“Why is it that when you reach a poor hold you stop in your tracks and waste time wishing that it was bigger? ” -Neil Gresham
Great Question.
“Stalling won’t make the hold get bigger or you feel stronger. If you’ve sussed the hold once or twice, sized up your feet and located the next handhold, then all you’ll achieve by delaying is increasing your pump and reducing your chances.” -Gresham
Good point.
This article from rockandice.com is the follow-up to the one we posted yesterday, Too Hard for a Caveman. It describes 5 more useful pointers for how to maintain good climbing technique when you’re feeling the pressure of being pumped.
For example, as discussed in the article, stalling out on a crux still trying to find a better hold is a common thing to do in a high-pressure, feeling-too-pumped scenario. It’s easy to want to retreat and hold back. But, if instead, you’ve trained yourself to focus on a specific aspect of maintaining good technique, you could get just the boost necessary to keep climbing through the pump. And in this case, have a way to avoid hanging out too long on the smallest hold on the route.
Check out the article to learn more about how to ignore instincts that want to take over when you’re pumped and how to handle the common mistakes that happen in exactly that situation…..
READ IT HERE: The Unnatural Way to Climb (link no longer available)
