Personal goals, training and prerequisites

The 8a scorecard promotes doing multiple hard ascents instead of focusing on just one super hard personal grade record. Personal goals of doing about 10 ascents of a specific grade are often the best strategy for long time progress and it makes your grade pyramid more stable in order to reach the next level. Different climbers have different prerequisites like gender, age, weight, height etc. You are usually also more talented for either open hand or closed crimp, power or endurance and so on. It is just normal to adjust to these and one example is that you seldom see any big guys going for steep 40m routes. Instead you see them doing reachy dynamic boulders. There is a saying is that "you should train and challenge your weaknesses" but if you really want to invest time into making a new personal best, do the opposite. First, you have to analyze your personal prerequisites and actually try to define the specific move you are best at. It can be doing a long lock-off combining a high step with a gaston, it can be a traverse on slopers or it can be an extreme knee-drop two finger cross over move. Once you have found your fauvorite move, try to optimize it and then you can travel around the globe looking for the perfect crux move. It will be easy to make a personal best but do not get a surprise if at the same time you will find that your pyramid has become less stable.