Achieving a goal is a tremendously motivating experience! Many goals, such as sending a hard project, require more than one kind of improvement in order to achieve. Tracking your sends is an obvious and relatively straightforward way to measure your progress; but, how do you do it when you have no new sends to report?
In this article, we’ll discuss the various ways that we measure climbing progress, and tips on how you can use these to keep your motivation high.
New Climbers
At the highest level, progress tracking begins with keeping track of your hardest sends; both onsights and red points. Depending on your experience and fitness, gains in these grades can be quick and dramatic or slow and incremental.
In general, newer climbers are more likely to see rapid results, especially during their first year or two of training. The reasons for this are many and various, but at the core, this happens because of improvements in technique and muscle gain that tend to be more rapid when you are just getting serious about the sport.
Don’t Get Discouraged
More experienced climbers will already have much of the basic technical skills mastered, as well as a higher base level of strength, and so will need to learn more complicated or refined techniques, as well as build muscles to a higher level in order to see the same progress.
While moving from V1 to V2 might take most new climbers a month or two, moving from V6 to V7 might take up to a year! Of course, age, climbing frequency, prior levels of fitness, and a whole host of other factors all play into this, meaning that most of us will go through periods of faster and slower progress many times throughout our climbing careers.
Waiting months or longer to see any improvements is a disheartening process and not one which we recommend. Instead, it is important to use other measurements that are both more regular and more reliable (while we wait for that one key number or letter to go up).
Consistency Grades
Luckily, we have many other ways to test your progress. The first is to remember your consistency grades: consistent onsight and consistent redpoint. Even though our rule of thumb places both of these a fixed distance below your hardest onsight and hardest redpoint, in the real world, these grades measure an independent form of progress.
For instance, during a given period of training, you may remain stuck with your hardest redpoint at V4; but you may find that you go from only being able to send half the V3s at any given time in your gym to being able to send all V3s that get set.
Going from a 50% success rate on a given grade to 100% is clear progress, even though the official “difficulty” of the climbs has not increased. The same would be true for flashes or onsights. Even going from a 50% success rate at sending 5.9 to a 70% success rate is impressive progress, and is an accomplishment that shows clear progress toward future goals.
Workout Tracking
One level down from this is to use your performance during your workouts as another progress measurement, one which climbing workouts are uniquely suited for.
Most of the sets we use are designed with easy progress tracking in mind. For instance, take a simple set like repeats, where the goal is to send your hardest 3 redpoints twice each during the set. This is a difficult task to accomplish, particularly if you are re-sending climbs you’ve only recently completed. The first time you try this set you may only complete one repeat on any given problem, or even less.
As you train, you will eventually reach a point where you can send each problem twice! This may not immediately lead to sending harder projects, but it is a clear and measurable sign of improvement.
Other signs of progress are being able to do more reps in a row without a fall, increasing the grades on problems in your training sets, even reducing the rest you need between climbs. Improvements in any of those measurements mean improvements in your overall ability, even if they don’t immediately transfer to sending harder projects.
Basic Progress Tracking: Every Move is a Route
Finally, at the most basic level it is important to recognize that, in a fundamental way, every single move in climbing can be viewed as “a climb.” There are, in fact, boulder problems that are a single move long. More generally, there are countless climbs where the only difficult part is a single crux move, and more frequently, two or three crux moves.
As a result, the most fundamental measurement of progress in climbing is: Can you do a move that previously you could not do? If, when you first tried a project, there was a move where you always fell, then, after a couple of weeks training, you stuck it for the first time—that’s an improvement! When you can stick that move reliably, or after you are already tired—that’s further improvement!
Being able to look at progress from multiple angles and in a variety of contexts will help to keep your motivation up.
All material is reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 2022 David H. Rowland. All rights reserved.
