The Relative Nature of Grades
Climbing grades are relative more than they are subjective. What’s the difference? Subjective issues are those based entirely on individual perceptions or opinions. In other words, subjective issues occur almost exclusively in our minds, not in the world outside our minds.
That is the land of the objective. Relative differences can exist in the objective world. And, they have a significant influence on how we interact with it.
A Visual
To illustrate this, we take an example from the sport of wrestling. Wrestling uses a relative difference, an athlete’s weight, to determine which category they compete in. This is in recognition of the fact that a significant weight difference can overwhelm the skill parity of two opponents.
For example, a heavier, but less skilled, wrestler may still have an unfair advantage over his opponent if his weight is significantly more than his opponent’s.
Indeed, such relative differences exist in nearly every sport. One common example is age groups. Few would argue that a 10-year-old quarterback can be fairly compared to a 23-year-old.
The Three Properties
When we look at climbing, we find we have the following situation. Any attempt to objectively explain how we come up with a route or problem grade would have to account for the following three properties:
1) Angle of the wall
2) Size of the holds
3) Distance between holds
In other words, holding all else equal, if you make a climb steeper, you will make it harder. Similarly, if you make holds smaller, your climb will be harder. Finally, if you place the same holds further apart, your climb will also be harder.
Factors Influencing Grade Choice: Angle and Weight
One could argue that weight plays a part in it. And there is no doubt that heavier climbers tend to have a more difficult time than lighter climbers. But the primary fitness trait that typifies all climbers is a high strength-to-weight ratio. Which means that heavier climbers would simply need to be as strong, proportional to their weight, as their lighter partners.
In other words, their increased strength would balance out their weight difference, leading them to (at least roughly) agree with the consensus grade. This suggests that wall angle changes should not severely impair a reasonable consensus grade.
Factors Influencing Grade Choice: Hold Size
The sizes of holds matter primarily as a proportion to the size of a climber’s fingers and hands. Climbers in fact, use this comparison as a way to discuss how “good” or “bad” a hold is. Phrases like “full pad edge or “half pad crimp” are frequently used to give an indication of how difficult it is to grab a given hold.
Indeed, there are advantages to smaller fingers in many cases. A “one pad” edge for a young woman may be a “half pad” edge for an older man. But for some holds, like large pinches and slopers, bigger hands (and longer fingers) are an advantage.
As a result, over the course of a long route (or many routes) the differences in hand-size tend to average out when assessing difficulty. While this does not fully level the playing field, it does reduce the overall impact these physical differences have on consensus grades.
Factors Influencing Grade Choice: Hold Distance and Height
By far though, the biggest relative difference between climbers involves how far apart the holds are. Many climbers tend to view this as an issue of height, and the prevailing wisdom is that taller climbers have a significant advantage over shorter ones (and there is some truth to that belief).
But even more than height, wingspan is the primary physical difference between climbers that affects our ability to reliably reach a precise consensus on grades. All else being equal (height, weight, experience, etc.), climbers with a negative wingspan (i.e. their fingertip to fingertip reach being less than their height) consistently grade routes and problems as harder than climbers with equal, or positive, wingspans (i.e. equal to, or greater than their height).
What Can be Done?
In sum, these relative differences—in particular, wingspan—place an upper limit on how accurate any climbing grade can be. To address this problem climbers could, like wrestlers, segment their sport into height and wingspan categories to reduce the impact those differences have on grades. Unfortunately, however, we don’t do that.
Even if we did, we would still have the fundamental problem of climbing grades being holistic. This means that they come from an overall impression of how hard the route is, rather than a series of precise measurements (like wall angle, hold size and reach). Any system that was more objectively precise, in fact, would likely not be useable in practice.
To properly assess routes, we would need to measure the angle at multiple points along each route. We must also measure the size of every hold and the distance between them. Additionally, various other factors need consideration. This includes establishing standards for comparison among all these variables. The sheer number of factors makes this approach unworkable.
Swimming Pool Analogy
Unlike a time on a standardized swimming pool, which is the same for everyone, climbing grades have an inherent ambiguity that make them problematic for accurate progress measurement.
To make this concrete, imagine you were a swimmer training for the Olympics. Your best time in the 100 m Freestyle is :50 and your goal is to improve your time by 5%. Now we will add the following wrinkle: your stopwatch is only accurate to +/- 5 seconds.
How would you measure your progress? Five percent of :50 would be shaving 2.5 seconds off of your time. But, at any given time, your stopwatch can be off by as much as 5 seconds! So, if your best time is :49 after training for a few weeks, all you would know for sure would be that your actual time was somewhere between :44 (faster than your goal, indicating significant improvement) and :54 (slower than your original time, indicating significant decline).
There are ways to mitigate this problem. For instance, taking an average over a number of 100-meter times. But no matter what method you used, there would always be a large grey area. It’s large enough that you could never be sure if a small improvement was due to your training or some other factor outside of your control.
Climbing Grades as a Guide
So, does that mean we can’t use grades to measure progress, at all? Absolutely not!
A less accurate stopwatch still gives us a reliable range of performance. This allows us to roughly predict a general trend of how we are doing, as well as how fast we need to swim to get better on average.
Using the swimming pool example, for instance, we can avoid training at a pace that is too difficult (e.g., faster than :44) or much too easy (e.g., slower than :54). But, the sensitivity of the watch is not good enough to accurately, and precisely, measure our gains.
Grades have the same character. They give us a rough idea of how we are doing, and, on average, are a reasonably reliable indicator of improvement and performance.
The problem is, like the stopwatch, they are not very accurate. More to the point, they are not accurate enough to detect small improvements (or declines) in our overall performance or individual abilities. They are, at best, a guide to point us in the right direction, but not a good scientific metric.
All material is reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 2022 David H. Rowland. All rights reserved.
