The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

action-oriented and love-based. For example: “I have the chance to go out, practice some falls, and get over my falling fears.” By using opportunity in the question, you generate an answer that helps you engage the situation and actively improve your performance. This is where you want to be. This is love-based motivation. You can use this three-part experiment for any performance-related question.
    4. Deliberate Breathing
    Setup : Choose a route that is easy for you, either toprope or lead.
    Set the intention : to breathe deliberately. As you climb, simply focus on breathing continuously. With each breath, force the air out with your abdominal muscles and blow it audibly out of your mouth. By doing this you hear and feel that you are breathing continuously and not holding your breath. Your inhalation will become automatic and the breath cycle longer and deeper.
    Breathing continuously and deliberately helps you stay in the process and reduces fears and anxieties.
    5. Soft-Eyes Focus
    Soft-eyes will make you more receptive and attentive to your surroundings.
    Setup : Choose a route that is easy for you, either toprope or lead. As you climb, don’t focus on any one hold, feature, or body part. You will see everything in your peripheral vision as well as what’s right in front of you.
    Set the intention : To spread out your visual attention so that it covers the whole field of view.
    Normal vision focuses attention on a small part of your surroundings. Your conscious mind is isolating parts of the environment and homing in on them. By not focusing on any one thing in your field of view you spread out your attention. Soft-eyes focus gives equal value to all things, enabling you to obtain more complete information from the situation. Information can be picked up by your subconscious and incorporated into your climbing effort.
    6. Left/Right Breathing
    You may have heard of left-brain, right-brain research. Studies have shown that the two hemispheres of your cerebral cortex specialize in different kinds of jobs. The left brain is more analytical, logical, detail-oriented, sequential, and thinks in terms of objects. The right brain is more intuitive, creative, imaginative, and thinks in terms of relationships. Figuring out sequences and rests while working a route is a typical left-brain dominated activity. “Going with the flow” during an on-sight is more right-brained. The right brain is responsible for your connection to what, in this book, I’ve called the subconscious mind.
    During the day your brain alternates dominance between left and right hemispheres and this dominance manifests itself in your breathing. Approximately every two hours the dominance switches. When the right brain is dominant, you breathe primarily through your left nostril because the right brain operates the left side of the body, and vice versa.
    The Left/Right Breathing exercise helps you intentionally balance the hemispheres of your brain. First, inhale through your right nostril while holding your left nostril closed. Exhale through your left nostril while holding your right nostril closed. Repeat three times, and then switch sides.
    Chapter 3, Accepting Responsibility
    1. Describing Objectively
    This exercise involves describing a climbing situation as if you were a scientist. Described objectively, a route will sound the same regardless of who describes it because an objective description has nothing to do with ability. This means the description won’t include subjective words such as good, bad, hard, easy, reachy, pumpy, etc. Have your belayer also describe the route and see if your descriptions are similar. Then look for subjective elements in your description and eliminate them. Your goal is to gather information about the situation in order to see it as clearly as possible, without subjectivity or illusions.
    You can do this exercise for various parts of a climbing situation, including:
    A) The route. Describe the angle, type of rock, size of edges, spacing of protection, features, etc.
    B) Your performance. Once you’ve climbed, describe your balance, your breathing, how well you stayed with your intention, etc.
    2. Shirking Observation
    As you become more familiar with the Rock Warrior’s Way approach to risk-taking, you’ll gain awareness of self-limiting and self-empowering talk. To refine this awareness, notice how self-limiting talk occurs at the climbing areas you frequent. Listen to other climbers. Do they become