Holding your arms above the head, as you are doing most of the time when you are climbing, improves the blood circulation. Once your are lowered down, your forearms are at risk to be flooded which will reduce the blood circulation. In order to get better endurance and reduce the time until your next burn, you better stay at the top jug and rest for a minute. Make your partner take most of the load in the rope and shake out as normal. This will reduce the risk for the fore arm to get flooded and optimize the blood circulation. If you fall, you could immediately grab the rope with straightened arm pretty hard and once you are at the ground, you can shake out by grabbing some jugs you can reach from the floor.

Eric Hörst has made some interesting analysis of Margo Hayes ascent of Biographie 9a+ in Céüse. From the video, it can be seen that she climbs the 30 m route in five intervals, around one minute of fast climbing followed by a rest in between one to three minutes. This goes in line with old previous training articles here on 8a and also how Adam Ondra climbs. In practice, this means that you are going for an indoor onsight, you should try to climb very fast and then do full stop and rest every six meters or 45 seconds as you are probably not as fit as Hayes and Ondra. In the video we can also see that Margo finishes off every session by first clipping and the start to rest. In theory, she could have saved some energy by actually first rest and midways in her resting, clipped the quick draw. This would have means shorter intervals with intense climbing and more time spent in a resting mode.

Jakob Schubert's flash of Catalan Witness the Fitness got reported as 8B+ (C) by us, as all five repeaters who had done it before had called it 8C, Chris Sharma 8B+/8C but Jakob gave it low end 8B+. Is it not strange that the other two big Euro websites did chose to report it as either 8B+ or 8C in both the headline as well as in the article. The media needs some kind of guidelines so we will stop misleading our readers. How do you think Schubert's flash should be reported.

Jakob Schubert reports on Instagram that he has flashed Chris Sharma’s Catalan Witness the Fitness in Cova del Ocell, giving it a personal, ”Low end” 8B+ grade instead of 8C. (c)Eddie Fowke - The Circuit Climbing During the last week Jabob also did Stoking the Fire 9b and Catxasa 9a+ in Santa Linya. Previously, Daniel Woods has flashed an 8C, Entlinge which nowadays are considered a soft 8B+. Also Adam Ondra has flashed a boulder which in the beginning was considered 8C, Jade.

Stefano Ghisolfi has done his third 9b the last 12 months, La Capalla in Siurana which Adam Ondra put up six years ago. Vertical Eye - Matteo Pavana Last year, the Italian was #2 in the World Cup after a steady progress in the ranking and as a matter of a fact, his scorecard shows the same up going trend. In the latest 9a and harder overall statistics, the 24 year old jumps to #4 and including his scorecard, he should be considered the second best sport climber in the world right now. Interesting is also that he did win the Italian Speed Championship some years ago, and has been #6 in a Boulder WC, so Stefano is one of the contenders also for a medal in 2020.

Tamas Zupan has done his third 8C, The Last Jedi in Remete-barlang. "About the name... I like star wars. And I hope I can find a new project until the next Star Wars film comes." It was an old project close to the village where I live. It is a big roof. It is hard to climbing here because it is often wet. I tried for three years. I climbed a stand start version (the force awakens 8A+) last year. After I did a lot of training with weight vest on a big overhang. And now i managed to do it, so I'm very happy.

R & I reports about Harry Edwards having done the FA of Frequency 9a in at East Clear Creek. The first time Harry made 8a news was when he was 12 years old when he did several 8b+ and 8c. Later he stopped climbing completely for almost two years focusing on group singing/dancing performances.

This diagram tries to show how superior Adam Ondra is when it comes to 9a and harder. We have given points for 9a to 9c based on a multiple of three which actually almost perfectly fits Ondra's grade pyramid. As grades are subjective and sometimes get down graded the scoring is somewhat speculative. On the other hand, Ondra is known to be the one using most frequent personal. Source is the 8a data base and escalade9. It should be mentioned that if we were to make such a diagram for onsighting 8b and harder, Ondra would have been way more superior followed by Megos. At the same time as Ondra has onsighted 21 routes 8c+ and harder, the runner ups have at most onsighted four.