Have you recently started climbing and you find your palms sweating at the mere thought of it? Then you’re on our team!
In the constant search of becoming a better climber by building physical skills such as power, power endurance, stronger fingers, and so on, there are a few tips and tricks that will add up to a stronger mind and support your body’s strength!
First, what is climbing visualisation?
Yet another practice to become a better climber that doesn’t involve getting stronger, visualisation is a valuable skill that top climbers use to enhance their performance during onsight climbing or projecting.
Route reading is a complex process that involves studying and analsing a route before attempting it. This helps you to create a mental image (a visualisation) of how you are going to execute each move, identifying potential rests and clipping positions.
Visualisation can be done for both onsight climbing and climbing projects and it involves imagining oneself climbing indoors or outdoors, whether on a boulder or a wall.
How do route reading skills influence your climbing?
Route reading is a technique that can help you improve your climbing performance, whether you’re onsighting (no knowledge of climb) or redpointing (prior knowledge of climb). It involves observing and anticipating difficult sections of the route before you begin climbing.
By doing this, you can prepare yourself mentally and physically for the challenges ahead such as how you’re going to climb through the harder sections and where you are going to rest.
Additionally, visualising yourself successfully completing these challenging sections can help build your confidence and improve your technique. By practising your breathing and movements in advance, you’ll feel mentally ready and more focused because your brain will get a taste of the effort you’re about to experience. I like calling this ‘the warrior’s ritual’.
If you don’t fancy the idea of a ‘warrior’ you can just stick to mental preparation! Visualisation training will not only give you the confidence to try harder grades but it will also improve your climbing flow but will also improve your capacity for focused attention
Practise this technique before climbing to improve focus and put yourself in the specific climbing energy.
How to improve route reading in bouldering
Choose a climbing project, something that is slightly above your known limit – enough to challenge you to look for solutions instead of giving up.
Route reading in bouldering is somethingthat is easy to train on your bouldering sessions as because you can actually ‘look your boulder in the eye’. I’d recommend watching this excellent video from Louis Parkinson from Catalyst Climbing on how to approach route reading in bouldering:
You can practise visualisation in several ways such as:
- Take a picture of a challenging route or project and study it at home
- Try to imagine yourself reaching high points and how climbing through them will feel
- Sit below your route before climbing on it and try picturing yourself doing every move, where you’re clipping from, where you’re resting, and where you are pushing through
I also find this video below useful when it comes to getting into the habit of route reading indoors before climbing. Joseph Diaz shares his experience of changing habit, which is just as important as the skill itself!
Do you struggle with climbing visualisation?
Don’t worry, it happens to most of us mortals! Easier said than done, route reading is not really something that comes naturally. If you are a freestyle climber just like me, you will find visualising quite a challenge.
To me, for instance, climbing visualisation wasn’t something that I could do easily. Even after 10 years of climbing, I still sometimes struggle to respect my beta – I find it hard to focus on my mental image especially if I feel too pumped or generally tired. This is why practise is key!
It was when I started hanging out with more experienced climbers that I started the visualising experience. I noticed they always did this thing: before climbing they would close their eyes and start moving their hands in the air and mimic climbing.
In my beginner years, I could not even remember the holds on a short route in the gym! My climbing was always quite freestyle, based on intuition: if I had a good (flow) day: great, if not: too bad!
Truth be told, I never took the time to do it until I started projecting routes above my known level. And as you will read further I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only one who found this technique helpful.
Thoughts from Hannah Banana on visualisation
Hannah Banana is Known for Hard is Easy Overcoming the Fear of Falling series. I admire both her courage to be vulnerable when it comes to climbing-related fears as well as her good humor while trying to overcome them.
So while for many professional climbers, one would think that reaching climbing mastery is something more familiar and easier to access, I thought it would be interesting to understand the thinking of someone most of us relate with: a climber who despite having a normal job tries and manages to improve their climbing on every occasion.
I think route reading and visualisation, and especially memorising the route are an important point in climbing. For a long time, I didn’t know, how important that part actually is. I tend to climb a route differently every time I give it a go.
In the past, I wasn’t able to remember the moves and lost a loooot of energy while I was over-gripping holds, not knowing what to do next. (she laughs) I think reaching that flowy state everyone talks about involves being able to read a route properly and visualise it afterward so you’ll be able to remember when you try to send it. I recently started practising it.
At a certain grade (harder than what you can normally achieve) it becomes essential to know your beta and you realise ‘just trying’ without remembering your moves is simply a waste of time and energy. Trying to ‘onsight’ (because you forget your moves) every time you try the same route simply doesn’t work. (she laughs again)
Adam Ondra’s approach to visualisation
Top athletes such as Adam Ondra can visualise how their climbing is going to happen even before touching the holds. In the following video, he explains a few simple and clear steps to visualisation as a crucial part of climbing.
While we all agree he is quite a phenomenon because he is excellent at all climbing disciplines we can’t deny the fact that years of training and competing contributed for sure to that!
And, just because you aren’t a competitor doesn’t mean you can’t be working on this skill that develops your muscle memory the more time you spend working on it. The human mind and how it can be trained can be impressive!
You tried route reading and you still didn’t send your route?
No worries! Winners know they know one lost battle doesn’t mean the war is lost. Sending is amazing especially when it happens while onsighting. But if you tried your best and you still didn’t succeed this doesn’t mean you failed.
Quite the contrary: falling is most of the time a great opportunity to improve because you can:
- Practise patience and attention to detail
- Find a better sequence
- Study your route in detail
- Clipping – when and where
- Rest positions – where to carefully wait while breathing deeply and when to move fast
Benefits of visualisation for climbing outside climbing
Moreover, visualisation isn’t just limited to climbing, as there are studies that have confirmed it is linked to success in other sports and achieving multiple goals in other areas of your life.
The best part of it is that it is a practice that can be used as a learning and unlearning process – for a lifetime! It is reassuring to read this because apart from confirming my belief in the positive impact of climbing on one’s life and well-being, it also backs up a strong link between climbing and real-life situations.
As for climbing and back to it…the practice of visualising will eventually transform into experience, an automatic skill that will give you a climber’s eye when you see a route for the first time and will allow you to read routes better as you climb.
Do you find route reading hard? Please share your experience with us so we can make this community grow game and muscles !
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