Picking Your Project
One of the best features of projecting is that you don’t need any special training to start. It’s as simple as picking a project and trying it.
In this article, we will discuss some tips for choosing a climb for a project and getting the most out of your time on it, both in terms of improvement and fun.
At its most basic, choosing a project is as simple as picking a climb you cannot yet complete (or redpoint, in climbing terms). But, for the best results, it will help to follow a few guidelines.
Have Multiple Projects
You should choose at least two projects to work on at any given time. Having multiple projects to work on at any given time helps with several things.
First, it helps to keep up your motivation. Some puzzles are easier to solve than others. Getting stumped on a project–either because you are having trouble figuring it out or because you are not yet strong enough to do a move–can get frustrating at times. Having two or more climbs to work on allows you to switch between them when you get stuck or even just tired. This helps to keep the variety up while reducing the risk of frustration.
Second, the additional variety helps develop additional skills. Climbing the same problem—or the same kinds of moves—repeatedly will reinforce your existing skills but will not typically teach you many new ones. Keeping two or three projects and splitting your time between them helps ensure you learn new stuff and refine the old.
Finally, varying your climbs helps reduce the risk of repetitive stress injuries. As the name implies, repetitive stress injuries are the result of repeating the same movements over and over. Working on a single problem increases the risk of this sort of injury. Having a few different projects allows you to split your time, increasing the variation of your movements, and reducing the risk of repetitive stress.
Pick Projects that Balance Strengths and Weaknesses
You should also choose climbs that play to your strengths…and your weaknesses. When you are just starting out as a climber, every new climb is an opportunity to learn a new skill—or several of them.
However, as you improve, you will likely find that you will begin to favor certain styles over others. You might start to feel really good on slab climbs or perhaps prefer the very steep ones. You may develop a preference for particular hold types, like crimps or pinches. Or you may favor climbs that require slower, static movement over dynos and dead points.
Climbing to Your Strengths
Regardless of your particular preference, working on climbs that “fit your style “has several benefits.
First, it’s motivating. Climbs that play to your strengths tend to be easier puzzles to solve. They often “go down” faster, providing more frequent positive reinforcement and more immediate satisfaction. Once sent, they can be inserted more quickly into more structured training (like the Rule of 3’s).
Focusing exclusively on such climbs, however, has a significant drawback. As the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And, if you only focus on your strengths, then there will be a lot of weak links in your climbing chain. Those weaknesses, left unaddressed, can slow or even halt your progress.
Climbing to Your Weaknesses
To prevent such outcomes, I recommend having at least one project at any given time that focuses on an area of weakness.
For example, many new boulderers quickly develop a preference for incut holds, like mini-jugs or crimps, because they feel very secure, are easier to pull and hold on to, and are less likely to slip off of. This preference, however, often leads such climbers to avoid climbs with more “slippery” holds, like pinches or slopers.
This quickly becomes a pattern: you favor climbs with more secure-feeling holds and tend to avoid those without. This makes you stronger and more confident on the first group which, in turn, makes those climbs feel better, and so on. But this habit also reduces (or dominates) your interest in trying climbs that feature sloping holds. This limits your exposure to those moves and prevents you from learning the skills necessary to build confidence and improve on such climbs.
The end result is that you become highly specialized very quickly, limiting your overall ability to a progressively smaller number of climbs and, eventually, stalling your progress. The analogy I like to use is another highly skill-dependent sport—golf.
The ability to hit a long drive straight down the fairway is related to, but not the same as, the ability to sink a long putt. And, as a fairly terrible golfer, I can confirm that, despite being able to drive a ball close to 250 yards off the tee, you can still easily come in five or six strokes over par because you can’t put it into the hole!
The moral of that story is if you don’t practice your putting, you’re not going to win many rounds. And climbing is no different—if you want to improve, you must turn your weaknesses into strengths. That means you must practice on climbs that feature holds and moves you’re not good at, plain and simple.
So, at minimum, I recommend you have two ongoing projects at any given time: one that favors your strengths, for morale boosting and reinforcement, and one that features at least one element you are weak on. This allows you to learn new skills faster and helps prevent a plateau.
All material is reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 2022 David H. Rowland. All rights reserved.
