As an athlete who has self-coached for the last 14 years, I have had to rely solely on my own insight and reflection on my climbing performance. Without a coach or a highly analytical training partner, I have found it difficult to extract all the valuable information from my attempts and use it to diagnose my issues and validate successful results. Even when I am climbing in my most present state, I know that my mind can only effectively focus on one or two aspects of any single move. Additionally, even when it comes to those focused moves, there will almost always be a gap between my personal perspective and reality. I have found that capturing video of my sessions and analyzing the recordings has been instrumental in my process of learning from experiences and improving my performance. In this article, I want to talk about the opportunities of utilizing this fantastic tool and how you can use it to increase your climbing IQ.
How can you Use Your Phone to Improve at Climbing Quickly?
I believe that video analysis is useful for all aspects of your climbing and training. The goal of capturing the moment on camera (your phone) is to observe our actions from a different perspective and find areas that can be improved. Our goal as climbers and athletes is to ensure that what we do to achieve better results is done to its maximal effectiveness, which means using proper form! This applies to on AND off the wall training and performing. If you can improve the form of your hangboarding, supplemental exercises, mobility training, projecting, and climbing drill practice, then you will get better results and avoid injury more often.
I am always shocked when I see highly experienced climbers performing exercises or executing basic climbing techniques with poor form. Video tutorials and examples are widely available on the internet, so why are they not videoing themselves and evaluating their form against these models? One of the best decisions I made a few years back was to video all of my supplemental exercises and basic techniques on the wall and compare them to videos of highly qualified professionals and coaches that I found on YouTube. It was an eye-opening experience that made overnight improvements to my training and climbing.
What should you be looking for?
In climbing, there are endless moving parts and controllable components of every move we make. So how do you know exactly the reasons that you are falling/struggling? Sadly, you don’t know what you don’t know, but everything is learnable! As you start this process, you will certainly struggle to identify all of your shortcomings and prescribe your own solutions. I remember staring at my videos when I was a teenager and scratching my head, wondering why I couldn’t stick the move I was trying. I could have easily given up and put the camera down and just “tried harder.” But I was determined to be a better coach for myself and learn more about climbing movements. So I played the video over and over and listed out all of the moving parts. One by one, I adjusted different aspects of the movements I was making; pushing the hip in later, twisting the knee more, locking the left hand closer to the shoulder, anything that I had reason to believe was influencing the move’s rate of success, I would change. Naturally, over time, you will confirm the validity of dials you can turn in different situations.
I liken this process to a DJ mixing music at a concert. The DJ has a general idea of what the crowd wants to hear and will react best to, but every crowd in every city is slightly different. Just like every climb and every move is slightly different. So, the DJ uses his soundboard with all of its dials and buttons to remix his songs and change the sound in real-time to adapt to the new crowd. At first, the DJ has no clue what all of the buttons and knobs on the soundboard do. They must experiment with each one, listening to their songs over and over, making changes to different components (treble, bass, reverb, etc.), and then listening to the new sound. We are the DJ, watching our videos again and again after adjusting aspects of our movement, learning which ones have which affects.
Wall angles, movement/hold types, and techniques all have their own checklists of what you can look for and manipulate to make appropriate modifications. At this point in my career, the moment I see an overhung boulder problem, a checklist of 50 boxes pops up in my head (all of the applicable things to look for when analyzing overhangs and the way I can turn their “dials”). As I look closer and read the sequence and see that it is a 12-Move compression line, the list narrows down to 20 boxes. Now as I analyze the crux move; a right-hand throw to the lip, 3ft above me off of a sloper rail and bunched-up feet, I narrow my list down to 5 boxes. I have encountered many moves like this before and know exactly what influences the perceived difficulty and likelihood of success on a move like this.
Tips and Tricks for Better Climbing Video Analysis
Video offers another viewpoint of your climbing experience, one that you can’t see when you are climbing. Therefore, having multiple viewpoints offers you more insight and can provide more information about your experience. I recommend getting multiple angles of yourself climbing so you can better see what is going on! For example, videos from behind are better for identifying lateral and vertical movements (sideways/up-down), while profile views are better for analyzing your proximity to the wall and trajectory (in-out movement).
This may sound obvious, but I have found that getting close-up shots of holds gives me better insight into how my feet and fingers truly interact with the holds. I prefer this to simply zooming in, as the quality of the shot is crucial in recognizing the details.
When watching back my videos, I like to put them into apps like Coaches Eye and On Form in order to watch them in slow motion, in reverse, draw lines on my videos and even play them side by side to each other and next to videos of people who used the beta I am trying successfully.
A keen eye picks up much more than just what happens on the wall. Experienced video analysts know to watch for things such as:
Fall Location (Where do you land when you come off the wall?)
Fall Rotation and Direction (How does your body spin and tilt in air? What does that mean?)
Rest Time (How long were you on the ground for? Was it enough time to fully recover?)
Muscle Tension (is the muscle flexed or loose?)
Shadows
Joint Angles (Acute, Obtuse, which do you want, why?)
Trajectory and Timing
Velocity
Gaze Duration
Pace
Efficiency opportunities in “easier” areas of the climb
All of these factors can be observed in your videos and all of them offer insight into what is occurring and why. It is your job to identify how these things work and what impact they have on your experience. I highly recommend spending $20 on a small tripod that you can easily pack into your climbing bag or crash pad and bring to the crag or gym.My tripodeven comes with a bluetooth button to start and stop video, so I don’t have to walk back and forth to the phone after every attempt! This small investment and simple habit of clicking record before each attempt and analyzing your movements during your rest periods can be the next major leap in your rate of progression!
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