Speed Climbing Dictionary: Vol 1

VOL 1: Mistakes, Corrections and Focus Points

Hi everyone! With today’s post we want to make a step forward in becoming a more cohesive and universal community. When you go in a foreign country what’s make you feel a foreigner? Of course, the language.

Our goal is to create a speed climbing dictionary with which we can talk all together the same language and like this we can understand each other even better!

Today we will talk about 3 very important words that we use in both training and competition:

• Mistake
• Correction
• Focus Point

First of all, what is a mistake? Of course that’s a very personal opinion and so we have to understand the person with which we are talking to, to understand his level of expertise and precision.

If I’m a PRO athlete putting the foot 3-4 cm (1-2in) to the left it can be a mistake, if i’m a novice it can become a mistake only if i miss the hold, so:

A mistake happens when the personal standards of technique execution are not met, the mistake is a personal metric and so it can be different for every athlete based on the level of expertise and the personal and coach standards.

From a mistake we can develop a theory to explain why it happens, so we will start to consider the forces that are involved in the movement, which one of them are not useful to propel us toward the finish button and which one have to be reinforced to have a better performance.

Of course part of the correction is linked to the body position, and for body we mean all, the center of mass, the upper limbs and lower limbs positions.

We are not considering the changes of techniques because they go through a different iter.

Once we have all these informations we can present a correction to ourselves or to an athlete so:

A correction is the act of objectively analyze a movement or a sequence of movements, the forces involved, the body position and all the factors that can influence it, and describe the best way these factors can be managed to obtain the maximal performance.

It’s an explanation of the factors and therefore it doesn’t give any direct input to the athlete.

Arrived at this point, we can finally start to give ourselves (if we are the athlete) or to our athletes, the focus points. As a focus point we mean an extreme simplification of the correction that will be used by the athlete during the run on the wall. The goal of that focus point is to NOT alter too much the thinking process because, if it’s too complicated, the muscle memory will be overwritten by the “manual” inputs and we risk to loose a lot of smoothness. If it’s not strong enough we will think it’s doing something and in the reality it’s changing something only in our minds.

So, the strength of the focus point lays in it’s simplicity together with the impact it makes on the run of the athlete.

So if we want to define an input we can say:

A focus point is a marked simplification of a correction that is given to the athlete to be used in practice to alter the current technique and make it better than before.

Said that, all these terms are essentially a part of speed climbing and it's important that we start discussing about them and their implications in order to make the speed climbing community more robust and equipped. If you want to see any specific term or want to comment about some term, send us a message to our Instagram (@speedclimbingworld / @speedclimbingapp)