Some notes on climbing tactics Very few climbers pay attention to tactics. There is one excellent thing about improving your tactics in climbing; you get the benefit of adopting a better tactic instantly. In other words, you don’t have to spent any time developing it – in terms of energy and time expenditure it is ‘free’ improvement. There are thousands of tactics, I can only give examples of a few to illustrate my point. Generally speaking, tactics just mean giving a bit of thought about what could make your next climb easier. Here are a couple of examples: Bouldering – If you are working out a problem you cant complete, remember you don’t need to start from the start each time. Work out each move one at a time diligently, memorise them and then link it. Then you wont have wasted all your energy by the time you have sussed it out. Leading – The most commonly missed opportunity to onsight a climb is not reading it from the ground. The saying is “if you cant see what to do from the comfort of the ground, how are you going to figure it out when you’re pumped and scared?”. Even those who are beginners at reading the rock can get a lot of beta just by having an extended swaatch from the deck. Where are the best holds? Are there any holds you might not be able to see while climbing (e.g. round an arete)? Are there obvious places to clip from? Where do you think the cruxes will be? Can you tell if certain holds will only work with a left or right hand. If you can see one that is, say, definitely right hand, you can work out a whole sequence based on this. Sometimes the position of chalk ‘thumb’ prints can give a clue. Watch people leading at the climbing wall – how long do they spend on each route hanging from holds trying to figure out the next move? Time it, it will amaze you how inefficient it is. You can cut out all this extra time by working it out from the ground. Remember its even more important to do this outdoors. As the P.E. teachers say – P.P.P.P.P.P (prior preparation prevents piss poor performance). If you are climbing a hard route outdoors, is it going to be hot and greasy? Have a look at the guidebook to see which way the crag faces. It will feel a grade easier in the cool of the shade rather than in full glare of the sun. Winter Climbing – Not knowing what your axes will stick in is a huge confidence destroyer. On the sharp end in a serious situation on some winter route is a bad place to experiment. What is the result? You spend huge amounts of time faffing until you find a placement which is utterly bombproof, and if its not then you probably abseil off. You (quite rightly) stay very far inside your comfort zone because you don’t know how to predict what your axes will do and the consequences of getting it wrong are bad news. Try 20 minutes of traversing with tools on a railway bridge (or a dry tooling wall if you have access to one) to find out just how little a tool will stay on and how to make sure it does. What would you rather do – get ten IV,4s done in the season in your old super cautious style, or spend one day at Birnam, the Ice Factor or your local sandstone wall and the other 9 days doing grade Vs? Like technique, you can learn tactics by watching others and trying out their tactics to see if they help you. Many climbers have made bad tactics a habit that is hard to break, such as clipping too early, carrying too much rack on a trad route etc. These bad habits have to be tackled head on with self-discipline. This is hard, but if you do it you will probably get as much reward from beating the habit as from the harder grades you will climb. As always the hardest thing is being objective about your own good/bad tactics. A coach or at least your climbing partner’s observations can help you out.
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