Climbing Coach

Well, it has snow the last couple of days leaving the tops covered in some snow, and with the freezing levels looking good well into next week. There might well be the oppotunity for some Welsh Winter Skills Courses. So if you want to learn to use ice axes and crampons, as well as learn how to survive and enjoy winter in the mountains of Wales, then it looks like we have finally got a winter.

If you are interested in either a Welsh Winter Skills course or few days being guided up some of the classic mountaineering routes, then please get in contact with here. If you’d like to know more about the courses then please look at my SMG website.

Well, I have been busy designing and building a logbook function to my iCoach project over on my Coaching/Instruction website. At the moment if you register you can complete a performance profile which will give you 5 climbing attributes to focus your training on over the next month.

To compliment this, I have added a way to log you training be it climbing indoors or out, running or mental skills training. As well as logging each route by grade, I am encouraging people to get used to using the PRE scale (Perceived Rate of Exertion), this if you like adds another performance measure.

Over time you should notice that your PRE for a given grade will decrease, before you Grade increases. Whilst at the moment there is not an outputting page, my idea is to follow this up in about a month with a page that allows you to look at monthly averages against session.

Eventually I might even add a facility that will add overload to your session, printing you out a programme for your next wall session.

Sorry I haven’t been on here much, the main reason is that I have been learning php to programming a bespoke web service for climbers. If you have brought my book ‘How to Climb Harder’ it features a performance profiling technique. I have managed to automate this for individual climbers.

Whilst at the moment the site only assesses your performance and gives you suggestions for training over the coming month the plan is to slowly develop the site. The next step is to add some ability to log your training sessions in detail, and after that I will look at developing various graphs to highlight performance changes.

If you’d like to try the site out, the link is here. If you do use the site, I’d really like to here any feedback on how you found it, plus any ideas on how you’d like to see the site develop. You do have to register and login to the site, this is neccessary for two reasons the first is that it allows you to revisit the site and review your profile, as well as re-evaluate it after a month.

The second reason is that may use some of the data at a later date to examine training behaviours of climbers.

Anyway I hope that the site will be of use to many climbers, and possibly even coaches. If you are a coach feel free to get your climbers to use the site. If it proves popular I can create a coaches login so you can examine your climbers profiles.

Well with the first signs of winter over Snowdonia, I thought I’d make a post about the Winter Skills courses that I run. In them I use many of the generic coaching skills of teaching skill aquisition, but apply them to crampon and ice axe work.

These courses are great, and a real essential if you are a summer hillwalker or mountaineer who wants to head out into the mountains in Winter Conditions. We’ll show you how to use all the equipment you need to keep yourself safe, as well as do some classic hillwalks and mountaineering routes in either Snowdonia or if you give me enough warning Scotland as well.

I have a couple of pages on my website Welsh Winter Skills, and Scottish Winter Skills. I have some dates in the calender for these courses, but I am flexible if the dates don’t suit you, then matbe I can arrange something y=to suit you.

I have put together a rock climbing calender to help promote my course dates over at Snowdonia Mountain Guides. It would be great to hear any feedback, it is an 11Mb download, available here.

Just thought I’d remind people that I am running some CPD courses for instructors or trainees this weekend. Saturday 22nd is a Long Term Athlete Development Workshop, and 23rd is a Coaching Climbing Movement. These courses would be ideal for anyway either qualified as an SPA or MIA or going through training who wants to develop skills for coaching climbing and working with the long term development of young climbers at a Kids Climbing Club.

If you are interested then contact me through the comments or contacts here or at Snowdonia Mountain Guides.

More details on the course can be found here.

I finally got round to making a new website for my domain, Snowdonia Mountain Guides. The site is still a work in rpogress, although all the major features are there. It is a retro site, in that it is based on hand coded PHP and HTML, rather than using wordpress as a content management system. I am oping that it will be easier to managed, as I have managed to do some background work that controls the pricing across all the site.

Anyway, I hope you like it and find time to explore and visit, and maybe be inspired to come and join me on a course at some point. I am really looking forward to the winter if anyone is keen for some last minute winter courses in Wales, based on when the conditions are in.

http://snowdoniamountainguides.com/

I have put together a small website about my book ‘How To Climb Harder’, it will hopefully help market my book. If you find any mistakes then please contact me here so I can rectify them.

If you have a website, blog, facebook or twitter account, and you like the book, then please find the time to liuk to the site.

http://www.howtoclimbharder.com/

I have been doing some research for an piece on mental toughness. I remembered a couple of examples, one good one bad, of how mental toughness helps or hinders athletes in other areas. One comes from this Gladwell peice on ‘The Art of Failure‘, I really like his work and Blink and The Tipping point are very good reads indeed.

In this article he talks about Jana Navotna crumbling under pressure just 5 point from winning wimbledon. I found a video, and if you can’t be bothered to read Gladwell’s Piece I will explain quickly. Jana had lost the first set on a close tie breaker, and then blitzed the second set 6-1 (or maybe 2?). She was then 4-1 up in the final set, and serving for what would have been her 5th game in that set. The video is a clip from a programme on choking.

Gladwell uses it to talk about performance catastrophes, where as I think it shows that her lack of mental toughness may have contributed. The video is harrowing, and if you have time, watch the medal ceremony, as Jana pretty much breaks down into the Duchess of Kents shoulder. I went and found fottage of the whole game and watch from this crucial point to the end.

The second video is for me equally moving for better reasons, a Russian gymnast is competing in the World Championship in 1975. As she goes for the dismount the whole apparatus collapses. She saves her landing, salutes the audience and judges and turns away from the aparatus, and never looks back. Putting the incident behind her literally and metaphorically, I think she went onto win the all-round individual and individual events in all 5 disciplines!

Enjoy the vidoe’s and remember Hang Tough in a mental stylee!