[Wellsy]

Indoor grading seems pretty throwaway at best and usually inaccurate one way the other. Most predominantly outdoor climbers i think tend to just ignore indoor bouldering grades.

  Putting any kind of stock in indoor grades is the path to madness. The best walls are the ones that use an internal system like the “levels” on the Wave that are only comparable between problems at the same wall.

I started climbing indoors at the old Notts wall. It was an amazing day when I realised that their grading system, despite being superficially similar to UK tech grades (I’m not sure if they were meant to be but they didn’t have +s) was completely unrelatable and that while I shouldn’t expect any Severe to have moves as easy as a “4a” that was set there, I also shouldn’t expect an HVS to have a crux as tough as the “5b”s. 

Lower grade (sub 6A) indoor stuff and the same grade outdoors tend to be very different. Indoors that means jugs. Outdoors that does not mean jugs at all.

It’s almost as if there’s a financial incentive for the walls to provide lots of very friendly climbing and to make it easy to progress steadily through the low to middling grades. 

For sure. And even if not... how do you set Cobra indoors? I am not sure you even could, and even if you could... I doubt it would be a 3 or a 4 or whatever that problem is in font grades.

I do think going on walls does help with outdoor climbing. It teaches you body position, efficient movement, maintaining contact, the best way to progress through a move etc. It doesn't teach you smearing, topping out etc. But it can teach you a lot if you go to the right place. And I think if you got someone brand new to bouldering and put them on a home board... they wouldn't then be very good outdoors. I think that the climbing wall is (other than just going outdoors) the best way to learn those skills.

[Paul B]

I do think going on walls does help with outdoor climbing. It teaches you body position, efficient movement, maintaining contact, the best way to progress through a move etc.

I strongly disagree with this. It doesn't teach it anywhere near as well as a 5+ slab that'll have you tearing a sapling out of the ground after repeatedly failing.

Different sorts of injuries. Old school boards = finger injuries. Jumping on blobs = shoulder injuries.

Amen. How are everyone's wrists these days?

[Fiend]

Wanked into prime stability.

[jwi]

To be abundantly clear: I do not think that it can be doubted that indoor bouldering is beneficial for the wast majority of climbers.

As has been pointed out above, it is very hard to learn to climb steep rock without the aid of juggy indoor boulders, unless the climber starts from a very impressive physical base.

Anyone who has climbed less than a handful years at high volume does not need to worry too much about transfer anyway. I am mostly thinking about old climbers with a lot of milage on all type of rock.

[IS2]

As a fairly old climber I can report that I was unable to go to any of my favourite walls and hang out, doing circuits, with my pals. I was able to use my home boulder boards, campus board and hangboards. The result was that I got a fair bit stronger and regained some power. That’s despite being so old I should be losing both strength and power fairly fast now.
The big difference for me was how I used my home set up instead of “the wall”. All my home sessions were planned, focussed on training objectives and short. My wall sessions were unstructured and long. (I had paid to get in so stayed long enough to get my monies worth.)
To summarise
indoor bouldering .... organised and focused = win
Indoor bouldering ... random = loss
So for me .... it’s wasn’t the indoor bouldering it’s what I did with it that made the difference.