UKC

Does anyone have any experience of the whipper training aid, is it accurate, dose the data assist your training, is it something you have continued to use etc.

https://thewhipper.com/

Wondered if this was a spam link to an s&m site! But apparently it's genuine ... strava for climbers ... Albeit perhaps still in development?

I'm skeptical that altimeters or movement sensors are useful for logging climbing, but something that facilitates logging training would be good to have. I've been waiting for that perfect training diary iPhone app so will follow this with interest. In fact I experimented with using Strava, logging all my climbing under cycling (as I no longer ride), to get all their nice diary views and weekly hours totals etc.

In reply to ianslade:

I wonder if you can use it to track other activity. Since it has all the sensors etc it seems a bit pointless to just be a climbing deely.

In reply to ianslade:

Oh God, Strava for climbing. Can't imagine anything worse.

In reply to ianslade:

I've seen a few of these things crop up recently, then just as rapidly disappear into the ether. It seems like a bit of a gimmick - the designer would really have to show that the kind of metrics these devices gather can genuinely be an aid to climbing performance ( or at the least have some sort of social media benefit ).

In reply to ianslade:
When I found it, I was also confused of the benefits of the system. The only thing that crossed my mind was that it can quantify your training and you could be quite targeted in your approch, but I'm not sold yet.

In reply to ianslade:

Surely a "whipper" sensor would quantify height and maximum velocity of a fall, possibly with angular momentum. Such data would earn bragging rights along with manually entered data such as the size of micronut that had held such a fall.

In reply to ianslade:
The guy in the video is always climbing on top rope, he even "sends his project" after all his training on top rope at the end and seems pleased about it. Smacks of some idiots who know nothing about climbing but just think its something else to make an app/gadget for.

I can't see how measuring total height gained and speed is any use to anyone other than maybe speed climbers. Although there seemed to be something in there hinting at gradient there is no accounting for the actual difficulty of the climbing you're doing, simply the raw quantity. according to that, someone doing loads of laps on a 4+ at the wall would be doing loads better than someone doing a few 7b 7c climbs in the same wall, or for that matter an E8 at the crag.

Distance climbed seems such a pointless measurement for climbing, almost as pointless as speed (apart from speed climbing). We log our routes and the grade, no one but kids of on a climbing course brag about how high the climb they did was.