the hands are used to engage in a movement, indicating that the eyes provide spatial information for the hands.

Visual–Vestibular Integration

What we look at, when we look, how we look and how long we look all have implications for how we process, interpret and interact with the environment around us. The direction of your gaze even activates certain muscle groups or dampens others.

When climbing, we tend to look at potential contact points just before they are needed. These ‘just in time’ fixations mean we might only look at a hold we will use half-a-second before actually grasping it.

The link between attention and where we look is highlighted by how difficult it is to pay attention to one location whilst moving our eyes to a different location.

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?“

Eye tracking research

Eye tracking research

What we learned so far about visual search strategies comes from Eye tracking research. Eye tracking is the measurement of eye activity.

Eye tracking describes the recording of eye position and movement in an environment based on the optical tracking of corneal reflections to assess visual attention. While the idea of eye tracking is quite straightforward, the technology behind is still too bulky to climb with it.

There is interesting research of coaches observing climbers by James Mitchell. When comparing expert with novice coaches, James found out that experienced climbing coaches observe the center of gravity area more than for example the hands and are more able to identify the most critical factors for success for a given movement. Ludovic Seifert and colleagues also looked into Visual search strategies of climbers observing a route they want to climb with the same technology.

Visual–Vestibular Integration

To navigate effectively through a complex three-dimensional climb, we must accurately estimate our own motion relative to the wall. This requires the neural combination of visual signals with vestibular signals regarding head motion, and proprioceptive cues. The vestibular-ocular reflex (VOR), is our natural ‘steady-cam’ mechanism. In the last installment we learned about the vestibular system’s role for spatial awareness and movement control.

Gaze behavior and spatial awareness

For enhancing control during complex 3-dimensional climbing moves by maintaining constant orientation of your head and eyes, we can pick up some cues from dancing. Spotting is a technique used by dancers during the execution of various dance turns. As a dancer turns, spotting is performed by rotating the body and head at different rates. While the body rotates smoothly at a relatively constant speed, the head periodically rotates much faster and then stops, so as to fix the dancer’s gaze on a single location (the spotting point, or simply the spot). Dancers will sometimes focus on an actual visual spot if one is available, but if no suitable object is available they will attempt to end each head rotation in a consistent orientation.

Binocular vision

allows us to perceive depth and relationships between objects. Each eye sees slightly different spatial information and transmits these differences to the brain. The brain then uses the discrepancies between the two eyes to judge distance and depth. The result is the ability to see a 3-D image and distinguish the relationships between objects.

Eye- Hand / Foot coordination

Coordination is the ability to get your muscles and your senses to work together to smoothly and efficiently accomplish a task. The right muscles need to contract at the right time with the right amount of force. Coordination can be improved with practice but like strength it is very specific. Improving your hand-eye coordination does not improve your foot-eye coordination. To get better at a specific task you should practice that specific task or something very similar.

Eye-Hand Coordination

It takes time for your body to learn how to do something. Some muscles contract that should not contract, some don’t contract at the right time and some contract with too much or not enough force. After some practice the muscles start work together more efficiently. The timing gets better and the movements become smoother. Having good coordination is important because without it your strength, speed, balance, endurance and flexibility are wasted. You need coordination to succeed.

Wolfgang Güllich and Eye-Hand Coordination in the Frankenjura

In the Frankenjura with it’s notorious pockets you get drastic feedback if your aiming is off!. Some of the best climbers described their gaze as a Chameleon’s tongue that sucks the hold into your fingers. When Wolfgang Güllich described how to climb Wallstreet in Rotpunkt Magazine thirty years ago, he emphasized on Eye-hand coordination and how a particular hold he called the shy one was always in sight, but only rarely in his hand.

Eye-hand coordination is a complex cognitive ability, as it calls for us to unite our visual and motor skills, allowing for the hand to be guided by the visual stimulation our eyes receive. Climbing and brachiating require manual dexterity and visual perception to be able to judge the distance from one hold to the next and be able to coordinate the physical movements to reach the next hold.

Eye-foot coordination

As you might have guessed are reaction times for hands is faster than for feet. Assuming a similar nerve conduction velocity, just the simple fact that our feet are further away from our brain than our hands are is the main reason.Most people also show a greater preference for hand actuation and are more precise with their hands. All the more reason to try to improve our Eye-foot coordinations!

Eye-Foot Coordination

Here the climber hits the wall with her left foot and because of the deflection misses the ideal spot on the left foot hold. Issues like that unfortunately often remain undetected.

The Quiet-Eye

Quiet-eye is defined as the last fixed gaze on a target. The duration of this last gaze depends on skill and on the probability of hitting. Without controlling one’s gaze, failed attempts become more common. A long fixated gaze before initiating movement — the so-called quiet-eye — influences performance.

Performers tend to react to increased pressure by shortening their quiet eye period and moving their gaze around the target vicinity, rather than keeping it stable.

Mental rehearsal and visualization

are practical psychological tools to improve performance. Imagery or visualization is the process that involves systematically rehearsing some behavior imaging a specific motor skill.

Mental rehearsal and visualization

When you see an image in your mind, whether it is real or imagined, you have a greater chance of reciprocating that image. Many climbers will run through different situations in their imagination as a kind of mental rehearsal. This way, when they are confronted with the situation in real-life, their mind is already primed to respond to the situation in an effective way. Visualization is most effective when you focus on process rather than outcomes.The goal isn’t to imagine yourself already standing on the podium holding your medal or clipping the anchors of Silence but instead imagine yourself doing the actions necessary to really get there.

Perception / Action

Improvements in performance are only achieved when perception/cognition and physical training are coupled. Perception is the first strategy, where the brain finds the prediction that best explains’ the sensory data. Action (or active inference) is the second, where the brain actively samples proprioceptive data to fit its predictions.

Boulder problems require solutions that work. What “works” in each case and what leads to success, depends entirely on the individual climber. Therefore we want to be careful with blanket statements about climbing technique that may ignore an individual’s unique movement requirements.

Perception is not an objective representation of the environment. Perception is one’s relationship between the environment and the perceived ability to act within it. That is true for all kinds of climbing, and can be easiest observed in modern bouldering contests. During the four or five minutes that they have to find the solution, the competitors have to simultaneously compare their skills and the requirements of the problem, and gauge the result.

Affordances are the requirements and options of a climb. Affordances are possibilities for motor action. Actions are possible only when there is a fit between your physical capabilities and the behaviorally relevant features of the climb. What you perceive, you act upon — so if you make a perceptual error, you will likely make a movement error. Unsuccessful movement in climbing is just as much a perceptual problem as a physical or technical problem. There is a huge improvement opportunity here, if you improve your perception, you learn more from a failed attempt.

Akiyo Noguchi — Perception / Action coupling

I first saw Akiyo Noguchi climbing in the lead finals of the world championships 2005. The next time was at the last event of the boulder World Cup season 2009 in Eindhoven, when she secured her overall title. I was filming her in the finals when I noticed that she, unlike anybody else, smiled after a failed attempt. As it came out she smiles because she has learned something valuable from her failed attempt. Here she learned to not use a heel-hook on the left hold in her second attempt. This enables her to use the hold as a toe-hook later on to gain length and reduce momentum.

the Art of Akiyo Noguchi

Four years later, when committing moves became more often Akiyo often struggled with them during her first attempts. In Vail 2013 her first attempts don’t look very promising. Just like five years prior, when she won in Eindhoven, she doesn’t look bummed after falling off, but positively optimistic, as if she had just gotten closer to solving the problem.

Akiyo then asks the spectators for support and tops out the problem the very last opportunity!

Akiyo remembers every information that she gathers with her senses during attempts. The new information helps on her next try. Unsuccessful attempts are important experiences that are necessary in order to solve the problem.

2018 in Munich she is under enormous pressure at the semis in Munich 2018. She just has to top the problem to keep her chance to win the overall World Cup.

Lets distinguish exploratory and performatory movements of potential holds on this problem by holds that were used or not used as support during the ascent. Calculating the ratio between ‘touched/grasped’ and ‘used’ holds to move upward indicates how she explores environmental properties by using adaptively perception and action systems. With learning and expertise, the number of exploratory and performatory actions decrease, as exploration became more functional.

Akiyo Noguchi perception / action coupling

Successful climbers are better in detecting individual affordances, in distinguishing possible from impossible actions and are more creative to find alternatives.

This concludes the first three installments of Ideas to improve your climbing. Thank you very much for watching- Please get in touch via my website if you want to learn more and for coaching inquiries. If all this information felt a bit heavy, please don’t forget

the best climber is the one having the most fun!

CLIMBOID

improvement in climbing with german coach Udo Neumann

Udo Neumann

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CLIMBOID

CLIMBOID

improvement in climbing with german coach Udo Neumann

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