In reply to 1poundSOCKS:
> That's not the same thing. You might be good technical tufa climber, not necessarily have 'no more technique left to learn' (who can ever say that anyway???), but be weak as a kitten.
> You can easily train finger and pinch strength in a small bit of free time at home, where you couldn't get anywhere near a tufa. Time is always finite for everyone, so by your logic nobody would ever benefit from training technique and strength, which is obviously not true. It's always worth training technique, and obviously for some it's worth doing some strength training.
Either you've not understood my post or I've not understood this one!? If you've read from my post "there's no point in training strength or technique" then it's certainly the former.
How you've gone from "making the assumption of finite training time, its best used on the areas of greatest weakness" to "there's no point in training strength or technique" baffles me. That's a leap of illogic beyond the usual on here!
Anyway, to try and summarise clearly before I log off:
- Tufa climbing relies far more on technique than it does brute strength.
- Most Brits cannot climb tufas well, and I include myself in this. To paraphrase someone I met over the summer "there's only 3 tufas in the UK and one of them is at Warrington wall", or something along those lines.
- Most Brits who think they need to get stronger on pinches to climb harder tufa probably actually need to climb cleverer instead.
- Given that there's only so much training time in the world, you might as well use it well. So if, like most, you are a poor tufa technician, the best use of your training time is on technique.
- If, as in the above example you give, you're already a good tufa climber but weak as a kitten, you can self-evidently focus on something else. But to be honest weak-as-a-kitten good proficient technical tufa climbers probably don't tend to ask on UKC about how to improve pinch strength as a way to improve their tufa climbing. They certainly aren't surprised when people tell them pinch strength isn't the way to go, because if they're a proficient tufa climber they'll have told plenty of people already that its not about pinch strength.
- If you have spare time that you can't use on a board or wall climbing tufa style problems (I'd suggest either shit pinches or flat sidepulls, to force you to climb side on), then by all means go get some bits of wood, drill holes in them, and pinch them with car batteries tied to the end. Or fingerboard. Or whatever it is you think your biggest weakness is. But don't bother doing this as anything except a supplement unless you know already you're a pretty good tufa climber.