Last week I finished off talking about platueing and it is something everyone experiences in any field they are in. It is the feeling of lack of progression in comparison to the intial feelings of progression when they first started what it is they are doing. This happens all of the time in climbing because people are focused on grades. Grading is subjective and people tend to get sucked into the thought process of having to send the next grade to feel like they are doing better. This ends up becomming really toxic because people will use it to make others feel inferior or will think poorly of themselves if they complete a new grade but then get stuck at that level for a long period of time. The way I’ve tackled getting my atheletes to avoid the feeling of platueing is providing them a framework for how to visualize their progress. The objective is to go up grades but between each promotion they need to complete a large number of climbs that they are already climbing at. To do that they need to work on problems that are difficult for them. So then the goal isn’t to complete the whole climb it’s to complete a move on it. So we take the large scale progression adn break it down to its smallest component. Now every time they complete a move they couldn’t originally do they get the feeling of progression and that scales until eventually they are able to move up a grade.

Image generated with Bing ai photo generator. Prompt was to create an image of small steps making up larger steps.