Board climbing is KILLING your outdoor climbing

Full working session on Acta Non Verba and Red Miso here https://www.patreon.com/tomohalloran

I’m all about board climbing and think boards can be a massive training tool winner. We just need to know how to use them to our advantage. It’s easy t get sucked into the hack and pull mindset, but it’s not going to help you outside. Hopefully these tips can help you along the way.

Also, some fun on Red Miso and Acta Non Verba on the Tension Board 2.

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have you ever considered how your favorite board climbing training sessions could be holding you back from your outdoor performance today I’m going to share with you the three big mistakes that I see so many people making and let you know how you can avoid them so that you can stop wasting your precious time and skin on your next project also I had a nice rainy day session on the tension board 2 the other day where I tried the two hardest projects on the wall at the moment it was a nice day so we’ll just splash a little bit of that along our journey today today and if you’re new here good day I am Tomo howerin I live in Australia I competed at the Tokyo Olympics I’ve climbed 369a plus Outdoors on a rope v14 on the boulders and just a general board frother so strap on in for more of that if you can most boards reward what I call front-wheel drive climbing and if you’re not aware of it you can be accidentally leaning quite heavily into this bad technique this front-wheel drive climbing is super inefficient it bleeds power everywhere and will generally result in frustration and walking home empty-handed so what is front wheeel drive climbing basically it’s relying too heavily on your arms to pull yourself through a movement not only are you tiring yourself out unnecessarily but it’s also saying goodbye to more than 50% of your body which is there to help you get through the moves many of us can be in this boat without even realizing it myself included my quick check or reset to see if I am doing this accidentally is to just go through a move and think about what my feet or lower half of my body could be doing can they be getting used a little bit more could I be swinging in with my feet could I be pulling in pushing like twisting my hips there’s often so many more things that we could be doing rather than just kind of concentrating on what’s holding onto the Rock and just trying to pull through harder actor non verba V12 at 40° it’s had seven ascents apparently at the 40° angle none on any other but apparently it’s quite hard and actually there’s a longer extension version on of it on the 12x 12 board so that would be cool to try one day it looks hard but I’m very excited for it uh I’m not really sure I haven’t seen any videos I haven’t seen any beta for it whether we end up left hand to start and then cross over or we’re going to cross come out maybe go again feet working real hard guess right hand up this thing’s horrific maybe there there or there there let’s have a flash go see what that turns out to be [Music] [Music] gosh that’s a hard cross into there ah okay so you rock up maybe hit there that seems crazy actually interesting trying to decipher this stuff do I just try harder it this direction or am I missing something oh that felt okay shoulder so if I hit here what happens next [Music] [Music] [Music] M ooh sweet LED boards and spray walls in general do tend to encourage just heave ho pulling because the movement becomes a little bit more simple and you’re not necessarily rewarded for finding the subtlety of how to put your foot on a hold often times we think that pulling harder is the answer when actually there’s a lot more efficiency to be had from below our armpits a lack of complexity in movement on boards can be another thing that is massively holding us back for our outdoor climbing following on from that front-wheel drive concept If all we’re doing on a board is just a dirty big front step and just pulling on through it’s really limiting our exposure to a whole pile of different techniques and our technique box just becomes smaller and smaller what we wanted be doing on these boards is exploring possibilities and finding a bit of funk is there a way to pop in a drop KN or a heel hawk or tow Hawks pushing and pulling with our feet there’s a ton that we can play with here that can all be transferred super neatly out onto the rock little rest break cuz I just realized that I’ve actually just I think done all of the moves but I just popped inside get some jelly beans and fun fact I’m not actually I quite enjoy the old SAS Barella flavor it’s actually gone surprisingly well I was expecting that to be a bit harder but initially it was just like wo that’s like another level but kind of comes together I think that’s an interesting thing to think about when you’re projecting stuff is just like give it those few attempts and just really feel it out it’s really easy to just ride it off as like n that’s never going to happen but that feels like it could almost go in the next couple of goes it might not but it [Music] [Music] might sick I am very keen to see what the rest of that Boulder looks like I want to find a 12x 12 nature is obviously infinitely more complex than what we find on these boards but it doesn’t mean that the boards are lacking in an ability to give us some good lessons one of my biggest frustrations when I’m watching someone board climb or just climbing in general is lack of body tension through their core down to their feet pulling hard and Cutting Loose on moves is not how you get through 99.9% of outdoor climbs yet this tends to be how many of us get up these boards then when it gets to the weekend and we can’t keep tension on that footer we’re suddenly going I just need to get stronger and yeah it’s true but we generally equate that strongness to our arm arms now this has been a bit of a like long-standing project of something to just jump on at the end of each session and just give it a go or two red miso v11 at 40° hasn’t been done at 45 keep on just coming up short on this oh man damn oh it felt good I just had it too spayed and I just I felt like I really wanted to go but my fingers were just a little bit too vulnerable and I felt like if I cut and isolated something was going to go pop oh that felt good though damn this is how it goes if you have found this video helpful so far I would love if you could hit the like button we can help spread it around to more people and save them from their unknown silliness because I’m sure most of us don’t want to be wasting our skin and time and everything outside we just want to do more also is there anything that you feel like you have have picked up on that has held you back outside recently it’d be fun to share it down below and we can all kind of learn from each other keeping tension from our arms through to our feet as we climb is simple but complex a drill that you can add into your weekly routine is finding some Boulders that you just do not cut on now finding the difficulty of these moves can be a little bit difficult but it’s worth playing around with and persisting so when I’m talking about the difficulty here I’m not necessarily talking about the grade of the climb but the difficulty of the movement that we’re trying to get better at it might actually be easier to keep tension on a v9 than it is a V4 so there’s no point in trying to look at the grade of something to be the indicator we want the difficulty in this drill to be coming from the core and our feet and legs as we move through the climb not from our Arms This is especially fun if you’ve done a boulder where you have jumped and cut try and do it with holding tension because often you’ll find that the movement that you use to HCK and cut is different to how you would use your body if you’re trying to keep tension you might suddenly find that actually you need to be doing a drop knee and the movement can go from being V6 up to V8 or something and it’s way harder but that’s okay because what we’re doing is training and not performing so just get rid rid of that idea of the grade being too easy perhaps and just work on is my body finding this difficult yeah cool this is working gradually over time you’re going to be building up the strength and the skill and coordination that is required to keep tension through movement and suddenly it’s just going to feel second nature and you’re not going to be cutting loose and just bleeding out all of that strength and power unnecessarily [Music] Dam damn the tension the drama it’s quite rare that we find ourselves jumping and cutting outdoors and that being the most efficient way yet it is what many of us end up kind of defaulting to on these boards the skills and strengths that you’re going to be acquiring as you’re keeping tension and finding the drop knees and all of those different movement patterns are going to massively help you outside another drill that you can use to find more complexity in these board climbs is to climb Boulders two or three different ways there’ll be a different foot sequence a different hand sequence it’s just fun to kind of play around with it and we’re just broadening our climbing IQ and speaking of the lack of complexity of movement one thing that really frustrates me with board climbing are the silly contrived rules no heels no drop knees no matching all of these things were massively highlighted rules when I was growing up climbing and it’s just such a waste the idea was that boards were for training strength and power and the employ in a heel hook was too efficient and not making it hard enough for us and this is just insane I feel super strongly that we need to be developing our strength and our technique at the same time and not over indexing on the strength side because what happens when we get to a boulder problem and we just can’t tow hook or we don’t know how to coordinate a drop knee or you’ve just straight up forgotten that matching is a thing like oh I like fully not dropping it again sick not the session I thought I was going to have when I first started started honestly I nearly didn’t start was in a crap mood and thought I’d just gone fold washing maybe I just need to come out and move my body and just not kind of dive into that bad head space which is very easy for me to do honestly I will fully admit that there is a time and a place for when it was worth concentrating on a more simplified climbing style however you need to be very aware of this and consciously be doing it because otherwise we could be decaying our climbing IQ and speaking of that I would be careful of relying too heavily on beta videos they’re a fun addition in the app but you just need to be aware of how and why you’re going to be using them are you completely stumped after 20 minutes of trying to figure it out on your own or are you just swiping through watching the video before you’ve even pulled on for the first time and potentially decaying your ability to decipher and read sequences and work things out for yourself ultimately it all comes down to knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it because from that position you can be making an informed decision about your training if the only time that you try to keep tension think of a creative solution and move well is in the field of play it’s going to be pretty rough out there thank you so much for watching I appreciate you all and I will see you on the next video