You know, how you’re always told as a beginner climber that you should place your weight over your feet and use as much of your leg strength as possible? Well, yea, you say, logical thing… BUT if you’ve gotten along in improving your climbing skills, then you’ll know that it’s easy to THINK you’re doing it right. Unless there is someone who really looks after you and cares about your climbing, you only realize that you’ve been doing it wrong when you start to do it right – accidentally.

Here are 2 quick pointers to help you if you’re at this stage in climbing. Try these and you’ll see arms getting less tired, moves become easier and you’ll just plain have more fun on the rocks…

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  Her butt and upper body should lean out more - above her feet

  The first tip is trying to place your center of gravity (which is approximately your butt) over your feet. Now, there are obvious exceptions to this rule, such as being on a reibung step, but in the beginning, make sure you don’t lean too far into the wall (see pic) if the wall is not vertical. In this case, it takes some extra energy for the lady to keep her feet on the rock, because the force from her center of gravity actually pushes her feet away from the wall (see the blue arrow?) She should lean a bit further out so that her body is above her feet and she’s in a vertical position.

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  Experiment with pushing your legs apart, like an opening scissor...

  The second pointer is spreading your legs, using them to sorta wedge your body. That is: not just simply standing on your feet, but with an outward force on your legs, you can stand more stabil and take even more body weight with your legs. Initially, on a small wall, try to experiment in every move with pushing your legs apart and seeing whether you’re able to stand more comfortably.

If this stuff looks fun, consider a fun alpine climbing trip with a mountain guide.

Miss the ice and your tools after a fun season? No need to worry, just be creative. Head on downtown like these guys and gals did and take your ice axe along. If you want to add more excitement, you can try drytooling on public buildings and get chased by security. (Just kidding.)

Enjoy and be inspired:

A really cool blog: Alpine Awakening by mountain guide Kurt Hicks recently featured a really good article on how to rapp quickly and securely with a party of three. It’s clever and definitely makes rapping faster and more secure when with a group of 3. Just make sure that the anchor points are strong enough to hold 2 climbers while they rapp simultaneously! Check out the post here.

Update: I got the idea for this post via onthesharpend.com

A friend and I were talking last night… He’s a great [tag-tec]alpinist[/tag-tec], having bagged several difficult routes in Europe and getting to 6600 meters on the shivering, cruel North Face of [tag-tec]Khan-Tengri[/tag-tec]. He went on a small climbing vacation to Croatia’s [tag-tec]Paklenica[/tag-tec] National Park – a paradise of bolted single- and multi-pitch rock routes.  With his girlfriend, a novice climber, they did a few routes where – after topping out, you could opt to hike back on steep, rocky trails to the foot of the wall instead of rapelling.

Great weather in late autumn and a ton of people [tag-tec]climbing[/tag-tec]. But what became apparent to them is the inadequacy of a bunch of sport climbers to… actually hike. It was a disgrace.

With small backpacks, many climbers actually had a harder time descending – WALKING – back on loose-rocky terrain than climbing up. It’s not that they couldn’t, or they needed help, but you know, how you can tell beginner hikers from more seasoned ones just by the way they move, walk on a hiking trail?

Well, these guys – more or less experienced sport climbers – obviously never spent much time in the mountains other than climbing rock faces.

Before rock climbing and mountaineering got to be almost mainstream (OK, we’re not talking about football or baseball-level mainstream), this is how climbers were made (sorta):

• you discovered the beauty of nature, so you went hiking to nearby woods;
• you wanted more, so you went into higher mountains, backpacked on multi-day treks;
• you might have gotten involved with ski-mountaineering, which just grew your devotion to the mountains;
• the big rock walls and peaks inaccessible by foot were very inviting, so you eventually got hooked up with a friend/club where you were introduced to climbing and eventually you learned the thing.

The point is, that by the time you even put on a harness, you were already a mountain freak, right? By contrast, this is how many sport climbers are made nowadays:

• climbing looks appealing, so you look for info;
• the most convenient way to get involved is in the city: indoor gyms;
• then, with some instruction (hopefully) you head straight for the rocks. You do a course and you’re a climber.

The result? You have a bunch of people on the rocks lacking prior experience with mountains or in the mountains. Not to mention the deep appreciation and a healthy amount of submission, humbleness towards them. Why does that matter? Besides being sort of a “spiritual” thing, it’s also a safety issue.

There’s probably no need to go into detail about the objective dangers of seemingly harmless sport routes – especially in higher mountians.

I love sport climbing, I get a kick out of bolted routes. This post isn’t a bash on sport climbers, I just wanted to humbly call to your attention the fact that the sport of climbing has recently been attenuated with people who would be in big trouble if they had to evacuate a route and do some “traditional” stuff on the mountain.

Just because you can get by on the rock without knowledge of the weather, reading maps or basic orientation in the mountains, doesn’t make these skills unnecessary. As guides, mountaineers, we get a chance to talk to people about how much more complex this sport is than what it may seem on a nice, sunny afternoon near the beach in Croatia.

You are free to disagree with me in the comments…

Photo by Yonker (Flickr), thanks!

You’ve got to have respect for Russain mounaineers. In Europe and North-America, they get too little attention. I just read on the English pages of mountain.ru (great site, by the way, full of priceless information) that a team of five ascended the 560 m wall of Fisht’s Western Face straight on the fall line. The conditions were incredibly crappy for them, but the tough, Prussian-style schooling paid off: they were able to ascend despite the poor conditions – despite hardly even being able to reach BC in the snowy and ici days of the Caucasian February.

Check out the dispatches here and lament over what it must have been like to climb this baby in early March:

You know you want it. Spring is approaching and you can hardly stop thinking about that rock route or mounain peak that you’ve been wanting to climb so badly. So how’s it gonna be?

What do you do when you’re working the rat race instead of sending a beautiful alpine route or an inviting rock face? The sweetest weeks of the alpine climbing are sneaking up on us and you’re no fitter now than the same time last year! So you’ve got to train, if you’re to hit your aspiration. Today, I’m writing to share with you some conventional and unconventional tips for [TAG-TEC]climbing training[/TAG-TEC].

So, allow me to define [TAG-TEC]training for climbing[/TAG-TEC] sorta’ of liberally – I consider training to be anything that will help you climb those peaks and routes which are challanging on your own level. Maybe we should call it preparation, which climbing training is a part of. That said, gathering information and even motivating yourself should be there on the list.

So let’s not waste time, eh? And jump right into the top 4 conventional and 4 unconventional ways of climbing training. Why 4 and 7, you ask? No special reason, it’s just that I was able to come up with. OK, so here we go:

Top 4 conventional ways to train for alpine climbing in no particular order of importance:

• Bouldering – for muscle and technique. Sure it’s obvious, but beyond that… On rock and harder alpine routes, you need upper body strength. Bouldering and doing pushups, pullups is a much better way to build the upper body muscles you use to carry a rucksack, for example. Rather than training by actually walking around with heavy backpacks, find alternative ways to build those muscles. You should take care to protect your spine and not go running carrying heavy stuff when it’s unnecessary.
  Of course, climbing technique is a big win when you do bouldering. When bouldering, you’ll typically climb stuff that’s twice as hard as what you usually do on an alpine route, so it’s a great way to build skill and confidence for big walls.
• Run. Uphill is good. Especially if you’re in the woods. Running downhill on rocky terrain, you’ll need to be careful not to get your ankle twisted on rocks. When it’s muddy, you’ll need sound steps not to slip. Great practice for descending icy-rocky slopes in crampons, where good foot-technique is your life insurance.
• Trek/climb anything and everything that’s within reach until your trip to the big mountians. No need to elaborate on that. Just go easy on yourself. Be pushing your limits, but with care and do it gradually.
• Eat right. This is a huge topic way over the scope of this post, but your diet and hydration have a huge effect on how you’re able to perform. Read up on it and treat your diet as part of your training or preparation… perhaps I’ll do a post or two on the topic some other day…

With training and climbing, as with anything in life, always remember to have fun. It sounds like weird advice for the most exhilirating sport in the world, but you know very well, how a bad mood and the feeling of „forcing it” can spoil a nice day. It will also make your stamina and muscle growth less productive.

Here we go with some of the less conventional climbing training stuff…:

• Do some yoga! I was surprised to learn in one of our surveys, that 12% percent of trekkers/climbers do yoga. Increased flexibility of your joints and the strengthening of special muscle groups results in a better climbing technique. In addition, yoga can do great things for the mind, improving focus, concentration and even your willingness to appreciate life.
• Read mountaineering books/watch movies and analyze them with friends. Read up on the science of climbing training. Here is an awesome collection of articles from Eric Hörst
• Visit a mountaineering museum. I did, and even though I wasn’t blown away by the exhibition, it was educational and made me miss the couloirs and the touch of the cold wet rock.
• Visualize/meditate. Here’s a really helpful mental excercise from the coach of the Canadian Junior Climbing Team.

If you’re sorta serious about hitting challanging targets in climbing, then the first four tips probably weren’t of surprise. However, if you’re into systematic training, then I believe, you should make the unusual a routine – as paradoxical as it may seem. Get used to doing unusual things that aid climbing preparation and you will a. have more fun and b. improve more. Diversity is king.

This is just the beginning, everyone wants to hear what kind of unconventional stuff has helped YOU in climbing training.

Thanks for the pic – Postcool-Flickr

Check out this video. 4 surprisingly cool French (no offense there ) mountain guides hit Trango wall on a brand new route, taking like 20 days to summit the 1600 meter route. Shows you just how far a great deal of humor, laughter, friendship and bad ass climbing will take you take all of them very seriously.

The funny thing is that one of the guys acutally “left” the team above 5500 meters – he jumped off with his wingsuit!

The team named their “project” – or the video at least Azazel, which is a name used for Satan in the Bible. Hmm, wonder what’s up with that…
Thanks to gorida.com for pointing this video out in his blog.

OK, this is supposed to be the largest collection of alpine/mountaineering literature in the world. A huge library with nothing, but climbing books and magazines. We’re in Munich, Germany. Here’s a little recording from inside the museum, which was, well, …later on that…

Now these are some nifty gaiters, aren’t they? Notice how gaiters haven’t changed all that much in terms of technology and innovation.

Here’s a picture from the museum of an alpine refuge being built. Awesome! What you may be able to make out here is the helicopter carrying up a huge pre-built, two-story wall for the extension of the mountain hut…

The Nazis back in the 30s and 40s were pretty big on mountaineering. They even had expeditions to Nanga Parbat. Here’s relics from one of their successful climbs of [tag-tec]Mt. Elbrus[/tag-tec].

The Germans run a bunch of refuges in the Austrian Alps. We climb Grossglockner and Grossvenediger regularly, where the mountian huts are usually DAV (German) run. Here’s a maquette of the hut that Germans are most proud of: Stüdlhütte, under Grossglockner. It was rebuilt in 2004.

All in all, I wasn’t very impressed with the museum. It was kinda dull and the presentation lacked any creativity. In addition, a bunch of stuff on display was very similar to my grandpa’s mountaineering stuff that I had the chance to see several times, so it wasn’t all that special. The library, however – that was a completely different story.

Despite the fact that it was closed, I had the chance to drool over like 50 English and German climbing periodicals and was able to get a peek in their catalogue.

Unfortunately, we had to leave Munich so I didn’t get a chance to go inside the museum, which is open only Thursdays. But, you can get a glimpse of their catalogue here and some additional info on the library right here. It’s all in German, baby!

Long live the Alps, long live mountain culture!

What’s the thing that challenged you the most when you started [TAG-TEC]rock climbing[/TAG-TEC]? I bet it was finger strength – definitely. And possibly your initial fear of heights. Or so you thought.

What you may or may not have realized as you advanced in your skills is that [TAG-SELF]rock climbing[/TAG-SELF] is so much about BALANCE. It’s a balancing act. You were probably told very early on that it’s all about placing your bodyweight on your legs.

CLIMB WITH YOUR LEGS, darn it!

…shouted your coach, if you had one of those better coaches called “close friends”. But what is placing body weight on your legs and turning your feet for proper placement? It’s all balancing, baby! Sure, if you’ve gotten far enough in climbing, you may have realized this.

The thing is, when I started climbing, I never understood guys telling me that it’s all about balance and so, so much less about finger- and arm strength. But if you’re a newbie at this wonderful sport, pay close attention to the effect that every small move has on your balance. That is, the way it becomes more or less difficult to stay on the wall depending on the angle you place your feet or turn your shoulders or move your hips…

If you’re a beginner, balancing is probably more important than you think, and you can never get good enough at it.

If you want to improve in rock climbing, one thing that can help you is fine tuning your balance. Here are some good resources…

• indoorclimbing.com
  
• A book for sale, but you’ll find a cool excercise on this page – Rock Climbing: Mastering the Basic Skills
  
• or check out the book (most of it anyway) for free on Google Books
• some funny looking, but definitely helpful excercieses for balancing

Do this kind of stuff even if you”re into alpine climbing, mountaineering doing relatively easier stuff. It’ll help tremendously, believe me.

Eventually, this is where you want to get…

watch?v=H4ENUH1WlYo

Is this stuff helpful? If you’re a more experienced climber: how did you get good at balancing?