I had the opportunity to take a short clinic from Arno Ilgner, an authority on mental training in climbing, and talked with him a good bit about some different ideas. He's one of those coaches who generates a good bit of a socratic dialogue. During the clinic he had us climb a route at our own pace and pay attention to the what was going on in our mind, then he had us climb the same spot again but this time go faster and again pay attention to our mind's streaming feed. When he gathered everyone together, i was the odd man out. While everyone else actually felt more comfortable climbing faster, I didn't. Which got me thinking...I initially chalked it up to the difference in the amount of climbing experience the others had but i think there's more to it than that. I've been climbing for over 14 years, while there have been some periods of no climbing at all be it due to life or injury, regardless I've gotten in a bunch of practice. When I was able to climb at my own pace, I wasn't thinking about anything but as soon as i had to speed it up, everything felt awkward and unnatural. It was the difference between feedback and feedforward. When I could climb at my natural pace, i could use constant feedback to facillitate a flowing movement but when i had to speed it up it I had to guess and use a feedforward method. It was very different. I had planned on playing around with speeds in climbing for a while (based on information gained from going through the S phase certification of Zhealth) but this shed a different light on it.
Also during the clinic Arno asked a couple questions based on what we were thinking about during climbing and I commented that my mindset was very different depending on the type of climbing, climbing vs. bouldering. I have no worries in my head when i spend time on rope but get me off the deck and it's a whole different ballgame.
This led to thinking about training mindsets i.e. onsight vs. redpoint...I'll be going into more depth on this later but for now I just wanted to get some thoughts out...
It's fortunate, I've been putting all this thought into mental training and suddenly I'm presented with food for thought.
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Interesting stuff Kevin! I've read Arno's book a couple of times over and have found somethings I could apply and some that didn't seem to fit me. Great read though! I have been playing with the different speeds and have found it to be helpful. It's seems when I am going for an onsight I tend to go more slow but if I'm redpointing I'm well into Sports Speed and can't even remember my thoughts during the send. Good stuff, keep it going!
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