#195 Si Moore — Building Better Sessions, How To Send Boulders, and Why You Shouldn’t Fall In Your Training

Intro

SPEAKER_02 0:00

When I used to climb in the schoolroom in Sheffield, Ben Moon used to come in and do his training and we he didn't chit-chat much. He's like my hero. I'm like, oh my goodness, how am I in the school room? And Ben's in here, right? Amazing. This is like super exciting, right? So Ben would come in and he would just do his volume on the wall, right? On the 50 degree board, just bang, bang, bang. When he fell out, he got a bit grumpy and he left. He didn't feel, right? He just he built this volume of success. It was really interesting. And that always kind of stuck with me in the back of my mind.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Welcome to the Test Piece Podcast. This podcast is about all things high-level climbing. How to go from good to great. I'm your host, Joshua Horsley. I've been climbing for over 30 years. We recently updated our Patreon, and now you get exclusive content from the guests that you love. You get your episodes before everyone else, and they're ad-free. Try it out now at patreon.com/slash test piece with a free seven-day trial. Okay, let's start the show. Cy Moore. Welcome to the podcast, dude. How's it going, man?

SPEAKER_02 1:20

It's going very well. Great to be here. Great to be chatting with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Yeah, great to be changing with you. But it's been a while. Uh Cy, we probably met like 15 years ago. I was counting up the years, and we were chuckling yesterday. What were the odds that we were going to do a podcast about climbing 15 years later? How does that even happen?

SPEAKER_02 1:40

It's funny. It's funny how things play out. Yeah. It's uh it's uh I think it's wilder that you're on number 200 and whatever.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Well, that's my secret on how to go from good to great, is just keep doing it if you just don't stop. Volume. I mean, there's a lot to be said for turning up. Well, back when we first met, I don't think podcasts even existed, which is uh disturbing. And it it's it also shows you where the world heads, where I even think about this in climbing, where it's like, can V20 be done? Or, you know, what's the next like discipline that will come out of climbing? You know, bouldering was a discipline that you know wasn't around forever, and you just you don't know. Like you gotta keep an open mind because the world changes and it's changed a lot since we started climbing like 30 years ago, dude.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Yeah, it's definitely uh it's a lot busier. There's a lot more people, there's a lot more people out there, you know. It's it it's it was a seems like a blink of an eye. And COVID gave me a little taste of it, uh, being in Bishop over that period of time. But you know, thinking back to 2004 and being one an entire season in the buttermilks and seeing like five other people, and then just fast forward, you know, 2018, and there's hundreds of cars there.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Dude, you were in the buttermilks in 2000. Actually, I think that's when I took I maybe took my first trip in maybe maybe 2006 or or something. Uh yeah, buttermilks 2004. Was that for the infamous movie West Coast Gimps?

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Is that that was that was, yeah, yeah. Like eight, eight young Englishmen and one Irishman and uh a few other people scattered around the boulders. Chris Shulte, Chris Shulte was there. Chris Shulty camped in his tent for that that entire season in the middle of the boulders, like like under Flyboy or something. And you know, nobody nobody even said anything. We camped just past, and when we we like we like set up like a I don't even know how to describe it, really, some sort of like uh yeah, and it was an encampment, right? Like, and we were hanging all our stuff off the trees and all our bags to keep the mice away. We turned up on day one, there was like one little mice come out, and by like day 30, there was like hundreds of these things crawling up the inside of the tent, whacking them off the tent, and the ranger, there was some ranger at the time, I think it was like a forest service ranger, would actually come up there, and and they didn't, they were just like, you know, this is unusual, nobody else is doing this, but you guys aren't doing any harm. And they just uh they just kind of left this there.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Dude, uh first of all, young Chris Schulte is a good memory. He actually lives by me now, um, continuing to put up cool climbs all around, cool compression climbs, I should say, go Schulte. Uh camping out in the buttermilks for a long period of time is brutal. Like it's one thing to be a van, it's one thing to like go into town. Actually, staying on the buttermilks for a long time is cold, uh, dry. Actually, uh on the note of West Coast Gimps, that is a play on the movie West Coast Pimps and uh Joel Rusher and Jeremy Meeggs, who have been on the podcast before, were some of the stars of that great old uh cult classic. And you know what they told me is they almost felt like without that hardcore style of being in the cold, kind of like suffering, it was hard for them to like pull out the real try hard. Like they enjoyed that side of old school climbing of just yeah, being cold, being a little miserable, but then trying hard on those on those razors, you know?

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Honestly, like we didn't really know. I mean, we didn't know anything else. We came from the UK and like landed there and like woke up, drove to drove the bishop in the middle of the night, and like woke up, somehow got down the road in these old thousand dollar cars that we bought, went to sleep, woke up, and it was just like there laid out in front of us. I mean, we were not thinking this is roughing it, we were thinking like we're in paradise. You know, we'd just all seen dosage like uh the mandala and the buttermilker and whatever that was, dosage two, and all of a sudden, like we all uh uh wake up in these boulders. So it like it's funny you had to think back, and that was it was a particularly cold winter, and there were a few big snowstorms, and we we s we just sat it out in our tents and didn't think anything off it. And you know, went up and down to town, and and again, Bishop was a bit of a different place back then, and uh just like started to work our way through all of the boulders, and like honestly, I mean that was there was no other way. There was no other I mean, people weren't really even staying. I mean, people didn't stay in hotels even then, right? Like, climbers were not coming and like staying in a hotel and Bishop, like that was not a heard-off thing, you know. We ever was just hanging out in the buttermilks, and you know, a few people were there and some vans, and you know, that you just went climbing and then you uh waited until you could climb again. And that was kind of what we did for months.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Go to town and stock up on some some food. Uh, there's an iconic scene of you taking a gnarly fall off of evolution. Um, what was evolution, which is the you know, kind of the the straight up, beautiful line on grandpa Peabody, and when you first drive up, you see it. Um, what was your guys' feeling about Bishop and the height and a line like that after coming from the UK and from Northern Ireland?

SPEAKER_02 7:10

Again, you know, we just we didn't we didn't really think too much about it, you know, it was just presented right in front of us, and we we've been climbing like some high balls and some gritstone roots, so we were kind of well at, you know, we were used to head pointing and that sort of style of climbing. So yeah, no, I honestly, and it's the same with all of those things, you know. You we we like turned up and like we all did like evolution to the lip, and then I think it had the direct had just been climbed, so Tony Lemich had just done the direct, it hadn't been repeated. Um I was like because obviously like you're young and you're climbing things like that, you're like, obviously, I'm gonna try and do this. So it was uh I it was quite a cold period of time, and I like went down in a rope, figured it out. It was actually quite a bit easier then. There was a big hole in the lip that subsequently snapped off. I actually, when I think back, like the move off the lip was quite comfortable. It only felt like maybe V5 or something, and it actually got quite a lot harder since that hole crumbled. So I was I was really comfortable, and the holes above it were actually quite a bit bigger than they are now. So I mean, I just was like, oh, it's it's a formality, you know. I'm gonna climb up here and climb this thing to the top. And I got up, I climbed all the way up. It's hard to get pads, right? So, like, I think Lisa, yeah, Lisa Rands and Wills lent us their pads. We had, you know, not as many as we would have these days, but we probably had a small double stack of pads in the kind of main area. I climbed up to up to the lip of this thing and got up there, and it was so cold, I couldn't feel anything. So I was like literally hanging. I don't know if you've seen the video, it looks totally ridiculous. I was literally hanging, kind of trying to warm my hands up or shake out or something, or just chilling on the lip with like a heel up or a foot up or something. I think a heel up and the heel just popped. So I just fell through the air, bang like that, and landed fully flat face down on the pads, like totally you know, it's it was in the moment totally fine. Obviously, like those falls out up over the years, um, just splatted straight down under the pad, didn't think anything of it. And yeah, after that, I can't remember. Well, I can't even remember what happened again. Like, I I was not I don't remember thinking back and being like, oh, I don't want to go up there again. I just somehow didn't end up there again. I don't know. We I think we left and went to Joe's or something, and then it kind of got forgotten about it. I actually went back to it. I don't know if you know if you know this. No, because obviously you did that at some point. Like I remember you climbing that.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah, one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was always in the back of my mind. So I went back to it years later, and just before I moved to Ireland, I actually was like, Oh, I'm gonna try this. So I got back on it again, and I I found the top quite tricky then. No, you know, I'm not great, like it's a bit of a small box, a bit awkward with that big reach up. So I found a crazy way to do it. I got up onto the lip and I managed to grab a pebble knob between a pointer finger and thumb to pull up. Like it's like this just tiny nubbian to pull up to bump to the edge. I was like, oh my goodness, I figured this out. Like, I can't believe I figured this out. So I at this point, I've got a kid, right? Like Madeline's like, my kid's like a year old or six months old at home, and I'm like up here like an idiot, 40 years old, trying to climb up this thing. So I was like, well, obviously, like I can do it, so I'm gonna do it. It was back, it was back to the same ridiculous narrative that I had in my head like 20 years before. So I got my buddy Mike out and Ben ditto, and we like rallied up some pads, and I went up there. And dude, I climbed the whole thing all the way up, feet over the lip, like did the move off the lip, went up to the match, got the match hold, stood right up on my tiptoes, reached up, and that somebody had moved the tick like that far down. I've got this on video. Sadly, I moved the tick down a little bit, so I just reached up to it, and the hold wasn't right where I expected. And I took the full ride from there onto the pads, which was quite a big fall. And then the next day the weather went, you know, that it did the bishop flip, it went to like 80. I was like, I'm dumb with it. This is a sign. It was funny to go back to it after all these years, and so I didn't climb it, I never climbed it, but I got very close.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

First of all, I can't believe you took the ride when you were young to your side, although it shows you it's funny how like kids either get really hurt or they're like fine. Like, if I were to land on my side from 15, 16, 18, I don't know how from high up, I might be like technically okay, like, oh, you didn't break your leg, but I'd be wrecked, dude. Just I could not take a fall like that now.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

You know, you know, of course. Oh my goodness, I couldn't take a fall like that now. You know, the funny thing is, I totally remember that fall, and it was like nothing. I landed as perfectly as you can flat on your face. I mean, I land it felt like I was just falling into a bed. Like I remember being like, bang, oh, like it's totally cool.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

So you are back in Northern Ireland where you grew up, and yeah, you were living in the California area for gosh, for like 15 years. Um after traveling all over, you decided to head back home. And what's the lens you now view like your kind of home crag in? You know, like uh what brought you back?

SPEAKER_02 12:25

Yeah, it's a good question. There are many layers to that, you know, and I think like a big one is like California is super expensive, right? And and like like I'm California, you know, I'm I feel like I'm Californian more than anything else, honestly. But it is super expensive, and we just had the opportunity to go back. You know, I actually think the thing that first prompted it was opening a climbing gym in Belfast, and Jackie, my wife, was really interested in that, and there was an opportunity to do that, and then COVID came along, and that kind of messed that up a little bit. But at that point, the idea had been like sewn in our minds. So we we kind of like were like, huh, what would that? That's funny. We'd never really thought about that. And I was set and staying in Bishop, honestly. Like I loved, I absolutely love Bishop, I love the community there, I love the climbing there. But that just gave me a chance to be like, huh, what would that look like to go back there or go there and with family there and having a little kid? And I kind of was curious, you know, I was curious about like the culture of climbing here and like the scene here and kind of like you know, the contrast of the busyness of California. I knew there was like not that many people here. So I was interested to kind of come and you know, see if we could like bring a bit of that, you know, the California energy, right? Like it's totally awesome. I mean, like all those years that we had in Yosemite, and like there was so much energy that I really loved. So I knew there was climbing here, and my some of my friends stayed here, so I just wanted to I wondered what it would be like to come back and like look at my home country and all of the climbing here and the community here through the lens of having traveled somewhere else and spent all that time. And then we got back here and I kind of discovered, I mean, I kind of rediscovered Fairhead. Like I hadn't spent a lot of time in the boulders in Fairhead, certainly. So, like, like getting in there and being like, oh my goodness, this is like it is world-class, it's stunning. There are dolphins swimming past, right? Like, there's so much to do. Uh, you know, I met a few brilliant people that like met it really all gel together, and then over time it just like compounds, right? You start to just notice all of these different qualities, and the standard of living is great. And so, yeah, it's uh fairhead is definitely a part of a big part of it.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Yeah, when you grow up in an area and you have a certain level of climbing, or even you just kind of have seen what's been established there, you kind of can get stuck on that same thread or line where you're like, these are the kind of climbs that get done here. Then sometimes like traveling, you come back and you're like, uh, how come we didn't climb that aret? Like, oh, it's too tall. Uh no, we got plenty of pads now. You know, like pads are ubiquitous. I also saw um that Keenan, Katie, and Aiden came out and you know, having some V16 climbers or V17, whatever they do these days, you know, have some fresh eyes, but you guys must have kind of shown them around and pointed out some amazing stuff. But yeah, I guess with the level of climbing that you were exposed to and participated in, it must look different now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:32

I think it's like there's so much in here, right? There's so the crag is three miles long. It's like it's a really interesting place because it's like quite close to civilization. But when you get into the middle of the crag, it feels like the backcountry. So actually, I didn't have any clue whatsoever. Like I knew obviously there was like this amazing, you know, this boulder field, and like, you know, my some of my friends had climbed there a bit. I climbed there a little bit right at the beginning before a lot of the the things got opened up. But like, yeah, I mean it it's it's so ex it's so extensive and so big and so adventurous, and it's just such an amazing place. And again, you you want sort of different things at different times of your life, right? So like the quietness and the adventure feeling of it and the remoteness like suits me really well right now. But in terms of like scope, I mean, those guys came here and they were just like, you know, it it's it's pretty stacked and it lends itself to like harder climbing. So, you know, they they were finding, I mean, ever on every boulder they were finding like oh, there's like a V14, oh, there's a V possible V16. I mean, Aidan was just like going around and like finding climbs literally everywhere, uh, and that's just in the first little area, right? Like they did explore a little deeper, and there's there's whole zones in there and whole areas in there that some of the locals have started to climb on a bit, but um Rob, you've had Rob on the on the podcast. But like it's not it's barely been touched. I mean, the the the real hard stuff is like still just sat there. So it's gonna be I'm excited to see what yeah, I think they're coming back.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Yeah, you got me excited because it's a good you know uh summer destination. I don't think we're at any risk of turning uh you know Fairhead into Bishop anytime soon. Um you know, it it is funny how places do still get uncovered. Like it's surprising how there'll be just tons of potential and tons of hard potential. And it's easy to think that the world somehow tapped out. It's just not. There's so much rock out there, there's so much good climbing out there, and so good on you to get to be plopped down right in the middle of Emma. I remember when you were first talking about moving, I think you made some comment about how your buddy Ricky Bell was like, if you don't want to climb on established climbs, you could just climb on nothing but new stuff for the rest of your life. I was like, ooh.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's and and uh Ricky slowed down a little bit just because of uh uh work and and same as me, like and same as both of us, uh, parenthood, et cetera, et cetera. But Ricky has like an at have you heard about Ricky's Atlas? No, no. Yeah, Ricky's got like this atlas of Ireland, it's like a roadmap of Ireland with like hundreds of projects. He has scarred the island and he has like, oh, there's a Trad E9 here, there's like an amazing highball arette here, there's all this, that like the whole way around the island of Ireland, he has this road atlas. So yeah, I mean, it's still the same. I mean, if you had time and energy, I mean, like young Dylan, who I we climb here a lot with at Fairhead, you know, he's already just started to drift a little bit out into different places and coming back and being like, oh, I just climbed this amazing, like you know, gritstone V11 in the middle of Fermanagh, like in the middle of nowhere, like totally beautiful, fine-grained, amazing rock uh that you know never been done before. And like, I mean, that's obviously we have fair head here, but then we have all of this, these other things sort of scattered around and spread out all over the place, all over the island of Ireland. And there's just nobody here as well, you know, and it's uh not yet.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Not yet. Not yet.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Yeah, it's funny to it's funny to think about that. Obviously, every everywhere kind of I mean, the population increases everywhere, and more people will get into the outdoors, but we're it we have the opposite problem here, you know. We're trying to get people like there's a barrier to entry in in this country, right? It's difficult to get out climbing, you know, it's culturally, you know, challenging and it's logistically challenging, and the weather can be tricky. So we're we're kind of in the opposite, you know, bishops kind of the opposite of that. You can just rock up, everything's always kind of perfect. So here we're kind of trying to like make it a bit more, you know, we want to make it a bit more accessible, we want to encourage people to go out there and enjoy the outdoors and like try and uh climb these things and you know, yeah, again, create that culture a little bit more.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Well, you just picked up a megaphone and and let everyone know. So don't be surprised if we get a few text messages. Uh yeah, uh tons of rock, not enough time because of parenthood and work. Uh Cy, you are the founder of Vertical Ascents. You've been coaching for like 15 years also. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 20:02

I'm like 15 years now? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I think like 2012, 13, yeah. So getting on to that.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

You know, it's interesting. I was just thinking about

Being An Early Adopter Of Coaching For Climbers

SPEAKER_01 20:12

this where climbing is really technical. Yeah, we all know. And coaching is now something that we see a lot more of, but back in the day, there just really wasn't that many coaches. It's kind of surprising because you would think a sport that is complex also has like logistical challenges around, I don't know, ropes, placing gear, in addition to the actual technical component. And then we also have this like dependence on physiology, like our hands and fingers, which are you know not really as well understood as say doing like a bench press or something. And yet back then, coaching was maybe not that common. Like I feel like you're you know one of the early ones to plant your flag as being like a big climbing coach.

SPEAKER_02 20:55

I put that down to living in California. If I like I and it's so funny because it's so normal, not everyone's a climbing coach. There's so many climbing coaches, like, which is awesome. Like, I mean, it's creative, you know, and why not? Uh, but I definitely remember the first at least the first five years, like my crew back in in Sheffield, or I would I was embarrassed. Like, I wouldn't tell people, I wouldn't tell people I was a climbing coach because they're like, You're excuse me, you're like, What? You think you're a climbing coach? Like, you can't, like, it's it wasn't a real thing, and like the idea of like saying you were a climbing coach or trying to like make some business out of that or money out of that, like definitely was a bit absurd. It's funny, uh, I can't quite remember where that shifted. It's kind of slowly shifted over the years. And San Francisco, right, was like was like so different, right? I like you know, obviously, Jackie was um managing the gym at some at those points or working in the gym and I was doing a bit of setting, and like, you know, one day I decided I'm gonna be a coach, and everybody was like, Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm like, all right, like let's let's do that then, you know. It's so it's so Funny to kind of think about that. And I remember even going home. Like I would have gone home and still hidden it a little bit from people for quite a few years, actually.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah, I was thinking about just now, and I wonder if it's so San Francisco had a big boom in climbing. Uh, we really like climbing just took San Francisco by storm. And when I was first starting climbing, it was a there was a really big ethic around not spraying beta, letting people have their own experience. And it was a big deal. Like you do not, or at least I it was really put into me, like, do not tell someone, hey, that crimp's good, or this is how you do that move, whether you're right or wrong. Uh and I felt like when you have a big influx of climbers, uh, there was maybe even a shift in how climbing was, where it was very like we would talk to each other about how to do a move. It was very like a, I don't know, like a partnership or a group dynamic of uh figuring something out where I don't remember it being like that when I was really young. And I wonder if that was where some taboo of coaching was, where it was like, you just go on your own adventure. You know, we talk about how fun that was or how cool that was, but not really the details. And coaching kind of pulls the curtain to the side and goes into the like the minutia, you know?

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Yeah, it's interesting to think, you know, I think like San Francisco as well. I mean, obviously, like these things were happening in different places, but I think that San Francisco had a few interesting things that kind of allowed that to happen. I think like California, and I mean, obviously it's a bit in American culture, which it's a great thing, like there's and California is is like there's even more of this, but like just like progressive, you know, doing things and like trying to build things and trying to like do something unusual. Like California is very supportive of that, and San Francisco is very supportive of that. So I think that's a component. I also think what was interesting about San Francisco at that point for me was that the climbing community there, you know, I'd lived in Sheffield, I'd lived in Boulder before that, I'd lived in a few other, you know, uh in obviously here in Ireland. The climbing community was really broad, and there was a whole range of people of different levels that were all interacting together. And I think that that was quite unique, you know, and it was it was a very good energy with that. So I actually think there was a lot of mentorship going on and a lot of sort of passing down of information just because of the natural situation of that community there. So that kind of happened by accident. I mean, people were just like asking me things, right? And obviously, like I like to talk. So like you like to talk and people like to listen, and before long, you're telling they're asking you questions and you're kind of giving them advice. So some solicited, some not. Um, so like I think sort of one thing led to the next, you know, people would people were asking me as much as anything, you know, like oh yeah, how do you do this, or how would you have done that, or what will you know, you know, whatever it was, you know, just following us around and the nature of that community there kind of it was very natural. Like one thing just led the next, and before long I was doing it for free, and then eventually I was people are like, Well, I want to pay you. I'm like, okay, and I'm like, you can pay me. And then eventually I was like, Oh, well, now there's I need to figure out some structure for this, you know what I mean? And then one thing led the next, and you just sort of build from there.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

And 15 years goes by. Um, yeah. So I'm sure the way you deal with climbers and approaching them and helping them has changed over the years. So I won't make you take me through the 15-year evolution. Um, but yeah, what's it look like today to when you work with climbers? Like, where are they looking for? How do you help them? Just kind of take me through that.

SPEAKER_02 25:34

Yeah, yeah. I know it's definitely changed a lot. I mean, it the big shift, you know, everybody when you're like working with anything like that, like you obviously start, you know, you go through this curve of not knowing what you don't know, and eventually knowing what you don't know, and then uh, you know, eventually you you gain more experience in this and you start to have a clearer sense of why you're doing certain things. And definitely in the beginning was like it was very, I mean, even only 15 years ago, it was quite rudimentary. There was not necessarily a lot of logic, it was a lot of like cultural kind of patterns of like, oh, this is what we do in the culture, like you haven't been exposed to this, I've noticed it, so let's I'm gonna share it with you, and you're gonna you're gonna try that out. So obviously over the years things changed, and definitely for me, you know, there was a point with my coaching where I had started to question things and I and I and I was trying to like explore reasons for doing things. So I would have had a client or a person I was working with, and I would have questioned them and and asked them why they were doing certain things in their program or in their with their logic, like why would you do this? If it's if you don't have a good reason for it, let's ditch that out. Let's get rid of it, you know, why why is that in there? So eventually, I actually uh halfway through the the 15 years or a little later, actually, you know, I started to turn that lens on myself and be like, like, why am I actually telling them to do this? You know, what's my logic behind that? You know, I if I don't have a good reason for telling you to do something, you know, perhaps I shouldn't be saying it. And that was kind of running in parallel. That idea was running in parallel with my deep down. I had like this, like, and I I know that you uh feel the same. I had this like deep feeling of like, I want to understand climbing as a sport, like I want to understand how this works. I want an airtight explanation or a defensible explanation of how these things work. And that was really missing with climbing, and it's much simpler in a lot of other sports and more complex in some sports. So for me, I then went down an educational rabbit hole for years and like started reading and started studying and really landed on movement. You know, movement ended up being like the anchor. Like ultimately, like I realized that climbing came back to movement, everything comes back to movement. So slowly exploring these different places, I was like reading books on dance and like different things because they they were the only places I could find references to movement. Eventually, I started to stumble on motor control and motor learning and movement science. And from that point forward, after exploring like those different theories and models, I had such a stronger sense of why I was actually doing things. So that gave me like this logical workflow from pretty much like a neurobiological level all the way up. And I started to create this like sense of what of meaning of what climbing was, what movement was, what skill was, what strength was, how these interplay together. So that really shaped the work we do, that really shaped the work I was doing with people then and and really continues to shape the work that I do now. All of the different systems and interventions and ideas and frameworks that we now use in vertical ascents ultimately come from all of those different ideas that I learned through that time. Um, and they they kind of, you know, some of those ideas are more noticeable than others. So that really leads up to today to what we actually do, because this was a very long-winded way of me getting to there. At this point, we do kind of two specific things. We help people have these high-quality climbing sessions, we bring them to peak form, we let them have a sense of progress or help them have a sense of progress. So that's one side of the kind of equation that we've ended up at. And the other side is helping people send their projects. So those are kind of the two main wings. There are other layers under that, of course, but those are kind of the two big anchors that we focus most of our energy on.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

I love how over time you end up like distilling things, but somehow in the distilling and narrowing, it makes it even bigger. And you're like, okay, movement. Um, I keep saying this about climbing, and I just experienced it yesterday. Climbing is so complex because every climb in some ways has an infinite amount of ways to do it. And then depending on your body morphology, it might change your beta compared to another person. And then depending on your personal strengths, it might depend on the best beta for you. And then depending on that day's conditions, it might change how you should do a move in the most efficient way possible. And so, you know, it's easy to say it's all about movement. But the actual application of that is, I think, kind of infinitely difficult. And you can always have better beta. You can always do a move a little bit better. And so I'm right there with you on trying to understand climbing deeply. But yeah, I feel like I haven't, I feel like I'm not there. I feel like it's maybe a lifelong pursuit for me at least.

SPEAKER_02 30:57

Yeah, I mean, and and just to add to that, I think that the interesting thing about climbing compared to every other sport is you get to choose the challenge, right? And tennis, you don't get to decide where the ball is going to land, and golf, you don't get to decide where the ball is going to land. So, like, there's this other layer on top of that where you're like, oh wow, like it's all of this complexity, and I have to decide what challenge I'm even going to pick in the first place, which adds adds definitely another another layer of decision making, and there are implications to that that are quite profound.

Building Better Sessions

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Well, let's first talk about building climbers to have better sessions, um, because I am guilty of perhaps still doing this. I just go in, I either go into the gym or I go outdoors. I just climb side. Like I just want to try hard. I just want to climb. I want to, whatever my buddies are on, I'm gonna climb what they're on. It has worked for me in general, uh, but maybe the either you can critique kind of my approach or lack thereof, or you can tell me what you typically see where people kind of spend their time and where there's some issues with kind of how they typically session, how you help them have better sessions.

SPEAKER_02 32:15

One of the things that I've really noticed with coaching climbers is if you can stay as close as possible to the natural kind of cadence or like behavior of a climbing session, the better. So, like when you start telling climbers to go and do these things that are not like going out and sessioning with your friends, very quickly they're like, I the compliance is super low. So I think that like that's really important to be like, how can we give you tools to be like, okay, I want to work in a way that is not deviating too far from that, but perhaps make tiny adjustments that are going to allow me to over time have these compounding impacts on my progress or my session quality or like my rise to peak form. So, you know, ultimately the two biggest levers for me are deciding what to climb and deciding how much to climb. Everything else falls under that. If you get those two things right, if you figure out how much to climb, you figure out what to climb, the characteristics that you're you you ought to be leaning into to develop the things that you want to develop, you know I mean, you can get like 99% of the way there, in my opinion, or 98% of the way there. So understanding relative to yourself those two components, right? So if we start first thinking about what to climb, this is where the science of movement really give me a clear sense of how to navigate through that. Because by exploring the science of movement and really looking at those models, one in particular stood out for me, and it was it's a theory called ecological dynamics. And it's it's not the only theory that I pull from, but it is one that that sways me quite a lot. And the idea in ecological dynamics focuses on the organism and the environment, and that being really strongly coupled together. So for me, I really think about the climber and the climbs. And I really think about the characteristics of the terrain and the implications those have on how the climber changes. So, in a really simple sense, right, if you go and climb in Spain and overhanging roots for five years, you're gonna get tons of endurance, right? If you go and live in a cave in Switzerland, you're gonna get really strong fingers, right? The terrain develops the qualities in you, you know, the what whatever you interact with. So you can actually start to leverage that and start to think about that over different timelines and start to really explore the relationship between skill and the environment, skill and the climbs that you're choosing. And, you know, I would help people in that instance like create a runway, you know, like exploring different environments in different ways. You know, one of the ways a lot of people choose climbs is they go out there and they'll be like, okay, what is the highest graded thing that it looks like I can climb? Right. Like that is their way of actually deciding what to climb, which is like fine, you know, you're working your strengths, it's fun to do. But there are other ways that you can fill in gaps, right? You know, you can start exploring and be like, okay, I really want to search out the slabs and arets because they teach me balance and they have an implication on and develop these coordination skills that are then going to be valuable in these other things that I'm trying to do. So there's these different ways of looking at the entire environment and looking at all of the boulders you have in front of you and looking at the boards and the gym, and start to think about well, why am I choosing that climb over another? You know, is there a way that I can kind of weave through this that's going to actually turn me into the climber that I want to turn into? The other side of that is how much to climb, right? And this is absolutely essential as well, right? The the dose is the poison, right? You do a certain amount of climbing, right? You uh you can end up doing too much and over-training and have problems with that. If you don't do enough climbing, like you obviously don't adapt to the environment that we just talked about. So helping people navigate that and understand the implications of that and figure out where the sweet spots are with that, so that you can like ride this wave of momentum and like have these high-quality sessions and stay away from injury and understand what a ramp up to form feels like or looks like, understand what recruitment for for lack of a better word feels like, know how to get yourself to this place where you're like snappy and sharp on the terrain that you're climbing on, and how to kind of push that forward. So those are the two sides that I kind of, and again, we're talking very zoomed out here. You know, obviously we can go in deeper and be like, well, what are the implications of that? And like what are the next level of kind of thinking about that? But that that's a zoomed out kind of starting point that I often would go from with thinking about that.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

First of all, the idea that you want to make I don't know if training is the right word, but your sessions congruent with a typical climbing session is really powerful to me because I I've noticed that I need to make something just fun for myself. Even if it's not optimal training, whatever like optimal might be, if it's not fun, I just won't do it. Or if I do it, I kind of half-ass it. You know, I just show up, which is there's showing up, and then there is like putting your all into the moment. So I think that's such an important part uh the idea. There's you know, what you climb and how much you do. I definitely think that I'm not alone in the most of the way I've done it in the past is well, what I'm gonna do is ratchet both levers up as high as possible. Like I'm gonna climb as much hard stuff as I can, and that's like the only way forward. That's you know, it's funny because one of the problems in a young sport is that what you see are the people who have the most success are kind of genetic outliers where they can ratchet things up to like they're just only climbing them on the hardest stuff they can. It's tweaky and they do it every day, and somehow they come out the other side. And you have to be careful because it's often not you or it is you, and then 20 years goes by and it's not you anymore. And I think it's like, you know, it's this direction that we all head in. I'm I know we could go down that rabbit hole, but I I wanted to pull back a layer on the choosing of climbs and what you climb on and the terrain and how you said that kind of like the the environment that you put yourself in creates the climber you are. And I think that one of the things beneath that is that when you want to get better at climbing, it means you have to understand even what your terrain is. And I think a lot of times, and for a long time, this is me as well. I don't know, I go in, I climb on the new set. And really what I would try to do is do all of the new climbs that were set. Like it's a really simple thing, just I want to do them all. You know, do you find that people maybe don't understand that something is crimpy or compy, or maybe even the better question is like, what are those categories like? Because in some ways they could be infinite, or you could just keep them kind of generic. It's overhung. It's not, you know. Um, yeah, how do you help people like understand what they're climbing on and how that might shape them as a climber?

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Yeah, I think a good way to start thinking about this, and and and one of the ways that I kind of work through this is you know, you can separate out the different environments, right? And you can explore the different environments. So, you know, obviously for a second there, we're kind of talking a bit more uh about the outdoor environment. You brought up the gym set, you know, we we have the boards as well. I think that the best way to explain that or for me to share how I think about terrain characteristics and adaptation, it's best to go to a spray wall. So I have I have one model uh which is called the spray wall 10. And the spray wall 10 uses different style tags, I call them. So it's different terrain characteristics that essentially develop different skills or different coordinations or prepare you in different ways. So, for example, I have like a list of like 40 different style tags. Style tags can include things like you know, 20 mil edges, pinches, two-finger pockets, cut loose, uh, you know, double dyno, footless boulder problem, wise you can go, uh 35 move boulder, right? They have all these different characteristics. And then what I would do in the spray wall 10 is I help the climber build out 10 different style tags that really lean into the characteristic that we're trying to develop. So the easiest way to think about this is the crimp ladder. So when I'm building this out in a training intervention, essentially the crimp ladder, the failure point has to be the thing that I'm trying to develop, which is the finger strength in context. So I will create a spray wall 10 boulder that the climber essentially I'll use big feet, but I'll use holes where the limiter is them holding on. So you could just sort of think hangboarding on a wall, right? Or the wall crawl kind of idea. The limiter is the fingers. I don't like to get into like telling people how to climb when they're doing it. I just set the environment and let them run. So I would rather, instead of being like, you know, climb it slowly, I'm just like, let's just set this up. Let's build the terrain in the way that we want to see meaningful growth and let's run a progression on it. And then in those, in that terrain, I'll build out almost reps and sets, right? I'll have the spray wall, I'll have all of these different characteristics. And then we've we have curated or built the the challenge level at the sweet spot just on the side of success, and then we have them run volume on it, right? They don't fail, they don't have to fail. You do not have to fail on boulder problems to build qualities. We can explore that kind of in a in a in a wing if you like. Uh, you know, I set it up in a way where there's a lot of success. I think about it from a sort of strength perspective rather than a skill perspective. So the challenge level is not, there's no uncertainty. It's just on the other side of challenge level, right? It's on the on the success side. So you think, you know, we don't build deadlift strength by doing failed reps. We build deadlift strength by doing successful reps and then volume at that and building that up over time. So in this spray wall 10 model, we have these different terrain characteristics, and then we layer these boulder problems together, and then the climber can go in and work through these and make them harder and harder and harder and develop these different characteristics that then obviously allow them to peak and form in that exact environment. But if you do this well, you can. We know there is, and you will agree with me here, I think. We know if there's any transfer in training between a two different contexts in climbing, the overhang training board and wooden holes to crimpy climbing is probably one of the stronger ones. So I really leverage that and think about that. The other layer, again, back to dose and like how much are we climbing? DOS is also related to intensity and challenge level. You know, there are modifiable elements of dose. And over the years, I've really started to drift, especially with more experienced climbers. I've really started to drift to higher levels of success in training. When I used to climb in the schoolroom in Sheffield, I remember Ben like it was we were young, it was like Ben Moon used to come in and do his training, and you know, we we he didn't chit chat much. He's like my hero, and like, oh my goodness, how am I in the school room and Ben's in here? Right, amazing. This is like super exciting, right? So Ben would come in and he would just do his volume on the wall, right? On the 50-degree board, just bang, bang, bang. When he fell out, he got a bit grumpy and he left. He didn't feel right, he just he built this volume of success. It was really interesting, and that always kind of stuck with me in the back of my mind. Fast forward to just a few months ago, my buddy Tyler uh Landman came and stayed with me. Uh, and of course, we like spent a lot of time talking about training and all sorts of things. And compared notes, we hadn't talked about things in a few years with anything that I was doing. And one of the things that he said to me was, I don't fall off. I barely fall off in my training. Like my training is like locked in at a sweet spot of intensity, the right terrain characteristics, and I do the volume there. I can measure it, I have a sense of feedback from it. And even on the boulders outside, you know, I took him out to Fair Head and he fell off a couple of times. Like he banged out a load of things up to 8A plus, and you know, he he was he was fast paced in an interesting way through the boulder field, but you know, he very quickly would be like, Yeah, I'm gonna leave that one. That one's that one's not for me. And in that, he did a handful of other V10s and V11s in one session, right? So it was just really it was very interesting. You know, he knew he was very good at picking the climbs, he understood the implications for the dose, and he just glided through the boulder field. I mean, I was giving him a bit of advice, buddy, uh, about this and that, but he wasn't listening to very much of it, he was doing what he knows how to do, you know. So it was really interesting to kind of think about that. Again, sorry, we've jumped around a little bit here, but to think about the implications again, coming back to the board and coming back to like these different layers of the terrain characteristics, the challenge level, the dose, the impact of that, and how you can kind of play with those variables to develop these qualities in bringing you to form in a certain terrain characteristic.

Support From Patreon

SPEAKER_01 46:17

Quick break while I tell you about today's sponsor. Thank you to all the patrons who help make this show possible. Join them so you can get episodes early before anyone else. And those episodes are ad-free. As a patron, you also get to submit questions for upcoming guests. The answers to those questions are only available to patrons. Follow the link in the show notes to join now. You also get access to a private Discord where you'll find me and other people who want to go from good to great. Okay, back to the pod. Let me say something back to you so I understand that kind of spray 10 idea. Um, and when I'm just gonna use the crimp ladder as the case study. Um, so my understanding would be you're like, okay, let's get better at crimps or small holds. You want to get stronger fingers. This is an area that we're working on. And so when you say that there's big feet and you want the fingers to be the limiter, so what I'm guessing that means is that you're not saying, okay, let's go super wide or complex or crazy gas stones, it's just very straightforward.

SPEAKER_02 47:23

That and that that is absolutely true. That is really important. And the interesting thing that it's it's funny, and this was a kind of this is a quirky place that I got to exploring movement science, is that that is not simple. It's it's actually unbelievable that your body can do what it's doing in that way. You know, even pick picking up a glass for an organism picking up a glass, like the the the amount of options to be successful at that are so big. So, in studying that, you know, if you think of the degrees of freedom and all the different options, of you know, it's it's infinite almost. So I actually started to pull back and be like, huh, actually, like a basic crimp ladder up a 45-degree wall is one, it's incredibly complex. Two, if you make it as simple as possible, you can lean into the limiter, right? But like just like and I've tested this with you know, this is a tried and tested thing. Like you build this out and you run this for three months or two months or a month, it's unbelievable the the curve of actual, you know, appliable finger strength moving between holes that you can gain in this. And you know, you see it from session to session. One of the strangest things that I kind of came back again with the movement science was this idea that, oh, you just learned the move, right? You know, you're doing it's getting easier because you're learning the move. And that's a really common thing that climbers say, right? You know, you've just learned the move. And I've started to reframe that and be like, huh, I'm not what am I learning, right? Like that's an adaptation, like that's a positive adaptation. Like, no, I I haven't, I haven't just learned it. It's not a cognitive thing. This is an embodied, like I now have the ability to have a higher level of performance on that challenge right there. Like that is adaptation, and I think it's a short-term, it can be a really short-term adaptation from session to session. But I've actually I really leverage that. I really pay a lot more attention to changes from session to session and curves of adaptation when I'm trying to help somebody or myself solve a problem, because that that's not, you're not, you can't dismiss that. I don't think it's helpful to dismiss that as just something frivolous. You know, you haven't just learned the sequence or learned the beta. You, if you can build a challenge that's right on the edge of your ability, that's simple in inverted commas, and you see growth on it, that is progress. That's an adaptation, that's a gain.

SPEAKER_01 50:03

Yeah. Adaptation. Adaptation is the key word here. And it's something that we've always messaged about in this idea of like technique, strength, like what's the relationship? And something that I feel like is not communicated correctly is that people sometimes talk about technique as if it's just something you like figured out and learned and accidentally stumbled into, and that there's not like there's a physical component of technique, would I call like getting your body into the right position by using a drop-knee like strength? It's like, well, there's clearly a physical component, and you're accessing a coordination and a and a way of moving that you did not have in that certain moment before. And it's this funny thing where uh we almost act like technique and strength are separate things, but they're clearly like heavily related. And you can't just dismiss one for the other and say, oh, I just learned it. It's like, well, what does learning mean? Like, what's that actually mean? So I I love that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:08

I and I think that's why if you're uh if you're interested in this or you want to understand this better, or you're a coach, I think it's super helpful to like understand movement science, right? Because movement science connects the dots with all of these things and allows you to kind of pull that apart and start to explore. And again, the right, all of these things are built off of models and theories, right? Like this is there, this is not truth, right? This is like again, it's defensibility in your logic more than anything else. So, you know, you can explore all of these different models and theories, and some of them, and and this is the big divide, right? Some of them are more cognitive, top-down. Like I control my body with my brain, and the others are more, and the ones I prefer are more environment up, bottom up, like information in the environment guides my movements. And again, it it's a it's a tough subject to explore. I think that my favorite uh way to describe it and talk about it is to think about a baby learning to crawl. You know, a baby learns to crawl across the floor, right? The baby is not watching the parent crawling and and seeing what they're doing and taking a cognitive plan, in my opinion, taking a cognitive plan and then somehow getting that plan to their arms and legs. What they're doing is seeing their mother on the other side of the room who has milk. So they now have a goal. A goal directs what is about to happen next. That goal is getting over there and getting the milk. So the baby starts to explore the sensory perceptual landscape, right? They they push and get feedback and huh, oh wow, I I I just did something and it moved me closer to my goal. It was a stepping stone, and there's a lot of noise in the system. It's a very chaotic search, but ultimately it's a search for a solution to get to a goal, right? With practice, with the constraints of the floor, eventually the child rolls over onto their belly, and this is a bit of a compressed timeline, and eventually figures out how to move their limbs in a way that allows them to be successful. And I think that thinking about movement from that lens for me is really helpful. Like movement is not, we're not thinking our way to a solution. Yes, we can think. Yes, we can move our hand voluntarily, but ultimately it's it's sensory information in our environment that allows us to explore and try things out against the constraints of the environment, the constraints of our body to find a solution. So, again, that's the more bottom-up information from our environment perspective versus the cognitive top-down perspective. There's a lot of argument about these two perspectives in the movement science world. And, you know, again, I explored both of those on my journey. You know, I explored more of a cognitive uh perspective and more of an information ground up ecological perspective. And, you know, the the ecological perspective, there were there's some big problems with cognitive psychology that actually get in the way for me of the whole thing making sense. And the ecological model doesn't have those problems. So it it for me, I'm like, oh my goodness, this makes so much more sense. Again, this is not necessarily right or the truth, but it makes sense for me and it gives me a starting point to be like, okay, huh. We move by attuning to this valuable information. Sight is the obvious one, you know, this information in our environment that guides our movement. And we can start to think about different ways that we can then manipulate the environment to develop the coordination skills, like the baby crawling across the floor.

SPEAKER_01 55:12

So this is what's tricky about climbing. So this is

The Case For Beta Videos

SPEAKER_01 55:15

where like I love the idea of just putting yourself into situations and you learn by heading towards the goal. You know, it's like in climbing, you're like, I want to do this move, I want to get to the top. It's like, okay, here it is, like good luck. And you start banging your head against the wall. Uh, but this is where climbing is really interesting is that you might sit there and you do, I don't know, you know, you're kind of like jumping and trying to latch something. And like you try it, you're like, I'm gonna keep swinging out. Like, okay, I'm gonna try like this different foot. Um, and you know, you're you're getting this feedback. And it's funny. Sometimes I think this. I remember I was having a session with our buddy Sander Pick and Derv a while ago on the spray wall, and we're all trying this move. And I thought to myself, if someone watched us and heard our conversation, you'd see one of us just hook ourselves and a move, not come anywhere close and then come off the wall and be like, oh, I figured it out. Like, I got it. And you're like, no, you just you look the same as every single other jump. Like, what happened? Uh, and you know, that feeling you get, that kind of like feedback uh of ooh, like I'm closer there. But where I'm going is like there's this weird spectrum where there is a cognitive thing where you go, what if I put my foot on that way far away hold and it looks crazy? It's like there's a cognitive part of putting yourself in a new situation to then learn. And so, yeah, how do you? I mean, maybe that's all part of the same thing, but like it's not just a feeling, like there has to be some direction from our, you know, our cognitive side of our brain, you know?

SPEAKER_02 56:50

Yeah, yeah. And I think like that's that's we have cognition, like we know we are thinking, right? We can do things voluntarily. And again, ultimately what you're doing there is changing the goal, right? You're changing the intention, and then you have your attention and you're attending to the information in the environment, and then the solution is emerging. So you're not with your brain controlling the exact degrees of freedom of your limbs. You're essentially constraining the nervous system search. You are removing options so that you can explore in a in a slightly less noisy way, which also happens, right, as you become more skillful, it removes the noise. The search is cleaner, right? You watch a baby trying to pick something up and you watch an adult, there's much less search through the space, right? They they they have attuned to the information in a way where they can get to the solution quickly. So what you're essentially doing there is you're using a verbal constraint, right? So the words that you're saying are narrowing down the search in a similar way to watching a beta video. You know, there's this idea that watching beta videos ruins your creativity, right? Like, oh, you watch beta videos, you're missing out on something, some learning opportunity. And I really started to look at that through a different lens because we don't think our way to the top of a climb, right? We we constrain the search, we pick the climb. And yes, okay, we watch a beta video, and the beta video might tell us where our hands and feet go, but we still have to climb it. We still have to do the climbing, we still have to do the action of actually climbing up the wall. And, you know, for me, climbing is about being exposed to different contexts and environments and solving that problem. And then that is becoming more skillful, right? So if you let's just do a thought experiment, right? Let's say, uh, and again, it's it's it might be a bit of a silly thought experiment, but it's worth kind of thinking about this point, right? Let's say you have two climbers, a thousand boulder problems. One of the climbers has beta videos for every one of the thousand boulder problems, the other climber has no beta videos. You get a year to run at these thousand boulder problems, right? The the climber with all the beta videos is banging them out day after day, right? They're getting loads more climbing done or lows more sending done, they're solving lots of more challenges, but yes, they're watching the beta video. At the end of the year, they get 500 done. The climber who doesn't have beta videos has to work them all out and they get 100 done. You know, if you then take those two climbers and put them onto another climb, who is going to be the better climber?

SPEAKER_01 59:44

I see. I see.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

Interesting to think about, right? Because once you have experienced a solution, you've learned it, right? Watching a solution does not mean you experience the solution, does not mean you're not learning it by watching it. You're learning it by doing it. You develop the skills of climbing by solving the problem in an embodied physical way, not by thinking about how you should do it. So once you've been exposed to all of this repertoire of problems, whether or not you watched a video to narrow the search, you've still done it. You still have the exposure, you've still gained the experience, you now have the coordination skills. You're going to be able to solve the next challenge that comes up because you've felt it, experienced, and built the skill. You might not have stood there and cognitively solved the problem, but I don't think that skill is developed by cognitively solving problems. I think skill is developed by experiencing problems and solving them in the action.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:45

That's fascinating, dude. That that almost also uh argues for that being part of the growth of climbing where people are able to see movement and learn it more quickly and get exposure to a greater repertoire of movements. And one of the things that really helped my climbing was I would climb with my buddies Mark Heal and Max Zolotukin a lot. And they have different, we all have different styles. Uh and Mark uh was really good at putting weight on his feet and really locking off really tiny holds and really putting weight on his feet to facilitate that. And had I not seen him solve certain moves using that technique, I would have never even thought it was possible. And it didn't mean that I could always then follow in his footsteps and do that same move in that same way. Sometimes I had to do it my own way, but it just opened up even the possibility of it. And so I, you know, I could have stumbled into a new problem and there was a solution for Mark that he would have instantly gravitated towards, and I would have never even known it was possible. And by seeing Mark do it, it just opened up, yeah, my movement repertoire, really.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:58

Yeah, and it it it there's a few things to think about there and pull apart. You know, it it they're they're seeing the what are called affordances, right? They're noticing. So watching a video and watching Mark, there can be slightly different things going on with that, right? So you're yes, seeing the holds and footholds that he's using. You're not necessarily seeing the solution. You're seeing the opportunities for action that he decided to use. So that's one side of it. The other side of it is actually interesting, jumping into the science of observational learning, which is actually something slightly different. When you watch somebody perform an action, like a golf swing, for example, the, you know, and again, the science in this is quite small and not that deep. There are people doing work on this with regards to like what do we notice and see, and what is observational learning, like how does visualization and things like that work. And actually, the science is quite shaky on it and not that confident. But one of the things that does come through, there are actually two things that stand out with observational learning. One of them is that we notice intention of another person. We notice, and this is interesting when you start thinking about action and intention and attention. When you watch another athlete or someone moving, you notice the intention that they have. Oh, they sprung off that hold. Oh, you know, you notice what was happening or what they were trying to do. The other thing that we're actually quite good at seeing, according to the science, is timing. For some reason, we can infer some information about timing from watching another human in a video or in front of us. So, you know, jumping for a hold perhaps might be an idea where you can actually get a sense of what that feeling of ramping up actually uh, you know, you can get a sense of what that is from watching somebody else doing it, and you can actually potentially apply that yourself successfully. Those are the two big things, timing and intention. The last time I looked, I haven't looked into this now in a couple of years, because there's not that much to look into. I read everything on it. Um, those are the two things that kind of stood out. So that's actually a slightly different topic. Again, observational learning and constraining uh a search through seeing the holds that someone is using is are two slightly different things and have slightly different outcomes. Again, we can also explore there's a little bit of a difference between motor control, controlling movement and learning movement, although they're obviously connected, but they're you know that that's another uh slightly confusing layer to the rabbit hole is deep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:53

Um I I mean it's infinite. Um something just uh is occurring to me where

Accepting Your Mindset

SPEAKER_01 1:04:59

there's this experience you have when you pull on, we'll say, for a flash go, and a bunch of things can happen. You are following the beta, and you know, again, this is like you talk about being a constraint uh because you're like, this is the foot that I'm going to use. You know, I saw this video where they use this foot, and then you'll sometimes hit a wall and you'll get into a position you say, oh, like this isn't right for me. And the things that come up on the fly are some of my most enjoyable moments where I almost just kind of my my body solves the problem in its way. It just taps into the probably the knowledge I've built up intuitively over the years. And how does one decide when to just say, hey, this feels awkward, but I'm pretty sure this is the beta and commit to it versus kind of like sometimes I I follow my intuition and I get it all wrong. And I mean, there's no perfect answer here because every Climate is different, every person is different, but it's just this experience that we all go through where you bounce back and forth between kind of like flowing, uh, trying to recreate what you saw in the video, trying to, you know, make a good choice in the moment. And it's it's tricky to put it all together, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:17

Yeah, and again, I think that you you kind of it's helpful to think about this, and there's different steps and different elements with this going on. You know, I think a good way to kind of start to understand that or have like an idea of that is to think about competition climbers. The best competition climbers come out, they have this palette in front of them, right? And they do the most extraordinary first try coordination solution that's absolutely flawless on a problem they've never seen before. And like that, they think about those complex paddles and things like that. Like, they're not thinking their way through that. They are attuned as elite athletes to the sensory information that they're detecting in the environment. And that sensory information has a match to their coordination, and they simply have to climb. Sure, there is there is some decision making, right? They have to be like, that's uh my right hand's gonna go there, my left foot's gonna kick out onto that. You know, they they have some cognitive decision making, like there is some reading of the of what's going on in front of them to start the guided search. But once they commit, like once they're flying through the air, I mean, they're not they're not making decisions at that point, they're just interacting with the challenge in front of them, and either they solve it or they don't. Right? So if we start thinking about you in that context of solving boulder problems, as you become more and more experienced, you become better and better at knowing. I don't necessarily mean cognitively known, I mean knowing in an embodied sense that you have a match for the challenge that's in front of you, right? Like, you know, there's climbs that I've walked up through, and I'm like, I'm gonna flash this, like that's V9 or something. You know, that that's gonna like I know I can flash that right now. Right, that fits me. You know, it was really interesting watching Haiti and and Keenan and Aidan when they were here. You know, we would go out to the boulders and they would spend two hours tinkering and touching and feeling and and and looking and putting ticks on and brushing them off and putting tick over here and brushing them off. They didn't put the rock shoes on, right? They spent two hours like going into the details of this, like it was a Michelangelo painting, and and went so deep down the rabbit hole. And then eventually they would wait for the conditions to be perfect, they would wait for everything to feel exactly right, and then you just pull on and just do it first try or second try. The search was so like and when they did it, it looked like they had like a thousand goes on it, right? Like it the coordination was absolutely attuned to the challenge. They had previous information of these climbs, even though they'd never pulled on. How could you do that otherwise? Right? They were so attuned to that information in the environment that when they decided that yes, they had a cognitive layer, yes, they had ticked a hold, they knew there was a foothold over there, yes, they knew how to grab that hold, they had practiced that off the ladder or off the ground. But like your focus of attention, I mean, you you can't hold on to two thoughts at the same time. I mean, that's not possible, right? They've only got eight seconds to climb this thing, and there's like an infinite amount of things you can do, yet somehow they find the one that worked for them absolutely flawlessly, first try every time.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:51

The best of the best. It's crazy to watch.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:54

Have you ever had that phenomenon where you pull on for a flash go? It just feels perfect, effortless. You fall because it wasn't effortless and you fell because it was hard. And then you pull on for a second go and just feel like a bumbling idiot. Like, what's going on there? Do you have any tips on how to solve that second go woes that I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'm sure everyone listening has experienced that where you just tap into something beautiful for your flash go. Your second go feels like you are well, it feels like it should have been your first go where you didn't know what was going on.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:27

Yeah, I mean, I think obviously I I can't give you I can't give you a brilliant explanation of that. You know, I would say that there's probably a psychological component to that and an intentional component to that, and possibly a conditions of uh in some scenarios, and obviously your body is changing from one attempt to the next. So there are quite a few variables, so it's hard to like narrow that down. I suppose the probably the one that seems most likely is the is the psychological, you know, what whatever's going on there on a psychological level, you know, there there is you go from the the the again for lack of a better way of describing it, you go from the beginner's mind to the I should, I should. And in the back of your mind, you have a cycle of, well, I should be climbing this well, I should do this now. And when you're focused on I should, you're not attuned to the sensory information in the environment, you're attuned to the repetition in your head. You know, a lot of sports psychology really focuses on attention, right? And it doesn't just mean, I mean, obviously it's it's decision making, like remembering the foothold, remembering that, but you know, when we climb or when we do anything, we are picking up this stream of information that is guiding successful movement. And if we are drifting and thinking about something that's cognitively going around in circles in our head and having our attention hooked onto that, it's a waste of, you know, there is essentially a mismanagement of resources. So psychological interventions really help athletes pay attention to what's important and stay open, as open as possible, and have as much resource as possible. Go to the the really rich specifying information in the environment that's going to lead to success. Because what's happening in your head doesn't matter, right? That's not helpful. It's not, and we don't necessarily have to get rid of that, but there are strategies and tactics that we can use to disconnect or detach from those thoughts and that loop and put the resources into the information in our environment. So I would say the second go, probably, you know, your first go, you don't have that expectation, you know. So you're really tuned into the information in the environment. You're just because you've nothing to lose, you're just, why would you not pay attention to that? You're not thinking about anything else. There's no fear of failure, there's no people are watching me. You're just like, you're in that uh highly attuned and receptive state of mind that's really productive and good and leads to success ultimately, leads to your best performance.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:11

I was gonna say, like, I feel like I'm open and just reactive versus proactive where I'm like, oh, I should do this move like this, or I I know I can do this move because I just did it, versus you kind of just pull on, you kind of have this openness to all the information that's being thrown at you. Uh, you said that maybe there are some strategies or ways to make sure that you're not wasting brain cycles on other things, or at least disconnecting that from that uh experience. Any any ones come to mind that you can make a chair?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:45

So so over the last, you know, obviously we've been coaching over the last 15 years and exploring all these different angles, but we're obviously, you know, we're we're really interested in other different psychological things, and we've, you know, we've been exposed to different therapies and and this and that over the years. There is a one tool that comes from the third wave of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is really powerful as a coaching intervention. And it's uh it comes from a method called acceptance and commitment therapy. Have you come across this?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:18

No.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:19

So acceptance and commitment therapy is it's a it's a a psychological intervention that allows us to notice thoughts and feelings, accept the thoughts and feelings, uh, come back to our embodied present self and focus on the goal and the outcome that we're trying to we're trying to get to. So it's actually a really interesting loop. We discovered this, I mean, we discovered this years ago, and honestly, we started, I use this in our coaching all the time. It's really interesting. You can use it in a therapy sense and you can use it in a coaching sense, and it works in a therapy sense, it generally has to be done by a therapist to someone, but in a coaching sense, you can actually, once you understand the accept and commit loop, you can actually just do it and practice it on yourself in different ways. And I use it literally every day of my life. So the real premise is, and again, this is off the back of the third wave of cognitive behavioral therapy, is that we don't have to get rid of negative thoughts. It's not helpful to get rid of negative thoughts. It's much more productive to accept those thoughts and get used to them being there and sit with them. And through this practice over time, those thoughts start to drift further and further away. And the implications of them, you detach from them. And the implications from them and the impact they have in your behavior become less and less and less. So you have to practice this over time. I mean, you can do it immediately, but you also then get better and better and better at it. So, again, the process is really simple. It's it's accept and commit. So you're accepting the thoughts and feelings, and you're committing to either value-driven behavior or I like to say sort of goal-driven behavior, what I'm trying to do. Often you have to do that in spite of the discomfort, right? So you might have a scenario where by following this guided behavior that you've determined in a lucid state is the right way to move forward for you. You know, an example might be in life, you know, okay, I'm not gonna shout when my child makes me angry, right? Like I want to shout, but I know that that is not in line with my values. So even though I feel the frustration and I have the thoughts of that and I have the emotion of that, I'm gonna notice it. I'm gonna take a breath, I'm gonna come back to myself, and I'm going to act in line with my values, which is stay calm and have a proper conversation, right? So that tool starts to be really useful in sport, and you can really leverage this and practice it, and it's really effective. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. Something that I have found, and again, we're going to go off on a tangent here a little bit. I kind of discovered meditation at the same time that I discovered ACT. And for me, meditation was the tool that tied everything together. And the really valuable thing for me, or one of the most valuable things about meditation, was not having a clear brain or like necessarily being able to focus my attention on something. It was understanding the architecture of my mind and starting to notice how thoughts and feelings arise and drift away. So, those two things in parallel, a lot of my clients, I end up, I encourage them to get into meditation, I teach them act, and over, you know, periods of time, they start trying these out in different scenarios. It works really well in climbing as well. You know, it's it's this practice of understanding that you're going to have these stressful thoughts and feelings. They're going to arise and there are strategies, and act as a really simple one that you can learn about and implement quite quickly. And I think it's really popular because of that. It's really effective. It works really well in a therapeutic setting.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:14

Yeah, I think that the thing that's really powerful to hear from my end of that is just that sometimes we look at people and we think of them doing could be scary things or doing things under a lot of pressure, like in competition. And we think that they are just robots and that, or or that they've found some secret in the sense of that they don't have fear or they don't have doubt or they don't have anything negative in their brain, that they're just just champs, you know, they just show up and crush. And uh, yeah, I was sharing with you that I MC'd like a mellow film tour in San Francisco, and I, you know, got up on stage, which is not something I'm used to doing, and it scared me. But when they asked me to do it, I thought, wow, I really want to do that. And I had some moment where I was like, well, I know I'll be scared, but it's okay, just do it and be scared. Like uh, I knew that there was no way to erase the fear, but it was still something I wanted to do. And you know, you feel that, you know, let's say it's the last day of a trip and you have good conditions and you want to do your project, you might be scared, you might be nervous, you might have a bunch of pressure, but are you just not going to even try? Like you have to just accept uh I I use the word for it. Um, you know, you have to accept and move forward, accept and commit. And I don't know, it's just a good message that's like that's the way forward is not alongside the negative thoughts completely, but that you have to be able to disconnect from them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Uh and yeah, that that's helpful for me. Yeah. Not thinking that there's just some secret that maybe uh, you know, the best competitors never feel any doubt or anything because that'd be a hard pillow swallow that somehow I I can never feel afraid again.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:58

And and the the other side of that is that by practicing psychological tools like this, you know, you gain psychological flexibility, right? So if you leave your climb to the last day, right, if you're worried about not doing it, right, that's a feedback loop that's distracting you as well. So almost paradoxically, like by using these tools, you get to the point where it's okay if you don't do it. It doesn't matter if you don't send it in your last day, right? And when you truly believe that you have your best performance, right? So that's the the game is it's complicated and it's subtle. And it's like when you truly let go of that, you then free up the resources to actually have your best performance anyway. So it's like starts to create this really interesting feedback loop. You know, there there is another thing I'd like to touch on upon that that you brought up with me. There are other ways, right? Like people, you know, and it's funny, Gazel and I uh uh Finlay and I chatted about this recently. Like we were comparing kind of notes on how we approached dangerous roots when we were a bit younger. And like we just forced ourselves to do it, right? Like it it wasn't, it was terrifying, it was stressful, it was probably it was it wasn't the best psychological way to handle things, and it it probably didn't lead to our best performance, right? But that's just that's what we did, and you know, it it it was it's okay, right? Like it wasn't actually that fun, and it could have been funner and it could have been more productive, you know. And I also see that there's a few people I have interacted with before who, for example, were competition climbers and you know, we're doing really well in competition, and they kind of harnessed anger as a tool. And, you know, it it's really difficult to look at that person and be like, huh, and you have to do this experiment, it's hard to do this experiment. But you know, the question is, is that anger valuable in driving this person because it's got them so far? Or actually, is that the last thing that's holding them back from getting to the real next level? And it's it's a really difficult thing to pull apart and explore that. But it's it's it it's that I've seen that and I've experienced that, and I've had to navigate through that before. And so there's so many different mindfills of this and interesting uh scenarios that arise, obviously, coaching people for all these years. Um, so there's three slightly different uh lenses to the same question almost.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:32

Okay, quick shout out to Hazel Finlay for connecting us. You are her coach. And after I did a podcast with Hazel, she was like, Hey, you might want to talk to Cy. Uh he's got a bunch of good insights. Maybe you should heal him up. I was like, Oh, I know Cy. So um thank you, Hazel, for um getting this rolling. Uh that idea of anger or of disconnecting from it is really interesting. It made me think of Nathaniel Coleman, who is an incredible comp climber, an Olympian, a silver medalist Olympian. He came on the pod, and the one thing that really stuck with me after it was the guy flashes everything. He is an incredible executor. And so I said, Nathaniel, what do you do when you fall? Like what goes through your head? You know, you got four minutes, whatever beta you had didn't work out, or or maybe it did, but now you're tired. Just what what goes through your head? And he said something to the effect of if you're too loud, then you don't get to hear what your body told you on how to solve it. And it just always stuck with me where you could have all these emotions and thoughts and desires and wants, but you then you're not getting the feedback of what actually went wrong because it's maybe that quiet voice that says, Hey, I think that was good, but you know, you put your foot a little bit too low on that volume. You need that extra couple of inches. You're like, okay, you know, and just that ability to, you know, what got you there may not be what gets you to the next uh step is also a a little bit of a different concept, but one I find fascinating. Uh, where it's this often uh said thing where like whatever gets you to you know fifth place in the world may not get you to first place in the world. And the ability to almost unlearn what got you there may be, well, I would be like, maybe that's how you go from good to great, would be uh the classic thing for me to say.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:30

And and that is a really difficult place to explore because they got all the way there. Yeah. Right? Are we gonna start changing things? Or are we gonna stay the course? So, you know, and and the the consequences of getting that wrong at that level, you know, they're high, right? If this is make or break, if somebody, especially if an athlete is thinking that they're on a runway and deems fifth place as not successful and podium as successful, right? You know, because if you start to change things or they, you know, you're you're they have to be like, this is right. I understand what you're saying, like this makes sense. Like I'm 100%, you know, obviously then that that type of thing, if you're in that scenario with somebody, there's a lot of trust has been built over a long time. So it would it takes a unique circumstance, I think, for that to start exploring that. And I I don't have direct experience of that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:31

Yeah, that's well, I mean, that that's always gonna be a tricky one, getting to go from fifth place in the world to first place, maybe just as far away as getting from not world class to world class, and it's something I always am interested in exploring. And I mean, I I've bumped into something similar in my climbing, clearly not at that kind of level, but I always depended on my strength and try hard. And it really worked well, trying really hard. And I was gifted with a lot of natural strength, maybe coming out of gymnastics or something. But at some point, it just I felt like I was banging my head against the wall. And it's like you can only try so hard. And uh, you know, I don't know if it really uh propelled me into a level of greatness, but it was a big shift in my mindset where I thought, maybe like I need to find the right crystal on this crimp instead of just kind of getting angry and trying even harder. And I don't know what the signs are when you need to make that shift, but you know, if you hit a plateau for long enough and like the thing you lean on again and again and again isn't working, I don't know. Uh, maybe uh take a take a look in the mirror.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:42

Yeah, it's uh you know, there there are many ways to to break out of a plateau, and there are many ways to define what success looks like, and that definitely comes in a case-by-case uh level. You know, every individual has to kind of explore that, and that's definitely something that we we explore in our coaching and the people we work with, you know. I think it's a bit more, of course, in your example of going from fifth to first, it's a bit more clear-cut what success is in that scenario, you know, whereas if we we go to us in a sort of recreational sense of like wanting to improve our climbing, I think it definitely requires you defining what that means. And of course, uh each person can have their own slightly different interpretation of that. You know, does it does it mean climbing a harder grade, or does it mean you know, some sort of quantitative or qualitative assessment of their climbing performance? Or does it mean becoming more of a generalist if you're a specialist, or more of a specialist if you're a generalist? And you know, I think that's another thing that's definitely really fun about climbing. You know, you can you can you can almost reinvent yourself if you don't have the demand, if you if you're not a competition climber, you know, and I think that's what competition climbers seem to love. To do when they come out of competition, you know, they go in all these different directions and explore all of these different things. And I think that's super interesting. But yeah, that I the idea of progress and and you know assessing where you are right now and where you want to go, it's quite a broad topic, and you can spend a lot of time exploring that and discussing that. There's

How To Go From Good To Great

SPEAKER_02 1:28:19

a lot of nuance.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:20

Well, with with that caveat that it's going to depend how one defines it, it just is a perfect lead up to my question of Sai, how do you go from good to great?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:31

Yeah, I I thought about this, you know. I I I I think that there are two different things that I I would like to say. And you know, one of them is more of a trait, and the other one is more of a behavior. The the trait I think that is is really important, for lack of a better word way to describe it, I think is dogged tenacity. You know, I think like to go from good to great, you have to have dogged tenacity. You know, you have to be able to grab onto that and not let go and run the course with that. And I don't think that there are many climbers who have gone from good to great without that trait. It's interesting. I I don't know whether that can be developed or whether that's just something that kind of emerges uh in your personality. Uh the the biggest behavior for me, and you know, there are many great climbers out there who deadlift. There are many great climbers out there who hangboard. There are many great climbers that do all sorts of quirky and interesting interventions. But there are, in my opinion, there are no great climbers out there who haven't been completely obsessed with the terrain and the climbs that they're choosing to climb on, and that haven't built a runway from one climb into the next over really long periods of time to get them to where they they want to get with their climbing. So I think you know, that idea of the climbs build the climber and really leaning into that. I can't think of many examples where that obsession with the different climbs and the different environments, you know, there's there's kind of two different types of climbers that I noticed. There's there's those that like go out to the boulders, let's say, and they'll kind of cherry-pick, you know, the next climb. And they have their reasons for that. And there's lots of different reasons for why they might pick that. And they kind of cherry-pick a climb over here, go through the process, then they cherry-pick a climb over here. And then there's the climbers who look at the entire bouldering field as a palette, as like an environment, and they look at the environment as a whole and they're like, how can I navigate through this environment in the most effective and efficient way so that I can take advantage of everything? And it's the climbers, in my opinion, that do that are the ones that go from good to great. And I, you know, I see that everywhere, and I see that with all of the climbers that I've interacted with over the years. Uh so that that would be my that would be my thought on that.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:19

The climb makes the climber. Uh, or or wait, what'd you say? Did I say that wrong? The climb the climb builds the climber, but yeah. The climb builds the climber. Yeah, it it's funny because I the name of the podcast is Test Piece. And when I think about how I always like to see a new boulder field, it was like there is the you know, if we're talking about the buttermilks, it's like, well, I gotta do uh what was it, the hunk, which is like this crimpy V2 tall slab that's just magnificent. And to me, like a really kind of right of passage, like that requires a lot of skills. And then you have right next to it, you got Pope's prow, uh, or you're across across the way. And you just start looking at all these things that I would argue, you know, you could call them test pieces, and they're test pieces because it's kind of like come come learn this, come, come see if you can get to the top of this one. And you know, when you have a great guide, I because I remember my uh this guy, what is it? Is it Dave Friedman? Dave Fre, a guy uh early uh climber and bishop when you first took me to the biggest. Yeah, yeah. This is literally what he took me to. He's like, here you go. Here you go. Like, what do you think about this one? Fly boy, you know, just like it, you know, and it it's definitely a different way than just saying, yeah, what's the highest grade in my style I can do? Like, what do I, you know, want to take home with me versus kind of like what challenges are laying out in front of me that and they're kind of stepping stones, you know? Like I I definitely, yeah, everyone has that local crag, and you're like, this is the one I need to do. And then once I do that one, maybe I can do this one. And I I feel like just that's an interesting idea of a runway and a ramping and expanding it to your whole whole life, you know, your whole life.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:15

And you know, you can kind of, I think, like there's so many fun games you can play. I love I like to play what's the lowest graded climb you can't do. Yeah, yeah, I it's it's hilarious, right? You start to like notice that. There's there's there's a I don't fair ahead, there's two boulders that you can see from each other, and there's a 6B that starts on the undercling. I've done the V9 version, but I can't do the 6B stand version. And from there, I look across at this classic V12 arette. They're both the same difficulty for me. They're literally the same challenge level for me. And like, I don't know what that what that means, but you know, it's it are what you can take from that, other than grades don't make any sense. But uh it's kind of quirky, you know, it's fun, and and I I I think that the you know, trying to find things that are and that's a big part of coaching, right? It's like nudging people in those directions, you know, again, shaping, helping them use the environment to shape them and and going and trying the things that they wouldn't potentially try, and and understanding that if you think about a terrain matrix, right, you might be at V4 in dinos and and v10 in crimpy walls. So those are ultimately the same challenge levels. So if you want to progress and you, you know, progression can be broken down in this more modular way, and you can kind of you can do lots of really interesting things with that and and kind of helping the climber use that environment in different ways to then push their progress forward.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:46

Well, I think people are often aware of this, but then when you really zoom out, and we talked about movement, the science of movement and learning movement, and then tying that to the climb builds the climber. And while people might hear, like, oh, I know I'm bad on dinos, I should do it, but really zooming out and thinking about it as the climb builds the climber, and it's up to you to put yourself in those positions, or maybe find a coach like you, Sai, to help you find the optimal position or the optimal um challenge uh to move forward. But I just think that that's interesting to tie it all the way back to the climb builds the climber. I think that's a good way to look at it, man. I so I love what you're doing. Vertical ascents, you guys. Uh, go check it out. Um, that was really fun. I do have some more questions for you on the Patreon side, but I feel like that was a nice place to end our normal pod on, then we'll move to the bonus questions.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:44

Yes. Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much for having me. And uh yeah, I'm excited to hear what the Patreon has to say.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:53

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