The Importance of Mileage

Espresso Note

Read Time - 3 minutes

How to get better at climbing?

Whatever the discipline you’d be hard pressed to find a climber who isn’t a least slightly interested in the answer to this question.

Climbing is fundamentally a skill sport, so learning to move well, and continuing to move well is key. Getting stronger, means you can pull harder, but pulling hard is nothing without technique. Truly there are no shortcuts.

At the beginning of your climbing career, it’s crucial you develop good movement skills, this will allow you to progress faster as well as setting you up with a solid base for your future climbing.

Mileage

As a beginner by far the most valuable thing you can do for your movement skills is gaining varied vertical mileage. Essentially the total number and diversity of new moves climbed.

Although the indoor gym environment is excellent for initiating completely new climbers, and is a good wet weather and/or flatland alternative, there really is no substitute for time spent outdoors on the rock.

How to get mileage?

Focus on high volume days outdoors, and actively seek out problems which seem out of your style or test out a new movement skill you haven’t encountered indoors or elsewhere before. But crucially, don’t get bogged down projecting, limit your attempts to five tries per boulder then move on. Instead, focus on trying and pulling onto as many different problems in a session as you can.

If your local bouldering area doesn’t have a good number of climbs, or enough at your grade, then consider other ways to get extra mileage out of the rock. The follow tactics can dramatically alter a climb:

• Reversing a traverse - Reversing a traverse adds a whole new set of moves to the same stretch of rock.

• Mandatory LH/RH - Forcing yourself to use your left hand rather than your right hand can turn a sidepull into a gaston and vice versa.

• Adding/removing a SS - Adding a sit start to an existing problem can add at least one move to a problem and raise the grade. Meanwhile, starting from standing usually renders a problem more amenable.

• Eliminates - Eliminating certain holds or features can force you to climb a problem in a different way, and often makes it harder. De-eliminating can have the opposite effect.

• Feet Follow Hands - Similar to eliminating, instead of allowing yourself to place your feet wherever you like, instead have your feet follow your hands.

• Climbing open handed - The default gripping positing for most climbers is crimping, either a full or half crimp. But climbing with an open hand grip, without bending your knuckles over, can change how a problem climbs, as well as training an often underused grip type.

This article is an extract from our eBook ‘Bouldering Basics: A Handbook for Beginners’.

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