Imagine

Still making use of the time off from climbing that I am obliged to have the moment. Some research showed that spending time imagining movements (in this study's case a piano sequence) results in the motor cortex (the area responsible for movement in the brain) expanding by the same amount as if the movements had been actually performed. Amazing!

In my case, having small hands, I have always found slopers quite difficult. So part of this week's meditation has been to think back to sloping moves and imagine my hand sticking to them like glue. I'll let you know the results when I get back to climbing! But if it can work for piano playing then there is no reason it cant work for climbing.

So, let your imagination run wild...

meditation's what you need...

Having been poorly with a chest infection for the last couple of weeks I have been obliged to take some time off climbing and indeed any exercise and focus on getting well.  I've used the time to really practice meditation, and have been trying a few different techniques which I thought I might share with you.

The first is the bodyscan, a mindfulness technique which involved deliberately moving your awareness around your body, from big toe, to breathing, to hands, to top of the head.  Sounds easy in principle, but staying focused in the body, at the point where you want to be focused is actually quite hard, as our brain's tend to wander off topic!  And also in my case, sometimes to sleep - proving what I needed perhaps was a little more rest!  In climbing terms, a useful technique to practice for moves which require precise body placement.

The second technique is a yoga breathing technique, moving breathing through chest wall to deep abdomen.  Again, harder to do than it sounds, but useful for keeping breathing rhythmic and smooth at times of stress.

The third technique is a deep relaxation and visual imagery.  I have in mind a particular route I would like to do, and after progressive muscle relaxation, count myself down in steps to the crag, visualise gearing up, and then doing the route.  Its very important during this kind of visualisation that you both feel the route and that you see smooth progress.  So again, if the mind wanders, bring it back gently to the task in hand.

I teach some of these techniques on my courses, but there are lots of excellent cd's out there if you want some help getting going on your own.  Great mental training!

Quick, quick, slow

On Friday I took a bit of my own advice and went climbing with some friends who I havent climbed with for a long time.  The change of partner did me the world of good as I did different routes to usual, boosting my motivation.

As someone who likes to climb slow and steady, using mindful techniques to anchor myself in my body, I normally struggle on steeper climbs, where a slightly more attacking approach is needed to compensate for my lack of core strength!  However, steep was the order of the day on Friday, so I changed my tactics for the session.  I began by warming up as I always do, keeping movements controlled, slow and steady so that I could place my awareness into different parts of my body at will.  Once both mind and body were warm, I switched tactics and took longer before I stepped onto the climb to memorise sequences , rests and clip positions, and then tried to move smoothly but continuously through the route.  The important thing here was not to try to move quickly, but this was an inevitable by-product of creating continuous movement.  Result - rapid smooth progress up steeper routes.

So, top tip for today, try to vary the pace of your climbing.  Mostly we dont pay attention to speed unless we are trying to avoid a fall, but being able to control the pace at will can be a useful skill.  Practice on well-known routes or problems until you are able to vary at will, and then go ahead to transfer to newer or harder routes.

Be careful what you wish for!

A friend reminded me today of a kind of wisdom which is only evident when someone reminds you of it!  Over the last couple of months I have suffered with some health problems, and I have been thinking about it a lot and wondering, why me? why am I ill? and generally bemoaning the time I have spent ill when I wanted to be climbing or mountaineering.

My friend reminded me that whatever you focus your time and energy on will grow, whether its something positive or negative, something we want or not, something that is beneficial to us or harmful.  I realised that I had been focusing on my illness and not on getting well, and had expended a lot of negative energy on that.  Zen aside, my own early psychological research told me how much the mind affects the immune system - the study I conducted looked at the role of guilt in influencing minor illness, and found that the more guilt you feel, the more likely you are to suffer coughs, colds and other bugs.  The light that dawned on me today was that I needed to focus more on promoting my wellbeing rather than my illness, a subtle yet crucial difference.

Why is this on a climbing blog I hear you ask? I think it has relevance to injury recovery, but also a broader message about focusing on what we want to grow.  So focusing on our technique rather than worrying about our fear should help our climbing ability to grow.  but if we spend a lot of time beating ourselves up about what we dont do so well, or for being afraid, then those things will also grow as we direct our energy to them.

So, today, think about what it is that you want to grow in your climbing, and your life, and direct your time, energies and thoughts to that, rather than the things you dont want.

Flying practice!

Last week a good friend and I decided to raise our heartbeats at the climbing wall with a little flying practice.  I personally have always hated falling off, disliking the feeling of being out of control rather than worrying so much about the consequences of the fall.  This is a good example of a self-limiting belief, where the perceived risk is not really related to the actual risk.  These things dont go away by themselves, and in fact, the more you avoid falling off, the more entrenched the fear will become.  

Graded exposure is a good way to progressively work up to your most disliked or feared situations.  Start as we did, taking falls which feel comfortable - it may be small lead falls, or it may even be second falls with a slack rope, etc.  Whatever, start in your current comfort zone, and repeat until you feel completely relaxed.  Then move up a tiny amount. For example, move one move above a bolt, and keep falling off there until that feels comfortable.  Then move up again, and so on.  The important thing is not to rush through - its easy to fool yourself that you are conquering your fear by going for a huge fall just the once.  However, we need to habituate to the anxiety, allowing enough practice for the adrenalin levels to drop and for you to become relaxed taking that fall.  This might take a long time - adrenalin levels can remain high for up to two hours in most people! - and one practice session will not be enough.

My friend and I started off with some small lead falls with the odd strangled squeak, and ended up taking some nice clip to clip falls.  Not massive by any scale, but a good start for both of us, and leaving room for us to keep practising over the coming weeks!