Training for Climbing, 2nd: The Definitive Guide to Improving Your Performance (How To Climb Series)

analyze why they happened, then bury them. With this attitude you will be free to try chancy moves and risk an occasional mistake. In the long run you’ll often look like a hero, but never like a zero. Surely this is better than embracing the critics and accepting mediocrity all the time.
    Don’t forget, your friends know how good a climber you are, and they won’t think any worse of you because of a poor performance. Anyone else critical of you really doesn’t matter. Work on improving your self-confidence and don’t let the criticisms of others invade your thoughts.
    In the end, embrace the attitude that there are no failures, only results. The results might not be ideal, but they do in fact contain important clues for improvement—do not overlook these guideposts for future success! The bottom line: By challenging your fears and doubling your exposure to fearful situations, you will double your rate of improvement and learn to excel in the most difficult and stressful situations.
    Tips for Managing Fear
     
    1. Analyze your fears to determine if they are real or imagined. Take action to mitigate the risk(s) associated with your legitimate fears.
    2. Overcome imagined fears with reason—know that these phantom fears are bogus. Redirect your thinking in productive ways and resolve to dismiss all other illusionary fears that might surface.
    3. Focus on the process of climbing, and detach from the possible outcomes. Let the climb unfold one move at a time.
    4. Predetermine that you will accept failure should it happen. Recognize that you are not defined by your successes or failures—however, you are defined by the way you react to success and failure.
     
     

Relaxation Training and Centering
     
    More than ever before, there are a multitude of things in our lives that can result in high levels of stress. Our jobs, relationships, possessions, even driving to the crag can trigger a stress response such as muscular tension or negative thoughts. Interestingly, it’s not the events or things in our lives that actually cause the stress, but instead our reaction to them. Knowing this, you are empowered to control your reactions to everything you experience and, in turn, regulate the total amount of stress in your life.
    Recognizing that an event or situation is causing you to become stressed is the first step toward controlling its effects. Foster an acute awareness of your tension levels by regularly asking yourself things like, How do I feel? or Are there any growing pockets of muscular tension? Make such tension checks a regular part of your day. For instance, do a quick check of your tension and stress levels every hour, and especially before any type of event that requires an optimal physiological state (a big meeting or hard climb). Keep an eye out for telltale signs of building tension such as a clenched jaw, overgripping a pencil or the steering wheel, or tightness and burning in the muscles of your neck, shoulders, or back.
    On the rock, tension reveals itself in overgripping of holds, nervously muscling through a crux move, or a general lack of fluid motion. Again, your goal is to recognize and tone down the tension when it begins; otherwise it will rapidly snowball and sabotage your performance. This, in fact, is a common cause of blowing a sequence you thought you had wired, or falling off a route that should be well within your ability. By killing your economy of movement, building tension and stress may very well kill your performance. And it’s probably been happening for so long that you don’t even recognize its negative effects on your climbing.
    The antidote to tension is, of course, relaxation. Following are two highly effective relaxation strategies as well as a great on-the-rock centering sequence that I call the ANSWER. Experiment with all three, and try to incorporate their use throughout your daily activities. In a short time you will become a master of stress and find yourself feeling much more relaxed—and also climbing harder, thanks to an increase in apparent strength (a result of reduced tension in the antagonist muscles and elimination of overgripping).

Progressive Relaxation
     
    In the early 1940s American physician Edmund Jacobson developed a technique known as progressive relaxation, because he felt that by fully relaxing the muscles, you would in turn relax the mind (Garfield 1984). He found that relaxation could be best learned by deliberately tensing and relaxing specific