I just wanted to give a taste of the training that Neil land I are doing right now at his home wall.
Since neither of us have any competition experience we have started setting problems that average 14-15 moves that we try to complete in 7min (which is a typical amount of time given for prelims and semis). If we fall off we hop right back on the wall, because the other aspect of this is to improve our endurance to actually climb for 7min.
I see hold #4, 2, 15…..
The first couple of times I did this I rushed and didn’t even make it halfway through the route we set. A good lesson there for me for the actual comps: I’ll do better if I shake out thinking how to preform the move before I launch into it than just trying to climb fast. Since I don’t know the routes we’ve set very well it is also good practice for me practice onsight climbing, which I admit has never been a strong suit of mine.
Last week we added another element to this routine. At the start of the session we took 7min to each preview a route we hadn’t been on before. After preview we each went through a warm up routine. After the warm up we each climbed our onsight route. This was enlightening, for each of us there were moves we thought would be hard but weren’t really that bad, but also moves that we thought would be easy but completely shut us down.
Action shot of me falling out of a figure-4. This kind of thing happens.
One more thing we work on is clipping while climbing. This is why you see all the draws hanging around Neil’s home wall, or see us climbing with harnesses on. And if you think that clipping isn’t a big deal, things are a little more tricky when you’re hanging out in a figure-4 trying to clip and long, floppy draw with golf gloves on.
Mixed Progression 