Welcome back,

For this newsletter I’ve decided to try something a little different. Rather than have several smaller sections like usual I’m using this space talk about an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while and that I’d like to share with y’all. If you enjoy this format, hit reply and let me know.

Last year I listened to Jared Tendler’s book The Mental Game of Poker*. A friend told me it was one of the best books on mental performance they had come across in any genre, and felt like it could also apply to climbing.

I don’t know much about poker, but I respect the mental aspects of it. In poker, you can make great decisions and still have bad outcomes, and you can play against people who make bad decisions who still have great outcomes. It’s a simple enough idea, but staying level headed and continuing to trust your decision making skills after bad results is hard to do.

Knowing how mentally engaging poker is, and with the recommendation from my friend, I decided to get the book. Today, I want to talk about an idea that Tendler shares on skill development that I feel has carryover to climbing.

The concept is called “inchworming”. Think of your climbing performance on a bell curve, specifically your climbing performance on mini-project level boulders (boulders that take us 3-5 sessions to send). That curve–that’s our worm. The left side represents boulders that highlight our weaknesses, the right side is the climbs that show our strengths, and the middle represents the climbs that we are able to consistently climb. 

When we only work on our strengths then the curve flattens out. While our average and top performances improve, our weaknesses stay where they are making the curve stretch out and flatten. When we work on our strengths and our weaknesses, the whole curve shifts to the right (like a crawling inchworm).

I believe this concept of inchworming can help explain why some people have enormous benefits from one type of training while other people barely improve from the same thing. When a generally well rounded climber adds physical training to their routine, they will end up seeing much greater benefits than someone who might be just as weak to start with but who has gaps in their mental or technical skills that will hold the tail of their inchworm further back.

Most of us have met climbers who have trained hard and gained a tremendous amount of strength or fitness only to climb one letter grade or half a v-grade harder. For those climbers, strength might have been helpful, but it wasn’t what held them back. That strength training made the head of the inchworm move forward, but the tail that’s comprised of their mental and technical weaknesses stayed where it was.

*Even though I listened to this book, I recommend reading it instead. The audio quality of the recorded version is bad enough that it makes it hard to listen to.

What kind of inchworm are you, flat, steep arced, or normal?

If you feel like you aren’t progressing right now (or not progressing as fast as you would like) it can help to look at the current shape of your inchworm to see what you need to keep moving forward.

Flat Worm

There’s a huge discrepancy in your best and worst styles.

If something fits you, you can smash it. If something doesn’t fit you…you don’t try it. Not seriously at least. This pattern of flocking to what suits you and avoiding what is hard is keeping you locked into this flat worm shape.

Maybe you crush steep crimps, or technical face climbing, or perhaps you love powerful compression on comfortable holds. I get it, it’s fun to feel good at things. For that reason, one of the easiest ways to make climbing more fun is to get better at more styles.

For the flat worms out there that resonate with this, I recommend Building A Better Pyramid. If you can learn to have fun with the climbs that seem harder than they should then you’ll see big jumps in improvement.

One other cause of a flat worm is that you recently developed a new strength and you haven’t caught your other skills up yet. If you just spent a long stretch of time only climbing outdoors then your technical skills might be the best they have ever been, but your physical strength and fitness might be lagging behind. On the other hand, If you spent your whole summer climbing on boards, then you’re probably dealing with the opposite problem. You’ve never been stronger, but anything that isn’t jumping between edges at 40 degrees feels foreign to you.

For the flat worms, your next step forward is to assess where you are at and figure out what it is you are lacking. This could be talking with a friend, watching video of yourself, or hiring a coach to help you. Once you find out what your weakness is, prioritize working on that while still maintaining your strengths.

Steep Arced Worm

There’s a very small range between your weaknesses and your strengths.

You climb everything all of the time. You feel like you’re pretty good at just about every style (except slab, but that doesn’t count right?), and typically, your hardest sends happen fast. It seems like no matter what you do, you can’t break through to the next level. Either you can send a climb in a few tries or not at all.

For most of the steep worms, you need to try harder climbs. What used to be hard for you now happens quickly. Maybe you used to spend three or four sessions to climb v6, and now you can do it in a few tries. So why isn’t v7 feeling any easier? The reason is that you’ve forgotten just how hard v6 used to be for you. When you broke into the grade it was normal for you to not be able to do all of the moves your first day on it. At some point, you forgot how to try hard.

Hard climbing is hard.

The point of training and working our weaknesses isn’t to make all rock climbing feel easy. We train so that our absolute best efforts can get us through something more challenging and inspiring than what was possible before.

Normal Worm

You feel like a moderately well rounded climber. You’ve got weaknesses, but you’re working on them, and you don’t feel like your strengths are extreme to the point of being a detriment. For you, the hardest part moving forward will be patience.

Realizing your potential as a climber takes time. The people that I meet who are working hard, training smart, and trying to eke out every advantage they can to send 5.14 right now were working hard, training smart, and trying to eke out every advantage they could to send 5.12 six or seven years ago. It’s a long grind.

Hunt down your weaknesses and prioritize them. Work to develop strengths so that you can leverage them when you need to. You’re going to get the most benefits from a well-rounded approach where you continue to level up your mental, physical, technical, and tactical abilities.

When you find something that works, stick with it. One of my favorite Dan John quotes is “it worked so well I stopped doing it”. I see this all the time in climbing. It’s the people who are already making good progress that seem most likely to make radical changes to their routines in hopes of making great progress. More often than not, it leaves them with worse results, burnout, and sometimes injury.

While I don’t think the inchworm idea is all encompassing or the new secret tool for breaking any plateau, I do believe it can serve as one more lens to look through when considering how we should approach our path to improvement.

If you enjoyed this or if you have any thoughts you’d like to add to the discussion hit reply and let me know. I enjoy hearing your insights.