Children should focus more on onsight and doing volumes

Adam Ondra and Alex Megos had an onsight focus as juniors and they have become, without injuries, the best in the world. On the other hand, we hear about more juniors getting finger injuries at the same time as they are focused on projecting hard, redpointing or competing in Bouldering. Sometimes, 8a actually do not report about remarkable redpoints by kids if it turns out that they have been projecting it for too long. In practice, it is easier for a kid to find and redpoint an 8a route where being short or having thin fingers actually helps than onsight a 7a. The problem is of course that once you have done an 8a, it may feel very disappointing to fall on a 7a onsight. For adults, you should have a wide grade pyramid based on factor three at least but for a children are at risk if the factor is below five. So have you not done five 7c+'s and onsighted five 7b's yet, you should not go for an 8a project! It should be noted that the original idea with the 8a ranking game is to count the Top-10 climbs and give good bonuses for onsights and flashes, in order to reduce the interest of just working on some few long term redpoint projects. Here is our new onsight/flash ranking. Juniors that are doing great also in this category are: Jan Vopat, Laura Rogara and Oriane Bertone.