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

year-round whether you climb indoors or out. Regardless of your tenure in the sport, significant gains in your climbing technique and overall ability will result from a commitment to regularly employing some of these drills in your routine. Apply these drills to accelerate learning (or to unlearn bad habits of movement) of the fundamental techniques outlined in this chapter.

An Overview of Motor Learning and Effective Skill Practice
     
    The importance of motor learning theory to the subject of training for climbing became apparent to me in the early 1990s as a result of conversations with Dr. Mark Robinson and thanks to ongoing input from my wife, Lisa Ann. As an LPGA golf pro (and climber) with an education in the field of kinesiology, Lisa Ann occasionally discussed the methods used by elite golfers to learn very difficult skills (for me, impossible!). At about the same time, Mark Robinson (former ’Gunks hardman and now an orthopedic surgeon in California) turned me on to an excellent text on the subject, Motor Learning and Performance by Dr. Richard Schmidt. Robinson then penned a breakthrough piece on the application of motor learning and performance to climbing for my first climbing book, Flash Training (1994). Subsequently I’ve studied the subject in depth, and I’ve even had the good fortune to engage Dr. Schmidt (the founder of schema theory) and discuss motor learning and performance (MLP) and its application to climbing. The result is a much-expanded section on MLP in this edition, along with numerous powerful practice strategies to hone your skills and technique.

Three Stages of Motor Learning
     
    Motor learning is the process by which we acquire physical skills. Regardless of the skill—walking, driving, climbing—learning occurs in three identifiable and overlapping stages: the cognitive, motor, and autonomous stages.
COGNITIVE STAGE
     
    This stage involves thinking about the activity, listening to explanations of it or comparisons to other familiar things, imaginative projection of what it may be like to do it, visual or kinesthetic anticipation of action, and formulation of the goals or desired results for future performance.
    Early attempts in this stage are clumsy, inefficient, and jerky; they expend energy and strength in wasteful ways. This is what you experience when making the first few attempts on an unfamiliar type of climbing (crack, slab, pocketed face, and such) or on a route that’s especially hard for you. During practice sessions in this formative period, you examine the route from the ground in an attempt to figure out the moves and rest positions, and then attempt to climb via toprope or, perhaps, bolt to bolt on lead. Typically the results of such early attempts are rough and imperfect. With continued attempts (practice), however, the quality of performance improves as proprioceptors in the muscles, tendons, joints, and inner ear provide sensory feedback on movement and body position.
    The underlying capacities involved in this stage are largely intellectual and character related and, to a lesser extent, physical. Therefore, people who enjoy early success—those who appear to have natural talent—are not necessarily the strongest, but instead the most perceptive, agile, confident, and relaxed. A real-life example of this is seen daily by climbing instructors who observe a novice female climber outperform her equally novice, but stronger, male partner during their first day on the rocks.
MOTOR STAGE
     
    The motor stage is less a product of self-conscious effort and thought than one of automatic increases in the efficiency and organization of the activity by the nervous system and brain, as a response to continued practice. A neurological “groove” develops as multiple attempts and feedback from multiple sources (internal and external) produce more reliable and effective execution. Energy expenditure decreases, and the natural inertia of the body and limbs is used to advantage—this marked increase in economy of movement is the hallmark of the motor stage of learning.
    When working a climb, this stage is represented by the attempts at redpoint when the moves and clips are known, and the goals are to develop efficiency and to preserve power and endurance for the cruxes. The underlying factors involved in this stage differ from those that lead to early success. Here, they involve the sensitivity of internal movement sensors (proprioception), the accuracy of limb