For the last 8 months or so I’ve taken up bouldering; the indoor climbing-sans-rope sport. It’s been a really interesting journey. So far it has been one of my favourite forms of exercise.

There’s a whole bunch of things which factor into my interest in bouldering:

There’s a ton of variety and novelty. One of the challenges I had with doing strength training at a gym was... well, a deadlift is a deadlift is a deadlift. And while you get a lot out of gaining strength through traditional training techniques, I really started to get bored, and getting bored meant I didn’t want to go, which meant... I stopped going.

Whereas at my climbing gym, there are new sets every week. There are a variety of problem types in bouldering (slab, underhang, vertical(, and each climb tends to be unique in its own way.

Frequent new problems and frequent change means that coming to the gym is different every time.

Speaking of problems, I really appreciate the extent to which climbing matches thinking and doing. While sure, if you’re strong, there are many climbing problems that can be done with brute force, more often than not there’s a much ‘easier’ way to climb a specific problem, and some problems really can’t be brute-forced without figuring out the ‘trick’. So there’s a huge aspect of climbing which is problem solving, which I really appreciate.

It’s also a fairly full body sport. There’s not a lot of muscle groups that get missed by climbing, and can be pretty great cardio, and so climbing has been over the winter my dominant form of exercise.

I recently really had a bit of a revelation about bouldering that I wanted to write down.

In bouldering, problems are “graded”. There are some standard grading scales, though at the gyms I go to it’s basically just 1-9. For a long while I was climbing 3s, frequently being able to do them my first try (‘flashing’ them -- climbing is filled with terminiology), yet aside from a single 4 accomplished in November, I’d not done any since.

Recently though I went from having done a single grade 4, to having done 6+ of them. It all started to come at once. The thing that’s interesting to me is how much of this was entirely a psychological barrier. There’s something fascinating about how merely having done ‘some’ of these routes suddenly made accomplishing more of them much easier. It is as if my brain and body suddenly gave me ‘permission’, in a way that hadn’t happened previously.

One of the most interesting videos about climbing I have watched actually covers this directly. Louis Parkinson of the Catalyst Climbing channel talks about mindset frequently (actually, I think it’s noticable if you watch his older videos how he’s actually grown on this front), and this is a whole video where he walks through the importance of mindset and how it is possible to train a more helpful mindset.

The revelation I really had is “grades are nothing but a number”, but that actually holds true everywhere.

Me doing a roof climb, making some silly mistakes, saving it, and having fun ;)