[mrjonathanr]

basically im saying ... its hard to be completely self aware enough to always be your own best coach.

Impossible, I'd say.  In any case anyone who was that good a self coach wouldn't be asking these questions here, they'd be out there cranking the rads.

To the OP
If yoga is that challenging, might that not be a strong hint to consider improving your flexibility?

[moose]

All movement is dynamic-otherwise you're not moving. 

You've obviously never seen me climb..... imagine primitive stop-motion animation of a badly dressed Anglepoise lamp ascending a crag!

[Sasquatch]

All movement is dynamic-otherwise you're not moving. 

You've obviously never seen me climb..... imagine primitive stop-motion animation of a badly dressed Anglepoise lamp ascending a crag!

I may attempt to make a video of this.......

[moose]

You don't need a video camera, a flick-book would suffice.  I don't so much as move, as execute a series of tableaus.  I suspect its a legacy of developing my climbing outdoors, at crags where I was frequently the only person around - a few painful hobbles back to my car gave me a pretty circumspect style - only going for moves that I was certain of making or reversing. 

[andy_e]

Climbing in stop motion must help with morph-o moves.

[kelvin]

a flick-book would suffice.  I don't so much as move, as execute a series of tableaus.

Moose - the definition of ultimate self awareness.

[petejh]

You don't need a video camera, a flick-book would suffice.  I don't so much as move, as execute a series of tableaus.

Is that because: 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players'?

[TheTwig]

balance - climb more vertical and slabby stuff where it's harder to 'cheat' by doing every move dynamically or jumping for holds. Anything that forces you to take your time. (focus on your feet!!). Whats your general technique like? Do you do lots of flagging, drop knees, heelhooks etc?

Technique is definitely subpar. Vertical climbing is defiitely more difficult for me than sloped or even horizontal walls. I'm not sure about flagging, I do incorporate that stuff, but a lot of time my center of gravity still seems off. I do use my hips and hang low and such, but I am quite wobbly a lot. drop knees are going fine. Heelhooks have been going better lately, but I keep sliding of holds still some times. 

On the shaky thing, as in cramping up or just running out of strength quickly? You might have a magnesium deficiency or something like that. Might be worth looking into

It's my core I suppose. it's the same when I do press ups on rings. I get violently shaky very quickly. A good climber said to me that it's those little muscles that you're working out, so I guess that I haven't developed those? He said to me that it was my core that was probably insufficient which is weird because I do have developed a six-pack (I'm very thin so maybe that doesn't mean that much) and also obliques.

But I have this weird muscle developed on the left side of my body. This chart)  calls it the inguinal ligament. But what is so strange is that this 'muscle' has only developed on my left side and not on my right side. Maybe this is part of my core problem?

I also tried yoga, but I quit, because it was painfully hard to me. I couldn't do the moves as my body is like a plank of wood. It's the same when I deadhang and try to get my legs vertical. I can't do it. Not because of my core, but because I can't get them that high.

There's a clue, sounds like you have a real core strength issue. Having a 6pack has absolutely nothing to do with how strong your core, or even abs are, it's just a result of body composition. I know because I had an 8pack as a club swimmer but wasn't all that strong at L-sits, situps, planks etc, and have a bit more fat on me now but arguably just as strong at those kind of exercises. I would get into doing some basic flexibility work on your rest days or after sessions at the bouldering gym, focusing on hips especially. One thing to note is as you improve range of motion you also have to improve the strength in that range, as you are only strong in the ranges you use. Classic example people who squat heavy but can't go all the way down, or people who bench press and don't go to the bottom.

Doing a bit of bodyweight/light weighted conditioning work would help too I imagine, a few pullups, pushups, dips, light overhead squats, etc etc etc.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so it might be time to shake up your routine a little and introduce a few new things and then see what happens after everything settles down

[TheTwig]

So I went and saw a coach, who focused on movement...

It may not be what's holding you back but he spotted things that non of my mates had noticed. I'd get in the right position, had neat footwork, fingers were passable, as was endurance but I got nowhere - I'd blame inflexibility (I am) weakness (I am), started yoga (was rubbish) but it seems I just didn't initiate any momentum. So every move felt harder than it should, because it was. Happily, I can now 'just go climbing' because I have a handle on how to climb, which I didn't before.

I'll rip the piss.. Kelvin, how much did it cost to have a coach to tell you to use momentum for climbing? Because you could have read that for a few fuck-alls in a number of well-known books which have been around for ages, or got the info for free from a library or one of a hundred blogs out there detailing efficient climbing technique / use of momentum / lower body initiation of moves.

There's a movement in climbing towards seeing coaching as the panacea for all improvement, which is well-intentioned and I partly agree with it for some situations and levels of climbing. But... being a climbing coach of early-stage climbers (sub font/french 7) in the UK appears from the outside to be like shooting fish in a barrel. A sure-fire cash cow of people seeking improvement who don't require any special knowledge on the coach's part in order to satisfy. The coaching appears to be little more doling out very simple and well-known ubiquitous advice on movement and training technique, advice that can be got by anybody for free with a little independent thought.
I saw a coach once, just after I'd climbed my first 8a (get me). I'd probably have got to 8a sooner if I'd seen him earlier, but I don't think I'd have benefited so much when I was climbing in the 6s - sport or bouldering. That stage was all about self-directed learning and motivation to progress coming from within. You can argue that it's better to be directed in the 'right' direction but I'm not sure if that's true. I'm wondering - based only on the number of people who post on ukb and some snippets of conversation at crags - if there's some dumbing-down process going on similar to how the ubiquitous GPS has eroded people's ability to use a map.

O.P. - Seriously, there's never been so much access to good quality information about technique and fitness for climbing, and there's never been better facilities for indoor training and indoor climbing. Yet there seems an unending number of people posting on here who claim to be struggling to work out how to attain a standard around the low font 7s. When I started, back in prehistory, low font 7 was considered an everyday level that any keen climber would expect to attain with a bit of application. All the info required was available it just took some motivation to look for it and apply it.

There isn't any special exercise required to climb low font 7. You aren't going to discover some special weakness that only you have, target it with a special exercise that someone on ukb tells you about and then suddenly find you're a font 7A climber. The only ingredients that matter are motivation and application of that motivation. If you haven't got that or can't work out how to grow it then you aren't going to get anywhere.



Rant over. Pulled a muscle in my back and am laying around when I should be training endurance hence I'm grumpy as fuck.

Meh. Couldn't disagree more. Everyone's body is different, some people just don't respond as well to training as others do. I certainly get by with technique in most of my climbing, and any time the problem is one of those 'you can do it or you can't' physically, I without fail won't be able to do it.

I agree with abarro, the first time someone explained to me how to rock over properly, and learning how to flag by watching someone else on the steep wall were absolute revelations. If I had learned those (and other) techniques sooner it would have kick-started the learning progress. I spent my first year just getting up to french 6a from 5, and then went from 6a to 6b+ in the second year as that was when I really got my technique dialed in and brought shoes that were a decent fit. This whole mindset with learning to climb by going through some kind of purgatory where you have to figure out everything for yourself with absolutely no help from a coach just seems ridiculous IMHO. In what other sport do you go into the training area or gym and are just expected to improve? Certainly not in any martial art, or gymnastics, or swimming (those are just the ones I've done). You have a coach or teacher, or even your peers who analyse your technique and make sure you are pointed in the right direction. I wish I had someone tell me not to crimp so much when I was starting out, would have saved myself a minor pulley injury and a few months of painful hangboarding until my openhand was just as strong as my crimp.

Just my 2 cents

P.s. to Bobtheboulderer, you could consider getting "The Self Coached Climber", pretty decent book and I found some interesting points on technique that helped me, even though I had been climbed 2 or 3 years before I got it.