
26 September 2018
Mental and tactical training for onsight/flash
The hardest thing in climbing, for most, is to always give 100 % during onsight and flash. On the other hand, this mental skill is what differentiates the very best from the rest of us. If you could fight as hard as the obsessed unique top climbers like Ondra you would immediately onsight two grades harder and also do much better in competitions. At the same time, such experience will produce more adrenaline and your climbing energy will be more awarding for you and your friends in several ways.
One way to train the obsession to always fight 100 % and get rid of the fear of failure is to do orienteering exercises on steep boulder walls. Instead of just following and working on a specif color marked boulder you need walls fully covered with different holds.
Set up some control points on the bouldering wall and ask your friend to give you directions and exercises at your level. This means that some holds need to be out of bounce or that you are just allowed to use one foot etc, in the beginning of the circle. Your "coach" could also say that a maximum of three moves are allowed to reach the next control point etc.
Such orienteering will also train your tactical skill but the main point is to make you do 20 times as many 100 % fighting flash moves then you are used to in a training session. It will not take long until you feel you are mentally stronger to more often fight 100 % during onsight and flash. You will be fully pumped with adrenaline, very long from doing the robot training, repeating the same routes and boulder over and over again.
Picture from Adam Ondra's Insta. "I have been taking annual two-week-break, so I could start working on changing the setup of holds in my gym @kotelna.brno. One part is almost finished, my dream of having the wall as full of holds as the japanese gyms or @chonjongwon96's gym has not been reached yet, but getting closer..."
Possibly it is not a coincidence that also the best bouldering competitors train with fully covered walls so they can use their creativity to fight and enjoy as many challenges as possibly, to get mentally stronger.
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