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

schema-rules for each. These motor programs, no matter how well learned, will work only for similar situations—and they may not apply particularly well at the outer limits of difficulty at these crags. Worse yet, when you travel to new areas, your limited skills and schema-rules will leave you climbing at a much lower grade or flailing on routes of the grade you’re accustomed to sending at your home area.

Transfer of Skill
     
    In motor learning the idea of transfer relates to how practice of a skill in one activity carries over to enhance performance of another, different activity. One startling, but apparently consistent, result in this field of study is that transfer is usually either absent or small, even between seemingly similar activities (Schmidt 1991). The complexity, coordination, and integration of a skilled movement are so specific that they derive very little help from other skilled movements. Therefore, practice at climbing will improve climbing skill, coordination, and technique, while playing around on a slack chain, kicking a Hacky Sack, snowboarding, or what have you are wastes of time for the purpose of improving climbing skill (although these activities may develop mental attributes such as focus and toughness that somewhat translate to climbing).
    This helps us understand why the old assumption that gymnasts, with their incredible strength and motor skills, would instantly become excellent climbers has not proven true. Although climbing and gymnastics obviously share certain physical requirements, the motor skills are very different and they are based, in part, on markedly different underlying capacities.

Rate of Improvement and Your Ultimate Skill Level
     
    According to the Law of Practice, performance improves rapidly from its baseline level when the activity is first practiced and continues to improve in gradually decreasing amounts as ability approaches some ultimate (personal) skill level (see figure 4.2). In learning a simple task, like driving a car, it only takes a few weeks to become fairly skilled. Beyond this, all the thousands of hours you spend driving over the rest of your life will yield only a small amount of improvement.
    The learning curve for complex activities, like golf or climbing, also rises rapidly upward as a result of the initial practice sessions. Because of the high complexity and wide range of skills inherent to these sports, however, you can continue to improve for many years, even decades. In fact, golf would seem to be the more technically difficult sport of the two, since several gifted climbers have reached world-class status in less than five years, while the best golfer ever, Tiger Woods, took fifteen years to ascend to that level—and that was unusually fast!

     
    Figure 4.2 Rate of Skill Acquisition
     

    As discussed in chapter 1, you can maximize your rate of improvement in a specific style of climbing by focusing your practice and training in that one area. It’s increasingly common to observe climbers who quickly progress to a high level of ability in one type of climbing—say, gymnastic bouldering or overhanging crimpfest routes. Since both these endeavors require only a small subset of total climbing skills, it’s possible to focus your practice on developing the small set of motor programs necessary to excel. The trade-off is that your limited motor programs will be a handicap when attempting routes outside your area of specialization—these climbs will feel hard for the grade, perhaps even “impossible.”
    The bottom line: Becoming a proficient, all-around climber is a long-term proposition. The most intelligent approach to training for climbing would be to emphasize learning skill over getting wickedly strong during your first few years in the sport. Developing refined schema-rules for the many different climbing skills takes you many years of climbing at wide range of areas and rock types. So while you may become a highly skilled specialist climber in just a few years, you can continue to expand the depth and breadth of your skills even after twenty or thirty years (I know that I still am!).

Practice Strategies to Accelerate Learning of Skills and Enhance Schema-Rules
     
    If you want to maximize improvement, then you need to know how to practice optimally. Acquiring a new skill requires a progression through the three stages of motor learning before you will be able to use the new skill efficiently and intuitively. Depending on the