What is it specifically about the western diet that is unhealthy? Is it the meat? As many of you will have gathered, this a question I have become interested in over recent years. I have watched many friends, family and others suffer with the countless manifestations of diet related disease and our entire health service is in the process of being crushed by it. So it is important to me.

The more I have looked at the evidence, the less I am convinced that meat is playing a causative role in this process and the more I think that its restriction may make things worse. To shed some light on this, I went to the epitome of junk food, McDonald’s, and ate nothing but their burger patties for two months.

It was a way to draw attention to the need to think a bit more carefully about what is in our food and which parts of it are beneficial, harmful or neutral.

Below is a list of references from the video.

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Doing this exercise really accelerated my confidence in judging whether my trad placements would be likely to hold a fall.

Last week I was in North Wales for Mountain Equipment’s athlete team meet. I had some unfinished business to attend to.

A guide to how to actually learn climbing technique, from hard practicalities to underlying principles.

The other day myself and Kev Shields went for a morning’s solo on Buachaille Etive Mor in Glen Coe. We climbed an easy classic, Agag’s Groove, that is a first mountain route for many new climbers. I decided to take a few cameras and film the climb. Soloing and filming at the same time is not all that easy. But its nice to show off the route and I hope it encourages more folk to go and climb mountain routes like this.

Coaches and sport scientists are often trying to quantify aspects of sport and there’s good reasons for this. But climbing technique is hopelessly complex with endless variation in movement. How could we go about quantifying it, or even thinking about it in any kind of structured manner? With difficulty. In this video I introduce some simple ideas for the way I think about technique that helps me to learn it and monitor my learning.

Maddy and Ollie at Lattice Training recently invited me to their HQ in Chesterfield for their finger strength and endurance testing protocol. It was fun and interesting to see how I compare to their ever growing database of high level climbers for these basic measures of strength and endurance. As you can see in the video, it yielded a couple of surprising results for me and a little food for thought for my general approach to climbing goals in the future.

Here is the video of my ascent of Lexicon in the Lake District. Thanks to Neil Gresham for putting the route up. It gave me a lot of enjoyment and a great reason to return to the Lakes for the first time in ages.

Videos of Robbie’s first ascent and my second ascent on the same day of What we do in the Shadows E10 at Duntelchaig. This was a project we tried together a fair bit during the autumn of 2020 and then came together for both of us last month on a great climbing day.

The ketogenic diet had a large impact on my life and my climbing. Here is a detailed discussion of 6 years of my own experiences with the keto diet for sport performance as a pro rock climber, with references to 150 scientific papers on the performance, health and other effects of the diet. You can find all the references below.

I’ve also published an audio version of the piece on my Patreon page as a thanks to my Patreon supporters. I thought that might be useful for folk to listen to it on the move since it’s a long and detailed piece.

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A video about the first ascent of Zero, 8B at Rooftown near Inverness. I’d been trying this line intermittently across two winters, lockdowns permitting (mostly not permitting).

Something that has really helped us get through the lockdown has been doing big walks from the house with Freida. Over the weeks Freida has realised how far she can walk in a few hours and we’ve seen a great deal of sunshine, forest, wildlife and many other interesting discoveries in various corners of Lochaber.

One objective Freida had was to walk to school which is about 14 miles. We’ve done this a few times now by various routes. We made a wee video on Freida’s YouTube about our first walk to school. I’m highly biased but I think Freida’s commentary is great.

So often in Scotland with hard new trad routes I have to do the finding and cleaning myself. Thanks to Robbie Phillips I got to repeat this one. Nice route Robbie. Check out Robbie's video of the FA below.

I finished my degree! I celebrated with two E8 trad routes. I’ll do a topo of this brilliant crag soon.

The first in a series on how to climb trad, from the absolute basics right through to E11. Its a huge subject and not one where taking shortcuts tends to work out well in the long term. In this video, we start easy, and fun!

My research questionnaire: https://glasgow-research.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/dietary-patterns-of-rock-climbers THANK YOU so much for your time to participate. Note that the questionnaire will only be live for a short time in July 2020.

In the video I above I discuss some thoughts on my own study of nutrition over the past few years and the research I’m currently doing. To complete the research I need your help and I’m asking climbers over 16 who climb regularly to complete a questionnaire about their diet.

The speech by Austin Bradford Hill I mentioned in the post is here:

HILL, A. B. 1965. THE ENVIRONMENT AND DISEASE: ASSOCIATION OR CAUSATION? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 58, 295-300. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14283879/

More information about how to participate in the brief video below:

I plateaued at around 7C+ boulder/8b sport for quite a few years in my twenties. Then I made a jump to 8c and then 9a in a surprisingly short period of time. In this episode I go through what I did. Yes it involved a hangboard! I'm not sure my intervention would have the same effect on most climbers these days, but I will suggest some other equally important training for climbing that should reach the same place.

Lots of climbing partners have said to me that they observe that I'm a very motivated climber, especially for completing hard projects. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to understand where this comes from and if it can be replicated. It can! And it's not complicated.

The first ascent of Lithium 8B+ (V14) and the hardest boulder I've climbed so far. Some more about the story of this ascent and many others in the movie Undisovered https://vimeo.com/ondemand/undiscovered

A decent discussion of the principles I apply to structure my bouldering sessions, both during lockdown and at any other time.