timofeisevbo: переводы

→Building falls into your daily climbing diet

→In actual fact, for the engrained habits it needs even more practice than would have been necessary if falling familiarity was gained from the outset. Engrained bad habits always take much longer to undo than creating good ones from a clean slate. There is no way round it. Once you can swallow that and accept that repetitive work needs done, you can start and the taste of real progress after the dull ache of plateau will revive the motivation.

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→Again, the key mistake in moving up the ladder of leading confidence is to underestimate the volume of practice needed at each stage to be ready to move to the next. Very few (the naturally daring) climbers haven’t had to go through this process. However, many of them will have done it earlier in their climbing career when they were learning everything for the first time. So they didn’t grudge it so much. The problem with those who have a long engrained fear of falling is that they subconsciously see themselves as relative experts in climbing. They have ‘done their time’ of learning from the ground up, so they don’t want to have to go through the grind of extended practice of basic exercises over and over.

→This can be especially demoralising if you’ve already put a fair bit of time and effort into practicing your leading and falling indoors and on more straightforward sport climbs. There are no shortcuts to this next level. You simply have to start again with progressive exposure to the situations that you are struggling with and eventually gain a massive reservoir of familiarity. Pick a route where you know you’ll not be able to see the next bolt or the route finding between bolts will be unobvious. Climb as high as you can bear above the bolt and take a controlled fall. Next time up, don’t aim to complete the runout, just go one or two moves higher and take the fall again. Repeat until the fall feels so familiar it’s almost boring to take it again. Some readers will be thinking, “But that could take all day!” Exactly.

→Unless you started out climbing outside on sport routes, moving onto falling practice outdoors will feel harder for most climbers. One of the biggest differences is with onsight climbing: you cannot always see the next bolt, you just have to climb until you do see it. This seemingly small difference from indoor climbing presents a massive challenge for those who struggle with fear of falling. The simple act of moving away from the last protection with no fixed target to aim for, relying only on trust in your own ability and that the solution will emerge as you move up can be incredibly hard to master.

→Practice on sport climbs

→To continue your indoor falling skills practice, introduce new practice situations by using different belayers, on as many different wall angles as possible, when you’ve pulled up slack to clip the next bolt and in more pressured situations like a route you’ve been ‘saving’ for an onsight or a leading competition. The more diverse the situations you practice in, the more resistant your confidence will be to unusual scenarios and simply climbing at your limit. Notice I said ‘continue’, and not ‘complete’ your falling skills practice. Falling practice is never complete, because like any aspect of climbing preparation, it’s reversible and if you don’t use the skill regularly, it’ll slide backwards at an alarming rate.

→Only once you are comfortable with taking falls with the protection at or just below your feet without it even registering as a worry should you take on bigger practice falls, or falls in more intimidating situations on climbs. The next stage is obviously to take longer falls, building on the foundation to allow you to be more confident and able to stay focused on the climbing rather than worrying about falling when you get high above protection. Once you are at this level, the process isn’t over. It’s necessary to start to make your hard won confidence more resilient to the knocks it might take from novel situations or nasty surprises that routes might throw up. In sports psychology this is called ‘stress proofing’. Basically the idea is to use your psychological (confidence) skills and falling (practical) skills in an ever widening net of potential situations. The effect is that when the time comes to call on your confidence and falling skills in a worst case scenario, the pressure of the new circumstances doesn’t cause such a crisis that you fail to access and use the skills at all.

→The next stage is the fall with the protection at your feet. This is a really big change from the previous level. The increased rope paid out plus its stretch and the movement from the belayer to absorb your momentum will mean you go quite a lot further than you might expect. It feels like a ‘proper’ fall and it’s this size of fall where you really get to practice and perfect all the techniques of falling. So it’s important to take many falls (10-100 depending on how fast you progress) before moving onto bigger or more complicated falls. This level is the foundation to move onto bigger falls without them being too scary and having a counterproductive effect. The stronger this foundation, the better.

→Next, fall with the gear at knee level. The length of the fall might be less than two metres (with rope stretch), but even at this length it’s important for the belayer not to pull the rope tight before the fall in order to avoid a harsh slam into the rock. It’s amazing how much momentum the body builds up in a split second of falling, and with such a short fall you’ll not have time or room to brace your feet properly. Slamming knees and wrists off the wall or protruding holds is enough to cause injury even from a one metre fall.

→Once all of these steps are in place, falling in the vast majority of sport climbing and even well-protected trad climbing cases will be consistently trouble free. If you spend time looking around at a popular sport climbing destination or even a busy climbing wall, you’ll see this in action, non-stop. Falling well is okay. Sadly, even if one of the above techniques is missing from the chain, the falling experience is bound to feel quite the opposite - a scary and even painful experience that’s unlikely to leave you keen to try it more. Once you have all the elements and have your first leader fall that went well, you can start making small deposits of confidence, one at a time. However, getting lazy or resorting hack to bad habits and ending up with a nasty falling experience will make a much bigger dent in your confidence than a single positive fall can repair. So discipline really pays of in the field of mental training. The only thing left to do once you are on the right track is get as far down it as possible and clock up those falls.

→So the amount the leader pushes outwards when initiating the fall, and the belaying technique during it determines the speed of the swing into the wall. But this is not all that is important. The leader’s technique for absorbing the impact with the wall, however gentle, is the final and crucial step in creating a positive falling experience. As early as possible during the fall, the climber should adopt a brace position ready to absorb any shock that occurs on the final swing in. The correct position is to lean back slightly and spread the arms and legs out in front of you ready to hit the wall. However, arms and legs should be slightly bent and not rigid. As you swing in and make contact with the wall, your feet should hit the wall first and should be able to absorb all the force. Even on an off-vertical wall, a fall (large or small) should only cause a mild swing in if the falling and belaying technique has been correct. The hands should rarely have to absorb any force and really just help to balance you and keep you upright. Nevertheless, getting into the habit of bracing them anyway is important for those times when the swing in ends up being a little worse for whatever reason. Ultimately they might protect your head from coming close to the wall in a really bad fall.

→Good belaying during falls is obviously essential to avoid this downward spiral. The belayer should maintain a small amount of slack in the system wherever it’s safe to do so. Falling off just below the second bolt of a route is an obvious exception - any extra slack here might risk a ground-fall. When the leader falls, the belayer, if not fixed to a belay, should move forward as the rope comes tight to absorb the shock more softly and prevent such a sharp swing in. Ihe social dynamic between the leader and belayer is crucial here. Often a leader who is on a route that is out of their comfort zone or about to take some practice falls will put pressure on their belayer to take the rope tight before the leader lets go. It takes some courage and good social skills to negotiate with the leader before they start up the route to discuss, agree and reassure them that a little slack and a soft catch will make things much better. They won’t always follow through when it comes to the moment of truth and demand a tight rope as they are about to drop. Ignoring them and giving slack anyway might seem like a good idea to ‘teach’ them that this makes a much nicer fall. But often undermining their instructions and breaking their sense of trust in you as the belayer will end up being counterproductive and cancelling out any benefits.

→Where you are using routes for training, it’s nearly always a good idea to climb on lead, for the opportunity to work on your leading, falling and tactical skills and to get used to climbing on real leads when pumped. However, for more advanced climbers, who feel very confident with their leading skills, bouldering wall circuits are an extremely time efficient way to train endurance, especially anaerobic endurance.

→Warm-up > Basic strength > hard bouldering > easier bouldering > Anaerobic circuits/routes > Aerobic circuits/routes.

→The psychological effects of endurance training on your technique are not to be underestimated. Activities like low level traversing on a bouldering wall are likely to increase your fitness, but applied wrongly they can seriously mess up your climbing technique and negate any positive effects. Its not that the physical effect of the training is somehow drastically different in traversing, as is often misunderstood. The problem is that you get used to the type of movement and pattern of fatigue you get from the traversing, and when you go back to real routes, the difference feels unsettling and you don’t climb well. Commonly, traverses are long, aerobic bouts of several minutes and you design them so you get a little pumped and stay at this level of fatigue throughout. While this is good for stimulating capillary growth, it’s different from the normal routine of getting more and more pumped on a route, culminating in a fight just before the top. Also, the moves tend to be front on to the rock and quite small and so you get used to this type of move when you are pumped. When it comes to doing a long, aggressive move high on a route, it feels unnatural. All this is not to say that traversing shouldn’t be done. But where it is used, it should be punctuated by regular sessions on real routes and shorter anaerobic routes or circuits.

→The first question to deal with when choosing how to train endurance for climbing is the practicality of it. Clearly, the goal is to get high volumes of pumpy moves and routes completed on a regular basis. Often, there is a practical limitation of access to either the routes, or partners to belay and share the training with you. So, using a bouldering wall to do extended circuits carries some big advantages. This will be especially useful for very experienced climbers or those doing a high volume of real routes as well. They will have well developed tactics and the training will be purely about increasing fitness. For less experienced climbers, the learning of all the other skills of route climbing such as leading confidence, route reading and tactics are also essential objectives to fit into the training. For these climbers, the more of the climbing that can be done on real routes, the better, so long as they are steep and intense routes that develop good pacing and work the muscles hard enough.

→To ensure maximum gains in climbing endurance, it is therefore vital that the endurance training mimics the real activity as closely as possible. General cardiovascular fitness may help us deal with the demands of a heavy training schedule, but won’t contribute directly to forearm endurance and may actually interfere with more specific gains by adding another aspect of training stress for the body to recover from. Climbing endurance training means working the forearms, and the best way to do this is by real climbing. This climbing should have an anaerobic (short intense bouts) and aerobic (long, less intense routes) component. This holds even for those only wishing to do fairly short sport routes of less than one minute duration, because the increased capillary density gained through climbing longer routes will help to sustain hard moves by perfusing the muscle better during the brief moments between pulling on holds.

→Endurance rules