alicehafer

It’s unavoidable. Once in a while we all take a break from climbing. Life gets in the way, injuries, as in my case, or just business, long jobs, travel. And what happens when we come back? It’s been about a month and since I started climbing again and the progress is slow, and the positivity is quick to fall.

There is nothing more frustrating then knowing you have the ability, but you just cannot muster the strength to climb something.

But you have to fail to improve.

But in my esteem to get back to where I was, or to improve, something about climbing became clear. With little of the strength at my will, it became obvious that body positioning played a huge part in the climbing. Now this is something everyone knows. Climbing is about technique. But it was a discovery more along the line that climbing is more about technique than I was willing to admit before. There seemed to always be a secret to a move that at first seemed too hard.

While people say strength + technique = is the key to climbing, I think I’ve discovered that the secret to climbing well, has little to do with strength, but body position, confidence, and most importantly, body awareness. Can’t say that I would be able to do a series of crimps on a 45 degree wall, but I could easily do challenging slabs, or some of the trickier Font problems that are more about how you approach them than how much you’ve trained.

For more specific tips on technique, see future posts.