An alternative to limit bouldering
The climbing world has universally acknowledged that if you want to improve in climbing, you must do some form of hard bouldering. The most commonly used form of this is “limit bouldering” - working on short sequences that require almost 100% of your physical and technical capability to complete. An athlete will find or create a problem of five or fewer moves where each move requires high levels of finger strength and body tension (rather than odd or “morpho” beta) and is difficult enough that they are unable to give quality attempts unless fresh. By working on moves that are close to or above your current limit, you develop higher levels of power and skill because you are forced to be working at such a high percentage of your current capacity in those areas. And it undoubtedly works - it’s a more training oriented version of projecting, and hard projecting is a cornerstone for every strong boulderer out there. Even if bouldering isn’t your chosen arena of performance, there are countless success stories from sport climbers discovering the benefits of being able to pull truly difficult moves.
However, if you’re still in the first couple of years of your climbing journey it may not be the panacea that some would make it out to be, and it may not even be particularly helpful for you. (Note: this also applies to people who are new to structured training and even those that have been training for a while but are just starting to include hard bouldering in their training). Beginner and intermediate climbers typically haven’t yet built the skills necessary to get value from limit bouldering. Sequences and problems that are so hard that they take five or more sessions to “send” require you to begin with an understanding of how to find subtle differences in movement, how to imagine different functions for the holds you are given and how to try truly hard for a single move. These are all extremely important skills and worth investing your time to develop, but in many cases the ante is above what the athlete is capable of. So you wind up flinging yourself at the same move or two over and over again with little to no progress, reflection, or development. This leads to nothing but mounting fatigue with few results to show for it.
I’m not saying that climbers in the early stages of their climbing/training/bouldering journey shouldn’t or can’t try harder things or even that trying things outside of their current ability is a bad way to learn. I am saying that the constraints around the game of limit bouldering are ineffective for beginner and low-intermediate climbers. As an alternative that accomplishes the same goal, I like to have beginners use the following constraints for their hard bouldering session:
You must try each boulder 7 TIMES before you can move on to the next.
In between each go you need to WRITE DOWN the following
Why you fell off
What you are going to do differently on the next attempt
The first rule will guarantee that you are trying things that are hard enough to force you to learn and ensure that you are sticking with them long enough to learn what the boulder is trying to teach you.
Some additional notes on rule 1:
If you send within those seven tries - great! Move on to the next one.
If you send in one or two tries, the next boulder you try needs to be two grades harder.
If you get to your 7th try and you’re making progress but you haven’t sent, it’s your call. You can stay and keep trying it or you can move on to the next problem.
If you make no progress in 7 tries (and I mean NO progress - not an inch closer to that next hold), then the next boulder you try needs to be one grade easier.
There are some forbidden answers to the first question called out above::
I’m too weak/short/tall/heavy
I’m not good/strong/flexible enough
Etc.
These answers destroy the learning process because they shift the locus of control outside of yourself. If you truly believe that you’re too weak then there’s no point in even learning. But there is always a way to make progress on a move. Focus on what you can change right here and now.
The second question will force you to reflect more on what you have just done and how it didn’t work out the way that you had hoped. This is where true learning happens. It’s all too common to just jump back on the route and try almost the exact same thing again, often with even worse results because you haven’t rested enough. Answering these two questions will not only force you to rest, but to examine how you’re moving on the wall - and that is the most fundamental part of improving at climbing. You’ll get the answers wrong a lot of the time - that isn’t the point. In the process of asking and answering these questions after every attempt you will get better at the process of understanding your own movement and your answers will gradually get more accurate and more helpful.
Actually writing them out will force you to make your thoughts coherent and examine them in a way that just thinking for a few seconds won’t. I highly recommend against skipping this part of the process. It doesn’t have to be insightful or well written and you don’t even have to save it past that boulder - you can jot these on sticky notes and then toss them at the end of the session. But the act of actually examining your movement and making it explicit will work wonders for developing climbing skills.
Give this a try next time you see “hard/limit bouldering” penciled into your training plan. You may well find that it helps you learn more, try harder and ultimately get more out of your training.
