Dr Rebecca Williams, performance psychology coach and consultant clinical psychologist, shares a chapter from her upcoming book Climb Smarter: Mental Skills and Techniques for Climbing.

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Part and parcel of setting appropriate goals for yourself is having a really clear sense of where your strengths and weaknesses lie as a climber. There are plenty of tools out there which can help you to measure your current technical, tactical and technique skills [1], but few which outline the main psychological skills needed for climbing. This chapter is all about the key mental skills required for climbing, and how to measure and analyse your starting point and ongoing progress.

What do we know about mental skills for climbing?

If you're a climber then you'll know at an instinctive level that what happens in our heads has a large role in predicting the outcomes on the rock. Some research has suggested that psychological skills may have a larger role to play than physiological parameters [2], but surprisingly there has been very little good quality research on the psychological or mental skills necessary for climbing. We have anecdotal evidence from elite climbers and coaches, but in terms of good quality research evidence, this is an area ripe for investigation. We can draw some parallels from other sports such as gymnastics or diving for example, but climbing poses some unique challenges in that it doesn't rely on a routine set of movements, performed in the same sequence over and over again, and indeed any given route may have multiple solutions depending on the style of the climber.

For onsight climbing, the ability to quickly find efficient movement solutions to novel problems is crucial [3], and we still don't fully understand the range of skills and practices required to develop this ability. Its likely that visual-spatial problem solving skills are helpful here, but how do we develop them, especially if you are not someone to whom this comes easily? If we are into redpointing, then the ability to memorise a long sequence of complex moves becomes crucial, so what is the best way of developing route memory? These questions have yet to be answered in research terms, though coaches and climbers will have their own favourite ways of teaching this.

There will be many general skills in common with other sports, for example as in goal setting, we know the ability to set good goals is helpful for sport development [4]. We also know from other sports that the ability to manage our emotions is helpful for confidence. However, climbing (and other adventure sports) is classified differently to mainstream sports such as running or other track and field sports due to the perceived risk to the climber. While we may have ropes, gear and belayers to protect us, climbing may often feel like a 'risky' activity, and whilst roped climbing relies upon a solid belay partner, it has a very different feel to team sports with an element of combat in them such as rugby or football for example. So how might the emotional control elements differ for climbers as compared to other sports?

Visual inspection skills - route reading

What do we know so far about the mental skills required for climbing? Elite climbers and coaches agree that what happens even before we climb is important for a successful ascent. This includes being able to accurately visually inspect a route and see the potential moves, links and sequences. This skill is likely composed of a series of micro skills - route reading, route memory, rest identification and memory for rests/ recovery points, as well as being able to notice and discount irrelevant hold information. In controlled experiments, route previewing has been shown to reduce the number of stops and pauses on a route but not necessarily to directly impact on whether the route was sent or not [5]; this was regardless of the climber's ability level. So there is an argument for practising route previewing regardless of whether you are fairly novice or experienced as a climber, in that you are more likely to select the optimal sequence if you are good at route previewing [6].

Adaptability and creativity

There is also a vast array of information to be taken into account whilst climbing - variabilities in rock types and holds and therefore movement patterns, environmental changes making conditions different on a frequent basis, and changes in the practice itself - onsight/ flash, redpointing, headpointing, seconding, bottom roping, soloing, bouldering and so on. Grading systems provide a very broad brush categorisation of difficulty, but given the subjectivity involved, they say little about the multitude of variables which will affect you as the climber on that particular route on that particular day. So some ability to perceive all the variables and weigh up their relative impact and how to manage to them best effect is key [7]. This is both a huge information processing challenge, and requires a commensurate organisation of motor actions in response to the constraints of the route [8]. In simple terms, we could call this the ability to 'break down' a route into all the relevant factors we need to consider, and make sound decisions about how to weigh up and act on all these factors, and adaptability is crucial to this.

Focus

Attention and concentration skills have also been shown to be important [9]. Depending on the length of the route, you may need to sustain your focus anywhere from a couple of minutes to 30 minutes for a longish trad pitch, tuning out the potential distractions of other people climbing nearby, changes in weather, wind, caterpillars crawling out of cracks (I remember this being a big issue one year at Tremadog!) and so on! There is also a need to tune into the rock in front of you if you are onsighting or problem solving on the go, focusing on small affordances/ edges that give you opportunities for moves, and the bigger motor control picture of what is happening in your body as you move and how to move and rest for maximum efficiency. It is certainly off putting at that point to have the focus switch to your thoughts or feelings, especially if they are negative or unhelpful.

Executive functions

Attention is just one component of what are often termed executive functions. These are higher level cognitive skills and include attention, ability to switch focus or sustain focus as needed, working memory, self-awareness and self control, impulse control, problem solving, planning and strategic decision making. Similar to the conductor of an orchestra, executive functions organise and orchestrate perception, motor responses, behaviour and so on. Executive functions can decline under stressful conditions and impact on effective planning, decision making, and complex actions. Not all climbing occurs on a relaxed holiday in sunny Spain; changeable or uncertain conditions such as extreme cold or a sudden thunder storm, where the stakes are high such as in committing climbs where say you have abseiled in, or perhaps where we feel social pressure or are under par physically, can all impact on the cognitive elements of climbing performance.

It's likely that some climbers have a better underlying ability to deal with the challenges of more extreme environments, but equally practice and training can help with preparation and adaptation. I can clearly remember being a guinea pig for a trainee instructor on one of the wettest Welsh days, trying to climb on the Idwal slabs with water pouring into my sleeve and heading straight to my armpit. Not an enjoyable experience at the time nor one I would have actively chosen, but it did give me a different perspective on what 'good conditions' consisted of, a practice run at problem solving in a difficult environment, and the knowledge that I could probably still climb during a cloudburst.

Psychomotor speed and accuracy

You don't need to be a specialist Speed Climber to find speed useful; some of the finest climbers around at the moment are also the speediest. North Wales based pro-climber Pete Robins is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it onsight climber, Adam Ondra is well-renowned for climbing hard sport routes incredibly quickly and Eric Horst's analysis of Margo Hayes' ascent of Biographie (5.15a) showed that she actually spent more time resting than climbing, with the sequences being sent quickly and efficiently. Of course there were some great examples in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics where 'specialist' speed climbers were no slouches in boulder and lead. Being able to perceive the visual information in front of you fast and respond quickly with your body can certainly be a useful cognitive skill for onsight climbers[10], with a quick reaction time helping to perhaps mitigate for any shortfall in fitness or stamina. Becoming accurate at speed but also being able to vary your pace for optimal effort across the route or problem is beneficial. We know from research that expertise in climbing can be seen via more dynamic movements, shorter climbing times, fewer exploratory moves, and quicker decision making. 

Confidence

Self-efficacy [11], which is having confidence for being able to climb a particular route or problem, has been shown to be an important psychological 'skill' for climbers [12], and certainly one which can be cultivated. That inner confidence comes easier to some people than others; there is a whole chapter later on developing confidence, and it links neatly to having a sense of mastery and improvement, a key motivator for many climbers. Having a strong sense of self-efficacy has been linked to the ability to take apparent risks when climbing, and overcome the inner warning system which usually keeps us out of high risk situations [13] - that is to say, the higher our sense of inner confidence for completing a route, then we are able to take more risks when climbing. Having the ability to manage our nerves, anxiety or fears when climbing is often the biggest barrier to developing that inner confidence despite maybe many years of climbing experience, and the issue that most of my clients to come to me for help with. This is covered later on in this book.

Managing your emotional responses

There are other mental skills which I have found to be helpful which haven't yet been researched much in climbing. Here, what we know comes from shared experiences amongst climbers and from other sports. This might include being able to manage your stress levels and get your arousal and activation levels just right for the route in front of you, being able to tolerate frustration and failure, and the ability to learn quickly from 'mistakes' or attempt failures. And of course, crucially the ability to manage feelings of fear around potential falls. Its likely that many of these latter skills contribute to a feeling of self-efficacy, since having a sense of emotional control is a key part of confidence [14].

Your internal emotional state will also influence your ability to perceive the usability of the holds in front of you. If you've ever been run out on a route, searching desperately for a piece of gear, you'll know that sometimes they only appear when you find a decent hand or foot hold, and decent hand or foot holds only seem to appear once you have your gear in! Anxiety tends to focus our attention on the present threats to our safety and fix our minds on opportunities for stability, and this means that we may miss holds, moves or gear placements by taking shorter moves and keeping our eye gaze closer in to the body [15]. So being able to recognise and dampen down anxiety, as well as taking active steps to mitigate the tunnel vision caused by stress, will have a positive impact on performance.

Motivated for improvement

Intuitively we know that being motivated is important for good climbing performance, but its really motivation for mastery that is a mental skill. It can be hard going, throwing yourself at problems, routes or even moves that you find difficult, and experiencing multiple failures. It can feel bruising to plateau in performance, and its no wonder that many climbers choose to stick with what they know, repeating routes they can already climb or sticking to what's well within their comfort zone. However, climbers who are motivated for mastery will work on their weaknesses, improve their movement patterns and technique, and seek out experiences that lift their learning. This is both a mindset shift for many climbers, and a set of effective behaviours for improvement. We can be super motivated to climb, but not necessarily motivated to improve, challenge and test ourselves - neither is 'better' than the other, but if you want to be a better climber, then embracing failures as part of the learning experience and seeking out opportunities to 'fail' is key. Aligned with this, we know from general sports research that the ability to set effective goals will aid improvement [16], and this in turn requires motivation to stick at them. Shifting from an outcome mindset (did I send it or not?) to a mastery mindset (what did I learn? how can I improve?) is an important mental skill for climbing performance improvement.

Assessing your current psychological skills

If you are using this book, there is a good chance you are aware of some of the blocks to your climbing. However, considering the whole range of psychological skills that are helpful for climbing well, getting a sense of where you are now, where your weak spots are, as well as where your strengths might lie, is really important. The tool below provides a quick and easy way to measure where you are now and track progress over any training program. It has not been validated by research, but will give you a subjective and personal yardstick for your own headgame skills. There may also be some very individual tactics personal to you that you want to add in there. Measuring now, just as you might do with a finger boarding program, and at regular intervals as you train your brain, will allow you to see the impact of any training you do. It will also allow you to capitalise on the strengths you already have. If you train your weaknesses, and play/ climb to your strengths when you want to send, then you are maximising your efforts and inputs. 

Climbing Psychology Skills Assessment

Shade in the boxes to give an idea of how you compare yourself now to where you would like to be – the closer to 10, the nearer you are to where you would like to be. It might help to compare yourself to someone at the level you want to be at already.

*If there are certain mental factors which are important to your performance and they are not listed here, please let us know as you will be helping to add to the body of research on climbers!

It's also important to be aware that how we are feeling currently about climbing and life can colour our self-assessment. For example, if you are feeling downhearted about aspects of your life outside of climbing, it is possible that this might cause you to negatively evaluate your climbing abilities also. For this reason, I would advise you to also ask someone you trust, who you climb with regularly, for feedback on your climbing. You can even ask them to complete the same assessment tool and discuss any discrepancies in the results and there is a free copy available to download from the Smart Climbing website [17]. 

Another tool which is also now readily at our disposal is video – can you get someone to video you climbing a route or problem that is in the style you want to be good at, and then play back and analyse your performance? Look for hesitations, times you looked down perhaps rather than ahead, areas where you felt you were climbing well or poorly, and then try to remember, what was happening in your mind at the time? Our memories are not always accurate! A great example of this is the video of Mina Leslie-Wujastyk climbing Careless Torque; a fantastic high ball, technical boulder problem at Stanage Plantation, which you can find on Vimeo. In the narrative, on the last attempt before she sends, Mina recalls that she thought she had the problem in the bag; however, if you watch the video back, you can see that she hesitates with her right hand and dips her head, just before she falls off. That same hesitation and look down does not happen on the attempt when she sends; so even pro climbers can sometimes struggle to recall their climbing accurately!

Measuring your progress at regular intervals (such as fortnightly or once a month) and comparing will help you to track your progress, and also to see that despite any inevitable ups and downs day to day, overall, you are (hopefully) improving. This is great for motivation and helps to prevent one bad day derailing you. It also allows you to change tack if something is not working. You can also be pragmatic about where to start with mental skills training, and choose a skill which fits best with what you want to climb. Alternatively, choosing the low hanging fruit - the skill which you think will be easiest for you to learn, or, if you are feeling particularly committed, perhaps start with your weakest mental skill as working on this will bring the maximum gain for your efforts. These principles also apply to physical training, and though not many climbers are systematic about measurement, it can certainly enhance the training process [18].

In summary, combine as many sources of information as possible to assess yourself on each of the mental skills for climbing, so you can make the assessment as objective as possible. There is also a more specific tool for analysing any anxiety you may have about different climbing situations, in the section about fear of falling. Measure your progress on a regular basis, and try graphing it up to track your development over the longer term.

Linking your assessment to goals

Now you have a thorough understanding of the mental skills you need to improve your climbing, and a sense of your current skills and abilities, you can make the link to your performance and process goals, and then to action plans. For example, lets say that you want to be good at onsight trad climbing, but you struggle with route reading. This is one of your weakest mental skills and you have scored it as 4/10 on the assessment above. 

First, think about what level of route reading ability you think you need for your outcome goal/ desired trad route. Can you inspect most of it from the ground, or will you need to think on your feet as you climb because many of the holds are hidden? Is there one crux, or a series of sequences you need to get right? How many moves do you think there are between rests or pauses? This will tell you roughly how many moves you will need to read and recall in any one go. Could having route reading skills at say 6/10 be enough, or will you need to be top of your game for this route?

Let's say that 6/10 will suffice for the route you have in mind. Now you need to figure out how to move from 4 to 5 out of 10, and then from 5 to 6 out of 10 for route reading. Do you need to practice the 'reading' element, or the memorising element, or both? This may seem like a deep level of detail, but in my experience, the more closely you can link your skill development actions to your goals, the more likely you are to see the relevance and stick at them. Key questions to ask yourself are, why do I need to improve this skill, what are the components of this skill, and how will I improve each of them. This will allow you to create really specific goals for yourself, and therefore to quickly see some progress.

Climber Study: Steve

Steve is happily onsighting around VS, but wants to develop his red pointing skills for an upcoming holiday to Kalymnos, where he has a much harder route in his sights. The line caught his eye a couple of years ago, and its long and sustained, and slightly beyond him grade wise at the moment. Analysing his mental skills, the key problems we discovered were that Steve tended to 'go off the boil' after around 10m, losing focus, something which didn't tend to happen in trad as he had opportunities to pause and regroup whilst he placed gear, which naturally broke the routes down into chunks for him. Also, Steve rarely practised refining sequences or memorising long sequences of moves. For both of these skills, Steve scored himself at around 4/10 and figured he needed to move up to around 8/10 for focusing, and around 6/10 for memorising a sequence, since the top part of the route was fairly straightforward to read in that there were few options holds-wise.

Looking at what options were available to him training-wise, his nearest indoor wall was a bouldering gym and there wasn't a lot of sport climbing nearby. Steve was a bit gutted to figure out he needed to start bouldering - not something he had considered as a trad climber! - to get some experience at working finding efficient movement sequences. I suggested he played the 'add a move' bouldering game with a bunch of friends at the wall to try to make it fun! This also allowed him to build up the length of sequence to memorise gradually. At the beginning he used some videos to help him recall the sequence, as well as trying to tell his partner what he had just done to encode the patterns. He worked at finding 3 different solutions to each boulder problem (efficiency), and building up from memorising a sequence of 5 moves to around 10 moves over a period of around 2 months (memory). He also spent time practising his focusing skills when he climbed outdoors, trying to stay in the moment using visual and sound cues for increasing amounts of time rather than going into 'autopilot' mode! We realised through discussion that Steve was probably erring on the side of 'too easy' in his trad climbing which was enabling him to switch off to a degree, and that upping the difficulty by choosing routes which were more challenging to him, or with a crux nearer the top, at the same grade would encourage him to keep his mind on the job for longer. 

Summary

We are still learning about the key mental skills required to be a good climber, and it is likely that different skills come into play according to your experience level and personal factors. Having a good understanding of your own mental game strengths and weaknesses will allow you to set really specific and relevant goals, where you can see direct links between your training efforts and the route or project you want to send. This makes progress much quicker and helps to keep motivation higher, as you know that each mental skills training session you complete will move you closer to the end goal you really desire. Measuring and tracking your progress through graphs and tick boxes can help you to see the big picture and not allow the odd down day to knock you off course, but it also lets you quickly see when your training efforts are not working for you and change tack if needs be. Whilst this can feel like a lot of detail and effort, in my experience this is time well spent and pays dividends in motivation and effectiveness.

[1] (Horst, 2008)

[2] (Jones & Sanchez, 2017)

[3] (Sanchez, Torregrossa, Woodman, Jones, & Llewellyn, 2019)

[4] (Kingston & Wilson, 2008)

[5] (Sanchez, Torregrossa, Woodman, Jones, & Llewellyn, 2019)

[6] (Dupuy & Ripoll, 1989)

[7] (Jones & Sanchez, 2017)

[8] (Seifert, Orth, Button, & Davids, 2017)

[9] (Orth, Button, Davids, & Seifert, 2017)

[10] (Seifert, Orth, Button, & Davids, 2017)

[11] (Bandura, 1977)

[12] (Sanchez & Torregrosa, 2005)

[13] (Jones & Sanchez, 2017)

[14] (Gill, Williams, & Refisteck, 2017)

[15] (Pjipers, Oudejans, Bakker, & Beek, 2006)

[16] (Perry, 2020)

[17] https://smartclimbing.co.uk/product/climbing-skills-assessment-pdf/

[18] (Horst, 2008)