I might write with a confident style but please don’t let that confuse you; Whilst I am a qualified Instructor and Coach, I'm not a professional climber or mountaineer so please don't take the blog post below as an authoritative guide. It’s a means of sharing my experiences and thoughts as I progress on my journey in the climbing and outdoor world and I hope they might be of help to you.

10-second summary:

• Recognising you want to improve is the first step.

• Leave your ego at the door, it doesn’t matter how good you think you are, you (probably) could be better.

• Adopt a growth mindset; embraces your weaknesses and relish the feedback from failure.

• Development isn’t always comfortable and results aren’t always immediate so be prepared for things to get worse before they get better.

• Work out what you want to do (goals) and focus on them…

• … but don’t limit yourself from trying new approaches to keep your interest high.

• Work out what level of effort you want to put in and if support might be useful.

• Learn from others - watching others do your climbs, reading booking and YouTube can be a great source of benefiting from others with more experience.

• Coaching is a great way to have another pair of eyes to provide insights you might not have about yourself. A one-off or recurring session can be a very powerful way of improving.

So how do you develop your climbing?

After you’ve been climbing for a while it's likely that you will start to get on harder climbs, be that in grade terms or different angles, adding dimensions such as leading or moving onto different terrain, from indoor to out or from one rock type to another.

Leaving aside the addition of new technical areas such as leading and transition from indoor to outdoor (separate blog) it is likely that at some point you’ll hit a bit of a ceiling in progression or you’ll find there is a sudden difficulty spike in moving from one grade to another or that climbing overhangs is much harder than vertical terrain and you can’t work out how to do it. 

People hit this ceiling for a variety of reasons and at different times in their climbing journey. Some people struggle from the off and others can get through to quite high grades, it is really down to our individual physiology and psychology. However, hitting this ceiling is frequently down to the organic way in which we learn to climb. The majority of sports have some form of movement and technique training or technique focus which is developed, but in climbing, a highly technique based sport, we are only really taught the technical/safety aspects such as belaying and then it's ‘go climb!’. When you learn to play tennis or football you spend a bit of time on the rules buts its mainly about learning to kick a ball or develop your serve, in climbing we do the opposite and tend to spend time on learning the safety aspects but don’t really let beginners know about the learning how to and improving their climbing skills. That's partly down to climbing being relatively new in terms of sports science but also down to the peer taught way in which people tended to learn up until relatively recently. Hence it's pretty random as to whether you stumble across the more or less efficient ways of climbing, often it is down to what works for us, but this doesn’t mean it is optimal!

A note about grades

It's generally best to treat grades as a guide to difficulty at best rather than the determinant for a climb and especially not your ability. When I started climbing, grade was key to me but as I’ve climbed more I’ve realised that they don’t mean a huge amount and aren’t as uniform as you’d think - just look at a grade conversion table and then do some Trad climbing (don’t). When people say they can climb X grade they often miss important context out like the type of terrain - most people won’t climb 6a as their hardest grade on a slab, vertical and overhanging terrain indoors and out! If nothing else chasing grades alone can lead to some pot holes of its own.

Are you creating a barrier?

For those who have been climbing for a while or feel they climb harder than others it is likely to be harder to start a journey or self-improvement. Afterall you’ve been doing this for a while and your grade is pretty good so you must be good? Yep, I felt that too, but I realised if I wanted to improve, doing more of the same and having a good opinion of my ability wasn’t useful, it wasn't me it was my ego. It took me a while to recognise I had some fundamental issues with my technique and also that to get better my climbing was likely to get worse as I rebuilt poor bases.

The best thing you can do with ego is recognise it, and then put it to one side. There is no real advantage to having a high opinion of yourself in climbing. At best it prevents you from improving by feeling you’ve already ‘nailed’ certain things and at worst leads to you putting yourself in dangerous situations. For those who get high into the grades before they realise the need to improve, the ego can be a powerful barrier to stepping back to work on your own technique.

To ground this thinking in more scientific terms, the four stages of competence, describes the starting point on most people's journey of undertaking an activity as ‘unconscious incompetence’, that they don’t know that they are not good. One of the side effects of this can be that someone generates a high opinion of their climbing as a result of getting up a few climbs. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect which demonstrates people's confidence in a subject is often highest when they know very little about it. Often confidence doesn’t return to the same level when they are a recognised expert. By recognising that you have the opportunity to improve, you can start your journey to conscious incompetence where you recognise the need to improve and the levers to do so and then through focused, specific practice that  you do improve to conscious competence. 

The flip side to overestimated ability is frustration or the feeling that climbing simply doesn't fit you. Whether climbing is for you or not is a personal choice, but it is highly unlikely that you don’t suit climbing. Climbing is a very broad church and one of the most diverse activities with people of all ages, races, shapes and sizes. If you are going to focus on improving it is important that you have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. Limiting beliefs can be as potent, if not more powerful than physical limits. With a growth mindset, a lack of reach becomes a problem to be solved, a fear of heights becomes something that can be understood, managed and overcome. Failing becomes learning. 

Focus on what you want… but don’t limit yourself

Climbing is a very diverse activity covering both indoor and outdoor aspects and then a diversity of approaches from sport climbing, trad climbing, aid climbing, big wall climbing, crack climbing, via ferrata, slabs, walls, overhangs, roofs, long, short, scrambling, all the different types of rock… there are a lot of different types of climbing and mountaineering and it's pretty hard to experience even a little bit of all of them. An expert in one type of climbing may never have tried another type! 

The point here is that in order to develop proficiency in something you have to be specific in your practice. There are lots of truisms in this space; ‘What you do, you become’, ‘You are what you train’ etc. and it's worthwhile having these at the back of your mind whilst you are making conscious choices about what you are choosing to spend your time on. This doesn’t mean limiting yourself to one area but it does mean thinking about the type of climbing you like and the type of climbing you want to do and how training will help that. For instance, if you’d plan on doing 50m+ slab climbs outdoors there is little point in spending hours on a 3-metre long overhanging 40-degree training board. It will get you strong for 3 metre climbs but not much else. 

There is a flip side to this which is that gaining mileage on a wide range of terrains, styles and types of climbing is very valuable in your overall development. This doesn’t mean you have to be a generalist at all times but that spending time in another area may support the acquisition of new skills and techniques that you may not gain from your current climbing setting. So switching from indoor climbing to bouldering, or indoor to outdoor sport climbing, it is a small change that leverages your transferable skills whilst exposing you to new environments and stimuli, taking you outside of your comfort zone. If nothing else, changing the setting, be it climbing to bouldering, indoors to outdoors, it keeps climbing fresh. 

So in summary, think about what you want to focus on, but don’t cut yourself from new experiences that might be beneficial.

Putting this into practice

So you want to improve and you’re ready to improve but what to improve and how? There is a spectrum from DIY to getting a team of specialists to help you. This is an entirely personal choice and different levels of support can suit different stages of your development. 

Working out the what and the how in simple terms is a 3 step process with an initiating and ending step:

• Assess - understand where you are at present - where you are above where you want to be and where are you below this will give an idea of focus* 
• Plan - what are you going to focus on, how, how often, how will you balance training with fun climbing.
• Do - executing, this can be a bit harder in practice when faced with everything that life brings.
• Review - Is the plan working? If not tweak it, working out better ways to ‘do’ more of what matters.
• Conclude - Once you’ve been through a period of time with your sessions this is time to step back and work out what has gone well and then start another assess phase to work out what to do next.

If this sounds a bit complex it doesn’t have to be. It can be as simple as I think my footwork is poor (Assess), how can improve my footwork? I’m going to focus on placing my feet accurately (Plan). Each session when I warm-up I’m going to spend 10 minutes focusing on my footwork on a slab, on a boulder or climb (Do). I’m struggling to be precise as I don’t look at my feet when placing them, I'm going to focus on this (Review). I’ve spend 4 weeks working on my footwork and I feel more confident, I’m now going to focus on route reading (Conclude)

A useful framework to think about areas for improvement is known as TTPP:

Technical - Can I build a belay? How good is my footwork? Is my clipping of quickdraws efficient?

Tactical - Where does the route go? What is my pacing? Do I redpoint?

Physical - How strong are my fingers? What is my endurance like? Are my hips flexible?

Psychology - Am I afraid of falling? How focused am I? What is my mental narrative?

This can serve as a useful way to define where you might focus effort, or you might choose to work on one aspect from each of the areas. 

Before you embark on practice it's important to bear in mind the adage ‘Practice makes permanent’ and understand what good looks like. As you may have experienced through self-reflection, you may have already started to develop sub-optimal habits through being unconsciously incompetent (no offence!) and so any improvement should be focused on an optimal approach as much as possible. The ego can be a barrier here!

*Competence in any given skills should be viewed as relative to your current level, in this way everything is in a state of development even if it isn’t a focus area. So, for example, my foot work is good - it's great for 6a, good enough for 6b+ but its not good for 7a. But I can’t route read a 5+, in which case if your goal is 6a+ then route reading is probably an area of bigger gains. It is also a great way of having a growth mindset - I can do this well, but it can get better if I focus on it.

What does good like?

So we’ve got a bit of a framework for ‘how’ to the ‘what’, but how do you know what good looks like? Again there is a spectrum from working it out yourself to engaging a team of specialists to support you. Here I’ll look at the various different routes that I’ve come across or used and give a subjective view of their pros and cons:

Self-led

Books - there is a wide variety of books out there and some very good ones that explore the many different facets of climbing from technical manuals on how to build belays through to managing fear when leading. Books are a great source of information at a generally low price point. They are very much reliant upon you to digest and interpret their information and apply it correctly - this takes time, effort and discipline but provided the content is relevant to you, it can really pay off.  

Online/Youtube - videos can be really useful, especially those that focus on movement or technical aspects which pictures in a book may struggle to portray as effectively. There are some really helpful youtube channels which can help to break down different technical and movement aspects of climbing and this is where videos can be really useful. A word of caution, there is also a lot of guff and showy stuff on youtube that at best isn’t relevant and at worst is wrong. Also bear in mind that people come in different shapes, sizes, strengths and flexibilities and its easy to watch some of the really competent people make hard things look easy. 

Organic

Observation - unlike books or videos which can often be a bit generic in their application, observing others, especially those who are more advanced, can be a really useful way of understanding techniques that are specific to the problems you are struggling with. Can’t do a climb or boulder problem? Watch someone else do it. You might find you get new ideas or thoughts for your next attempt. You could even ask the person - climbers tend to be more than willing to give a few thoughts or advice. When I’ve fallen off a problem I’ve often had someone come over, offer congrats on putting the effort in, but also offer some ideas (beta*) on how to get over the bit I struggled with.

Climbing with friends - similar to observation, climbing with friends is a great way to bring collective minds, body types, abilities and psyche to solving problems. The ability to discuss and combine thoughts on how to complete a climb can be very useful and if you’ve got a more experienced climber than you it can be worthwhile trying harder climbs/moves to get a sense of what they feel like. Just be respectful of others by not providing too much beta* before someone else has climbed, some people can get understandably frustrated with others providing too many ideas, especially if they want to ‘onsight’ (climb without prior knowledge) the climb.

*specific advice or direction as to how to complete a climb.

Professional led

Group coaching - tends to focus on a pre-set area of focus such as specific techniques and as such, it is topic-led coaching. This can be really useful when you are trying to learn new skills. These sessions introduce specific themes and often means of practice in a structured way. Where they can be less useful is where you have a degree of experience as the sessions tend to focus on delivering specific drills rather than adapting them to your needs. These tend to have a one-off cost.

Development coaching - this is where working with a coach on a 1:1 basis over a longer term can be really powerful. They are able to observe and engage with you over your particular climbing style and experience looking at targeted and specific ways of helping you to improve. A good coach will be able to help a climber at any stage in their journey or refer you to someone who can. Coaching will have a cost associated, but the benefits can be far more rapid as a result of this targeted approach.

Specialist coaches - climbing coaching is starting to see increasing levels of specialisation driven by the growing body of evidence and sport science led approach. Climbing is still relatively immature in terms of its scientific evidence base, unlike other, richer sports such as football. Nevertheless, the field of professional support is increasingly becoming more niche with experts and expert organisations, especially in areas of strength and conditioning, but also areas such as psychology. It is a bit more of a commitment to work with and pay for multiple services like this and you really do need to consider the time you have to commit to climbing and wider life stresses and commitments to assess whether you will be able to reap all of the benefits of this multi-faceted approach. 

The big advantage of working with others, especially a coach, is that they will be able to give you insights into your climbing that you might not see yourself. Similar to the ideas put forward in Johari’s window, there are things we know about ourselves and things we don’t, sometimes the route to improvement requires accessing information about ourselves that we may not be aware of.

Personally, I’ve used all of the approaches from one time to another and all have had a role to play in helping me to progress and achieve my goals.

Final thoughts

So is there an optimal approach? There is no one size fits all approach and it will largely come down to a degree of experimenting with what works for you. It is also worthwhile recognising that in your journey as a climber you’re likely to need different things at different times; doing some self-learning is a good idea when you’re trying to work things out or working on drills, but if you’re struggling with some specific movement patterns, getting the perspective of others can be the thing that provides the jump to the next level.

Reading/viewing ideas

9 out of 10 climbers - an excellent in-depth read as to why climbers become stuck on their journey of progress from the legendary Scottish climber Dave MacLeod

Rock Warrior's way - an exploration of the psychological aspects of climb and well worth a read if you want to lead or push on in difficult terrain

Rock climbing technique - an excellent resource by John Kettle for those who want to self-coach and develop their own climbing

The BMC - youtube channel has a good range of informative videos, especially on the technical aspects of climbing

Glenmore lodge - The Scottish national outdoor training centre features a range of technical videos

UKClimbing - contains a range of articles on technique and has comprehensive forums

WideBoyz - an excellent and often amusing source of information for those who seek to master the dark art of crack… climbing!