When It’s Better to Think Inside the Box

I never thought I’d be recommending this, but some of y’all should be putting less effort into becoming technically better climbers. Even more damning, I think you should be spending more time having beta fed to you so that you can skip as much of the early learning process on a project as possible.

One of the most common pieces of advice for improving at climbing is to learn how to solve problems on your own. It’s easy to fall into the trap of always asking for beta or finding videos of climbs so that you don’t have to do your own thinking. This can lead to people becoming dependent on beta from others, and makes it incredibly challenging for them to find methods that suit their body and their strengths best. It’s great for short-term performance, but if it’s done too much it can stifle long-term progress. The advice of finding your own beta guides us towards thinking outside of the box and recognizing how to read sequences for ourselves.

While I agree with this advice and have often promoted it, I think there’s a danger in taking it too far. Finding your own beta is a great way to learn more about movement and technique, but it’s also incredibly time intensive and can skew your climbing time heavily towards the discovery stage (learning as much as you can about the climb and its moves) of projecting. This leaves you with less time for focusing on trying hard and giving redpoint attempts.

Stages of Projecting

There are multiple stages of projecting. Some of these include:

1. Researching and finding a potential project: This can range from scouring the internet for your next dream line to swiping through an app on a phone to see which board problem looks the least heinous.

2. The initial reconnaissance phase (trying it a few times) where you determine if it’s worth investing more time into this climb.

3. Beta Finding.

4. Doing the individual moves.

5. Linking sections and using other redpointing tactics, like refining beta.

6. Give redpoint efforts until sending: A large portion of the mental game of rock climbing lives here!

The less time you spend searching for beta, the more time you can dedicate towards getting better at the skills of sending and trying hard.

A few issues come up with always being dependent on finding your own beta. First, if you don’t learn from other climbers, you’re going to miss out on skills and lessons that they’ve already taken the time to learn. If you’ve never seen a handjam or kneebar before, it’s going to be hard to create that technique from thin air.

Next, it means a large portion of your climbing will be spent doing very short sequences and likely not trying very hard.

Lastly, it can often lead to people spending a disproportionately short amount of time on the linking and redpointing stages of projecting. This is the stage where people tend to struggle the most mentally.

However, if you project straight-forward climbs where there’s zero beta-finding, then your focus is on making links, trying hard, and the mental side of performing. This allows you to sharpen your redpointing skills while also making your sessions serve as a better strength stimulus.

How to know if this is for you: Red Flag Phrases and Situations:

• If the longest part of projecting a climb is finding the beta.

• If you regularly send your projects immediately after unlocking the last piece of beta.

• If you find yourself saying that it’s hard to project on boards (Tension, Moon, Kilter, etc.), and that you can either do a hard climb quickly or not at all.

• If you regularly feel the need to make beta perfect to the point of not needing to try hard.

There’s a tremendous amount of value in learning how to solve problems, tailor beta to your own body, read sequences, etc. However, if you are regularly spending multiple sessions to send a climb and most of that time is spent finding beta, then you’re likely lacking quality time with the redpointing process. My recommendation is that at least 25% of your projecting time should be spent on straight-forward climbs where the beta is easily accessible. Boards can be a fantastic tool for this, but it can be done just as easily outdoors or on commercial sets.