[Stu Littlefair]

p.s one thing that people don't notice or comment about in this dataset is the way that the distributions are mostly pretty symmetric, apart from the grade range around V10-V11, where the outliers tend to be stronger than the median.

Lots of strong but crap climbers tend to reach ~V10 as a level is my reading of this.

[teestub]

Stu as a person of science, can you comment on the bias of the Lattice data? I try and get my head around this occasionally but get confused.

They only get to have results from people who approach them for training (maybe get several results from people over the years as their grade and finger strength progress) and as such these are a subset of climbers who are interested in training.  Do you think this would lead to in inherent bias toward people with strong fingers for their grade vs the archetypal grit Jedis who may have climber to a high level but would likely test poorly on an edge? 

[stone]

p.s one thing that people don't notice or comment about in this dataset is the way that the distributions are mostly pretty symmetric, apart from the grade range around V10-V11, where the outliers tend to be stronger than the median.

Lots of strong but crap climbers tend to reach ~V10 as a level is my reading of this.

Is it also possible that V10 is the grade at which people are most likely to be doing loads of fingerboarding? Those fingerboard specialists then become the outliers at that grade. Perhaps if a bunch of V14 or V4 climbers were to switch over to being fingerboard specialist, they would then become V14 or V4 climbers who were uncommonly good at fingerboarding for that grade?

[JamieG]

I have to be honest, I don't see anything that different about the data in the v10-v11 range at all. The only thing that is maybe noticeable is that at the higher grades the data is noisier, which is unsurprising since the sample sizes will be much smaller at the end of the chart.

To answer teestub question. Yes the data is definitely biased towards people that are interested in training and specifically a lattice training plan etc. But there is no way of knowing if this means they will have inherently stronger fingers that the 'grit jedis' without actually testing it. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of difference.

In all honestly I think once you get to hard boulder problems you tend to need to be quite good at everything. You can't really get away with weak fingers, or poor technique. Hard problems tend to need it all working together. Or at least that is my impression.

[Bradders]

This isn’t meant to knock, I’d be genuinely curious to see some robust significance.

To balance the (good and necessary) skepticism of the 20mm test on here, it's worth pointing out that Lattice did release the data (or at least a screenshot of it) from their testing.

https://www.facebook.com/latticetraining/posts/free-data-release-did-you-know-that-you-can-access-our-database-and-finger-stren/1114657262199930/

Assuming the box-and-whisker plot uses standard settings, those little grey boxes show the range covered by 25-75% of climbers, so half of the population lie inside this box, half outside.

So - apart from a decent number of outliers - most 8A climbers can pull 150-175% of their bodyweight on a 20mm edge. From my point of view this is a pretty reliable metric and you probably already know if you are an outlier (great technique/flexibility, massive, tiny, etc).

Obviously it's not perfect but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

I don't think anyone was suggesting there isn't something in the idea of pulling X amount to climb grade Y. It's that it's a dramatically oversimplified way of tackling the objective (that being to help people climb harder things). And, for me personally, because it was the main thing that was pushed out in the early days of Lattice, and because it is such a simple concept, it had an outsized effect on how many people both approached training and, more importantly, saw themselves.

[jwi]

(I don't have time to do this today, but I'll check soon).

If you want to know if you are strong enough to do 8a I suspect that best boulder grade is a better predictor than finger strenght measured on hangboards?

I'm not sure what the point is of benching finger strenght? Who does not need stronger fingers? Is getting stronger fingers not a priority for everyone in the world except that Japanese chap on instagram (and that Canadian chap whose name also escape me at the moment)?

[Paul B]

Stu as a person of science, can you comment on the bias of the Lattice data? I try and get my head around this occasionally but get confused.

I think Highlander spoke about this in one of his mega-long videos. I've had a quick look but can't readily find it although I did note he looks to have been tested relatively recently.

I've never had a go at the "focussed beast-mode" training that Paul B was renowned for and now says he regrets. My guess is that even if I had tried that in my 20s, I would have had to have been very careful and would have needed to have done a lot of injury prevention conditioning exercises or I would have broken. It is not at all clear to me though that it would have made my climbing movement efficiency etc even worse. My impression is that some people are naturals when it comes to that and some are not. Everyone can improve by getting more experience but I still think individuals are different.

Firstly, I did break, and a LOT (and not just the 'Works' incident or the car accident the year after). My fingers were pretty much permanently wrecked.

To flip this around using arbitrary numbers; if a person (A) spent 90% of their time board climbing and 10% scratching around on rock, would you find it surprising that person becomes best at climbing steep things, generally with positive holds and relatively big moves? Conversely, if a person (B) spent 90% of their time scratching around on rock and 10% of their time board climbing, would it be surprising if that person had much better understanding of body positioning and the subtleties that grit requires?

My other point is that person A will struggle to gain the movement efficiency of B in the future as you can't simply turn off that training and over-reliance on strength. My thought these days is that at a certain grade, focusing on training and 'easy' wins in terms of strength is detrimental for anything other than the short term 'win' of ticking F7a (or whatever grade is appropriate here).

The best climbers that are slightly younger than myself that came through Sheffield got out loads, on every type of rock going and then applied a fingers first approach to training. I think their success from comps to pioneering hard new problems with no topo and an e-bike approach speak for themselves. The equivalent mistake in this instance would be people only seeing the fingerboarding and training to be able to one-arm pinky monos ignoring all of the groundwork on rock that came first.

I don't think anyone was suggesting there isn't something in the idea of pulling X amount to climb grade Y.

At times, that's exactly what people have said. What I think Highlander said was something along the lines of people start aiming for this metric and thus training for it which skews the data, presumably because when it was first tested, this ability was a subset of someone's skills (a byproduct?) rather than a specific aim or measure.

[JamieG]

At times, that's exactly what people have said. What I think Highlander said was something along the lines of people start aiming for this metric and thus training for it which skews the data, presumably because when it was first tested, this ability was a subset of someone's skills (a byproduct?) rather than a specific aim or measure.

This is such a common problem in education that 'teaching to the test' is a commonly used criticism of certain approaches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test

 The same I'm sure could be true in training. Spend too long trying to improve certain training metrics that you lose out on a broader rock climbing 'education'.

[Wellsy]

Stu as a person of science, can you comment on the bias of the Lattice data? I try and get my head around this occasionally but get confused.

I think Highlander spoke about this in one of his mega-long videos. I've had a quick look but can't readily find it although I did note he looks to have been tested relatively recently.

I've never had a go at the "focussed beast-mode" training that Paul B was renowned for and now says he regrets. My guess is that even if I had tried that in my 20s, I would have had to have been very careful and would have needed to have done a lot of injury prevention conditioning exercises or I would have broken. It is not at all clear to me though that it would have made my climbing movement efficiency etc even worse. My impression is that some people are naturals when it comes to that and some are not. Everyone can improve by getting more experience but I still think individuals are different.

Firstly, I did break, and a LOT (and not just the 'Works' incident or the car accident the year after). My fingers were pretty much permanently wrecked.

To flip this around using arbitrary numbers; if a person (A) spent 90% of their time board climbing and 10% scratching around on rock, would you find it surprising that person becomes best at climbing steep things, generally with positive holds and relatively big moves? Conversely, if a person (B) spent 90% of their time scratching around on rock and 10% of their time board climbing, would it be surprising if that person had much better understanding of body positioning and the subtleties that grit requires?

My other point is that person A will struggle to gain the movement efficiency of B in the future as you can't simply turn off that training and over-reliance on strength. My thought these days is that at a certain grade, focusing on training and 'easy' wins in terms of strength is detrimental for anything other than the short term 'win' of ticking F7a (or whatever grade is appropriate here).

The best climbers that are slightly younger than myself that came through Sheffield got out loads, on every type of rock going and then applied a fingers first approach to training. I think their success from comps to pioneering hard new problems with no topo and an e-bike approach speak for themselves. The equivalent mistake in this instance would be people only seeing the fingerboarding and training to be able to one-arm pinky monos ignoring all of the groundwork on rock that came first.

I don't think anyone was suggesting there isn't something in the idea of pulling X amount to climb grade Y.

At times, that's exactly what people have said. What I think Highlander said was something along the lines of people start aiming for this metric and thus training for it which skews the data, presumably because when it was first tested, this ability was a subset of someone's skills (a byproduct?) rather than a specific aim or measure.

I think this is 100% what I have done. I'm not sure I really know how to fix it tbh

[SA Chris]

Was thinking; Wythenshawe is a funny old name isn't it, sounds like something out of Tolkein.

Where did the post split anyway?

[mrjonathanr]

Stu as a person of science, can you comment on the bias of the Lattice data? I try and get my head around this occasionally but get confused.

I think Highlander spoke about this in one of his mega-long videos. I've had a quick look but can't readily find it although I did note he looks to have been tested relatively recently.

I've never had a go at the "focussed beast-mode" training that Paul B was renowned for and now says he regrets. My guess is that even if I had tried that in my 20s, I would have had to have been very careful and would have needed to have done a lot of injury prevention conditioning exercises or I would have broken. It is not at all clear to me though that it would have made my climbing movement efficiency etc even worse. My impression is that some people are naturals when it comes to that and some are not. Everyone can improve by getting more experience but I still think individuals are different.

Firstly, I did break, and a LOT (and not just the 'Works' incident or the car accident the year after). My fingers were pretty much permanently wrecked.

To flip this around using arbitrary numbers; if a person (A) spent 90% of their time board climbing and 10% scratching around on rock, would you find it surprising that person becomes best at climbing steep things, generally with positive holds and relatively big moves? Conversely, if a person (B) spent 90% of their time scratching around on rock and 10% of their time board climbing, would it be surprising if that person had much better understanding of body positioning and the subtleties that grit requires?

My other point is that person A will struggle to gain the movement efficiency of B in the future as you can't simply turn off that training and over-reliance on strength. My thought these days is that at a certain grade, focusing on training and 'easy' wins in terms of strength is detrimental for anything other than the short term 'win' of ticking F7a (or whatever grade is appropriate here).

The best climbers that are slightly younger than myself that came through Sheffield got out loads, on every type of rock going and then applied a fingers first approach to training. I think their success from comps to pioneering hard new problems with no topo and an e-bike approach speak for themselves. The equivalent mistake in this instance would be people only seeing the fingerboarding and training to be able to one-arm pinky monos ignoring all of the groundwork on rock that came first.

I don't think anyone was suggesting there isn't something in the idea of pulling X amount to climb grade Y.

At times, that's exactly what people have said. What I think Highlander said was something along the lines of people start aiming for this metric and thus training for it which skews the data, presumably because when it was first tested, this ability was a subset of someone's skills (a byproduct?) rather than a specific aim or measure.

I think this is 100% what I have done. I'm not sure I really know how to fix it tbh

Get out on as many rock types and styles as you can, as much as you can. You’ll learn loads.

[Fultonius]

Stu as a person of science, can you comment on the bias of the Lattice data? I try and get my head around this occasionally but get confused.

I think Highlander spoke about this in one of his mega-long videos. I've had a quick look but can't readily find it although I did note he looks to have been tested relatively recently.

I've never had a go at the "focussed beast-mode" training that Paul B was renowned for and now says he regrets. My guess is that even if I had tried that in my 20s, I would have had to have been very careful and would have needed to have done a lot of injury prevention conditioning exercises or I would have broken. It is not at all clear to me though that it would have made my climbing movement efficiency etc even worse. My impression is that some people are naturals when it comes to that and some are not. Everyone can improve by getting more experience but I still think individuals are different.

Firstly, I did break, and a LOT (and not just the 'Works' incident or the car accident the year after). My fingers were pretty much permanently wrecked.

To flip this around using arbitrary numbers; if a person (A) spent 90% of their time board climbing and 10% scratching around on rock, would you find it surprising that person becomes best at climbing steep things, generally with positive holds and relatively big moves? Conversely, if a person (B) spent 90% of their time scratching around on rock and 10% of their time board climbing, would it be surprising if that person had much better understanding of body positioning and the subtleties that grit requires?

My other point is that person A will struggle to gain the movement efficiency of B in the future as you can't simply turn off that training and over-reliance on strength. My thought these days is that at a certain grade, focusing on training and 'easy' wins in terms of strength is detrimental for anything other than the short term 'win' of ticking F7a (or whatever grade is appropriate here).

The best climbers that are slightly younger than myself that came through Sheffield got out loads, on every type of rock going and then applied a fingers first approach to training. I think their success from comps to pioneering hard new problems with no topo and an e-bike approach speak for themselves. The equivalent mistake in this instance would be people only seeing the fingerboarding and training to be able to one-arm pinky monos ignoring all of the groundwork on rock that came first.

I don't think anyone was suggesting there isn't something in the idea of pulling X amount to climb grade Y.

At times, that's exactly what people have said. What I think Highlander said was something along the lines of people start aiming for this metric and thus training for it which skews the data, presumably because when it was first tested, this ability was a subset of someone's skills (a byproduct?) rather than a specific aim or measure.

I think this is 100% what I have done. I'm not sure I really know how to fix it tbh

Get out on as many rock types and styles as you can, as much as you can. with weaker/better climbers than youYou’ll learn loads.

Fixed that for you.

[mr chaz]

I think this is 100% what I have done. I'm not sure I really know how to fix it tbh

Get out on as many rock types and styles as you can, as much as you can. with weaker/better climbers than youYou’ll learn loads.

Fixed that for you.

Don't do it Wellsy, keep your head down and aim straight for that V10 ceiling. It's beautiful up there..

[stone]

My other point is that person A will struggle to gain the movement efficiency of B in the future as you can't simply turn off that training and over-reliance on strength.

I think this is 100% what I have done. I'm not sure I really know how to fix it tbh

I'm still puzzled by this. If it is just about long-term damage to the fingers from repeated severe training injuries, then that is easy to understand. But you (Paul and perhaps Wellsy) seem to be saying that there is more to this than that. That being strong before being experienced at climbing causes almost irreversible impairment to the capacity to gain efficient climbing technique in the future. That is what I'm struggling to get my head around.

If you were to plug away at doing techy problems at somewhere likely Caley (or I guess Font though I've never been), I'm struggling to see how the prior hyper-training would cause any problem other than the possible opportunity cost of having not been learning when young and receptive. Imagine two identical twins, one goes board training from age 18 until 40 and the other plays computer games or whatever. If they were then to both embark on a mission to become maestros at techy slab/wall Caley bouldering, the board climbing background wouldn't be an impediment would it?

Many many people spend a lifetime doing volume of techy slab/wall climbing and resolutely remain pretty crap at it and also remain even worse at steep positive stuff. That is normal. My impression is that steep positive climbing may be amenable to training and that may lead to some people becoming disproportionately good at that style. That doesn't mean their potential to climb techy slabs was ruined by their training or even by missing out on climbing that stuff when young. They may simply be like normal people when faced with that style whilst being used to being vastly better than normal for steep positive stuff.

[M1V0]

That being strong before being experienced at climbing causes almost irreversible impairment to the capacity to gain efficient climbing technique in the future. That is what I'm struggling to get my head around.

My understanding of this would be that a heel hook required for doing a 6B (where general strength does not surpass 6B [whatever that may mean]) is much easier to learn the basic mechanics and nuances of than it is to skip learning at this level and then try to apply it to 7C heel hooks. By being "too strong for the grade", one doesn't get the opportunity to develop the pathways or understanding of how to apply these techniques when suddenly your general strength no longer surpasses the grade of the climb you're attempting. When all else is equal, and your technique is several grades lower, you're done for. It's hard to "go back" and relearn on easier things, because your strength will typically hinder your ability to learn it properly.

Once you know how to one-arm your way out of a tricky position, that's the default choice.

[Paul B]

I think this is 100% what I have done. I'm not sure I really know how to fix it tbh

If I were being flippant I'd say find a partner who's relatively new to climbing, quit your jobs and go travelling around Europe sport-climbing with a bit of bouldering before venturing onto some more adventurous multipitch stuff and a bit of trad. Fall in love with the Verdon Gorge and return repeatedly to terrify yourself each time vowing never to return. Get engaged and realise that weddings are expensive but not in Vegas ($120!!!). Get married in the parking area for Lev 29 and then spend the next 6-7 months living out of a Ford E-150 mostly doing trad and then finally in 2019 book a trip to Madagascar to climb run out techy MP routes. Get bitten by a dog on the first day, require hospital treatment and suddenly realise that you might have pushed it too far taking your adventures to a third world country where it could all get a bit Blood Moon. /selfindulgence

Less flippantly stop focusing on training geekery (and I mean it, step away), prioritise getting out (including when the weather is less certain) with other people who are better technically as climbers, embrace failure and enjoy the journey. Repeat problems you feel you might've overpowered in the past. Look at things like flexibility that might mean you choose to climb things in an inefficient manner without realising it (an example of this was a trip to the NW slate quarries with a member of this forum where it was evident his hip flexibility made thin rockovers significantly easier!) etc. etc.

I'm still puzzled by this. If it is just about long-term damage to the fingers from repeated severe training injuries, then that is easy to understand. But you (Paul and perhaps Wellsy) seem to be saying that there is more to this than that. That being strong before being experienced at climbing causes almost irreversible impairment to the capacity to gain efficient climbing technique in the future. That is what I'm struggling to get my head around.

The GP this week scared me a bit when I went in for a screening and she was immediately fascinated and quite alarmed by my fingers ("have they always looked like this") as apparently I have 'clubbing'. I checked with a physio I hold in high regard and he said it's common in climbers due to repeated trauma from training. When people Google, no they don't look like the severe images you first see!

A good example Stone would be Noir Desir (accepting you've not been to Font). The first few moves are through a small roof then there's a series of slaps up a wall with scooped holds. A Frenchman turned up and pulled on from after the roof and cruised the top (and I mean absolutely p*ssed it) including some faux hold on the right with a flat palm as he adjusted his body. We chatted for a while and he said he simply couldn't do the first move. I was absolutely astonished by this but that was the case, he spent the entire session not doing the first few basic pulls. Meanwhile I thrashed away for the entire session pulling far too hard on everything following the start moves as it's incredibly hard not to rely on that strength and know how little you can get away with if you really nail the positions.

I tried to look for a video on Bleau.info and found one of Willackers absolutely brutalising it. Instead this one perhaps is a bit closer to my experience although he doesn't milk the heel in the same was I'm remembering etc.:

[Will Hunt]

Everyone should be made to climb with Alice Thompson at some point so they can realise just how shit their flexibility and footwork really is.

[Fiend]

Less flippantly stop focusing on training geekery (and I mean it, step away), prioritise getting out (including when the weather is less certain) with other people who are better technically as climbers, embrace failure and enjoy the journey. Repeat problems you feel you might've overpowered in the past. Look at things like flexibility that might mean you choose to climb things in an inefficient manner without realising it (an example of this was a trip to the NW slate quarries with a member of this forum where it was evident his hip flexibility made thin rockovers significantly easier!) etc. etc.

Alternatively:
So, kids, the motto is: Don't learn your craft. Don't get experience on rock. Don't focus on technique and skill. Don't do laps of  Stanage highball slabs. You can pick all that crap up when you're old, injured, decrepit, out of training action. Be a Goal Climber, not a Soul Climber - the soul doesn't age and rot until long after the body does. Get on the wall, the board, the campus rungs, the beastmaker. Get strong now, put the effort in now, focus on those gainz now that will last you a long time, before it's too late, before the body can't cope with it any more.
(Can add in prehab and stretching to that righteous focus on getting strong)

[mrjonathanr]

This really should be a Ewan Macgregor voiceover with a nice bit of old school techno in the background.

[User deactivated.]

I feel like my movement gets better if I watch the Charles Albert Reel Rock section the night before climbing. Just wait a few years until they sort out the Neuralink tech and you can have it streamed directly into your consciousness while climbing.

[M1V0]

The GP this week scared me a bit when I went in for a screening and she was immediately fascinated and quite alarmed by my fingers ("have they always looked like this") as apparently I have 'clubbing'. I checked with a physio I hold in high regard and he said it's common in climbers due to repeated trauma from training.

Me too - I've had multiple people voice concern over my fingers and their clubbed nature. I had blood tests etc. recently, and I presume nothing sinister came of it, no one rang in a hurry to ask me to report to a hospital! I've been too busy to go back in for the routine appointment they asked for, I'll do it soon...

[petejh]

This isn’t meant to knock, I’d be genuinely curious to see some robust significance.

To balance the (good and necessary) skepticism of the 20mm test on here, it's worth pointing out that Lattice did release the data (or at least a screenshot of it) from their testing.

https://www.facebook.com/latticetraining/posts/free-data-release-did-you-know-that-you-can-access-our-database-and-finger-stren/1114657262199930/

Assuming the box-and-whisker plot uses standard settings, those little grey boxes show the range covered by 25-75% of climbers, so half of the population lie inside this box, half outside.

So - apart from a decent number of outliers - most 8A climbers can pull 150-175% of their bodyweight on a 20mm edge. From my point of view this is a pretty reliable metric and you probably already know if you are an outlier (great technique/flexibility, massive, tiny, etc).

Obviously it's not perfect but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

Interesting, thanks.

So many questions and thoughts from looking at that. Lots revolve around 'correlation not causation'. Also a thought - how different I wonder would that same graph look if the population was 'climbers local to font' instead of climbers local to England/Wales.
The graph shows an obvious trend which is unsurprising but doesn't appear to be a good advert for finger strength benchmarking as an accurate predictor of grade potential. It shows you that if you can pull x%BW then you sit somewhere in a very wide range of people who also pull the same %BW and who climb either many grades harder or many grades easier than you.

I wonder if a 'climbers local to font' %BW finger strength study would show even less granularity.

I'd like to see someone good with stats do some analysis and come up with a significance value for the metric of 'x % of BW' as a predictor of 'grade x'.

[mrjonathanr]

The graph clearly shows that if you can hang 150% of BW 2 armed, you can climb somewhere between V4 and V14. What’s not useful a about that?

More seriously, taking the mid 50% of the V grade referenced, the spread of a given point on the Y axis looks like about 4 points on the X, so pretty broad.

That is without interrogating what the X axis is actually telling us… 1 Vn at the Works? >50 outside? Just grit slabs/font roofs/limestone crimpy board style problems?

Your mate who is good at stats would need the raw data, because to me, it shows that strong climbers have stronger fingers than weaker ones, as a rule, but not always.

It’s nice to see, but hardly revelatory.

[Stu Littlefair]

Pete, mrjonathanjr

I think you’ve fallen into the trap that leads to people being too dismissive of this test/data.

It’s not supposed to, and cannot, predict with ANY precision the grade you should be able to climb.

However it is useful to see “for the grade I climb, are my fingers strong/weak”?

That is a totally different question and a useful thing to know, because despite what jwi suggests for some people finger strength really isn’t a priority. That guy climbing by V4 who can pull 150% body weight - he can lay off the deadhangs.

[Fiend]

However it is useful to see “for the grade I climb, how much cash should I be spunking onto a generic finger-strength-focused training plan”?