Sunday 20 October 2013

Sport Psychology for Climbers


Ten days ago, I finally sent Two Zig Zags.  I’d been working on it for over a year. Well not consistently.  There was the winter closure, and the crack was often wet in the spring, summer humidity rendered the textureless starting hold unusable, and the grease that built up on it... but still more attempts that it should have taken to consistently target the the pinch and figure out a couple of foot moves from there to the easy finish.  Especially since I’m significantly stronger and smoother than last year.

It got me thinking of the psychological factors at play for successful (or unsuccessful) redpointing. To be clear, my forte in the hard sciences of biomechanics, neuromuscular control and physiology, rather than sport-psych.  What follows is based on deductive reasoning from anecdotal experience as a coach and personal experience as an athlete.  Please leave a comment if you can contribute anything to support or refute my thesis.

There are two major things to consider.  The first is "attentional focus", which you surely are familiar with.  It could be something external like a part of hold you’re aiming for on an a dynamic move, or something internal like relaxing your breathing, or squeezing a pinch for all it’s worth until after you’ve done the next move.  Really this is just part of the learning process, emphasizing an area (of the body or move) that not as automatic as the rest (of the movement pattern or route).

The second is this thing called "optimal level of arousal".  Too much equates to anxiety, tension, perspiration, distraction.  Too little is laziness, carelessness, relaxation.  There are a myriad of techniques athletes and sport psychologists use to increase or decrease stimulation.  Though there is something to this, particularly for competition climbing, it probably gets too much credit for success in real world climbing.  I’ll explain...

Faced with a desperate situation in the mountains, the fight or flight response kicks in.  This is usually the optimal arousal for such critical events.  If it wasn’t, they probably died.  So you hear about the success of  this strategy around the campfire and read it in the mags.

When it comes to more mundane climbing tasks, such as working a project, there is more controversy.
A fairly recent article by Alison Osius, extolls the virtues of increased arousal (stress) on redpointing, and provides corroborating anecdotes by some big names in the climbing world.

There are as many examples of the opposite: success coming on days where there was no pressure, a bit of fatigue, and low expectations (low arousal).  Adam Ondra on the first ascent of La Dura Dura, for instance.  

Eventual success following repeated failures, with sporadic progress can be over-analyzed and weak links forged.  Ondra is quoted (in Rock & Ice #213) doing this very thing when discussing his success on that route.  More likely though, he just had finally deciphered all the nuances of the body movements required, and executed them without making a significant error.