I am a firm believer in the fact that there are skills a coach possesses and skills they don’t.  The important thing is to recognise this and now when you need to call in outside help. The reason I am writing this is I had an enquiry from someone that wants to brush up on their trad climbing and also wants help to push into the F8 grade.

The trad climbing I can help with, however I felt that I possibly lacked the level of knowledge to really help with the 8 grade issue. So I contacted another coach and got them on board to do a couple of days with the client. Unfortunately the dates fell through but it made me realise that there are indeed things I can help with and things beyond my current skill set.

The client is looking at other dates and hopefully the course will work out, as I am looking forward to observing another coach working at this level. As for me simpy observing the coach will be a form of continuing professional development, after all there is always something new to learn in coaching. The trick is to allow yourself the honesty to accept that we all have weaknesses. Secondly giving yourself the opportunity to work on your weaknesses is the only way to grow as a coach.

These are key tennants in my next book Effective Coaching: The Coaching Process for Climbing Instructors, which is due out next month. As well as covering aspects of the coaching process like teaching and learning, it also features a section on reflective practice that is all about professional development.

Anyway, I thought it was a interesting point for other coaches to examine and consider.

I have just produce a new eBook, a beginners guide to avalanches. The book is called “A Mountaineer’s Guide to Avalanches” and is available on both Kindle and iPad. It is a very basic book that covers the essential knowledge you’ll need to make appropriate condition on the hill. There is a full breakdown of the book and some screem shots from iPad version here.

Two articles have been derived over on UKC as a beginners guide to avalanches part 1 & part 2. As such you can get a good feel for the book before you buy it, there is also some try before you buy options on both versions

It cost £5.14 for kindle and £4.99 for iPad, not bad value really for the price of less than two pints.

I saw this on facebook, I took the time to read it all the way through. Whilst on the one hand you might think what a silly girl. On the other hand in any other sport an injury probably does only last a week. In this post Ailsa catalogues all her injuries, which my word is a lot.

I hope she recovers soon and manages to find a happy medium to her climbing, she seems to have so much enthusiasm which is not uncommon in young people who become struck down with the climbing bug.

I guess for climbing coaches it is linked in a way to my last post of moral responsibilities of coaches. At what point do we turn round and say to a young climber, STOP. It is very hard, they come with bucket loads of psyche, climb loads, they often listen to and respect you and then all of a sudden you the coach has to turn into a version of Dr Evil and say sorry you can’t climb. Emotionally it is draining for both coach and student as nobody wants to take something that means so much to someone away from them, but arguably it is in the long-term interest of everyone.

I guess at times tough love is needed, given that there is so little information on injuries to young climbers. As such it is hard for coaches to know what is best. I have written on this subject before, in that we need to use a precautionary principle. In that it is better to underestimate what training a young climber is capable of then over estimate it and lead to injuries.

Another way to look at it, is it better to have a climber who you make wait until their fingers and bodies a physiologically ready to push hard on routes and boulder problems who never ever wins a competition. Or is it better to have one who maybe wins a few comps but as a result has lasting injuries? Given the level of climbing young climbers are achieveing I am unsure as to whether both winning and staying injury free are possible.

It is very easy for me to cast opinions from the comfort of my own home, but last year I turned down an oppotunity to coach with the North Wales Academy. I turned it down for several reasons however one of which was I felt uncomfortable having anyone under the age of 12 in a club whose premise is elite performance (I thought climbing was a late specialisation sport afterall!). That decision was based on one of the only papers that have studied long term damage by elite coaching. Which highlighted the risk to permanently damaging the growth plates in fingers in young climbers. That paper associated the damage with campus boarding, however as a climber I have never injured myself on a campus board. Instead I have injured myself bouldering or pulling very hard on challenging routes, as such I wonder what damage either will cuase, particularly hard boulder.

Anyway, I hope we can all learn that what might be obvious to us as climbers and coaches is not obvious to our young students. As that is the key to Ailsa story, she needed someone to tell her to stop who knew something about injuries. Hopefully that is what the new coaching awards will offer.

As part of being a Mountaineering Instructor I regularly have to weigh up both my legal responsibilities and moral ones. In that I am mainly talking about making a decision as to whether or not I get someone to lead climb or not. Often that decision is based on observations made whilst having clients climb on the blunt end of the rope and seeing how they move and place gear.

When its an adult there is still a legal and moral obligation to make sure those climbers are willing to take a risk. I have mentioned this in detail on some posts on the soft skills of teaching lead climbing .

In a landmark case for instructors Pope versus Cuthbertson, where Pope fell whilst lead climbing but as an adult he not only consented to be leading, but the judge considered that he had been well informed about the risk involved.

This begs the question as to what you can do in the case of teaching children to lead. I have done several weeks of teaching on a young persons climbing course for a couple of centres. Often based on mine and others experience the biggest problem isn’t a young persons climbing but there judgement and attention to risk. At times I have not taught leading all day because the young belayers simply stop paying attention to whats going on with the leader.

Each person on those courses need to have there parents sign consent forms to allow them to be taught lead climbing. Several Mountain Guides, Instructors and experienced climber send there children on these courses, as such I can see that they can make an informed decision as to what risks the child will be exposed to. However I have always thought that based on Pope versus Cuthbertson, if something bad was to happen them the level of understanding of the average parent when it comes to lead climbing would be a very grey area in court. In that how can a parent give informed consent to an activity they are unsure of.

How I and many of my former colleagues manage this is carefully selecting routes that might well be difficult but at the same time safe. I have had indoor climbers build up to E2 outside on some courses, and other instructors and coaches have got young climbers on routes harder than this. The over arching safety aspect is the coach or instructor is on a rope next to the climber to assess all the gear and make sure the climber is safe as possible. By that I mean that the climber is unlikely to hit the floor or ledge or other hazard.

I am writing this as I have just read a news item on UKC, and would like to see what other coaches or instructors think. I am not saying that in this case the coach is being negligent as I do not know the extent of the relationship or the exact circumstance. Instead I want to open up a debate as to what you think is acceptable when coaching a young climber and whats not.

Nosfertu is an E6 on grit, the first gear is over half height probably 25ft off the ground. In the video the coach appears to be on the ground belaying/spotting and don’t get me wrong the 13 year old kids is obviously extremely talented as he makes very short work of the route after top-roping it a few times. However if he was to slipped or choked the results could have been serious.

There are things that as an outside observer and instructor that makes me go through that worse case scenario. I often suggest to people I train to put themselves in the mind of a prosecuting lawyer. What would they would focus on:

1. It was his first ever trad route lead.
2. He had never place gear?
3. How informed that parent consent was?
4. Is an E6 a common thing for a first time lead climber to do? In legal speak is it common practice?
5. The route is unprotected in the first half.

I think stood in front of a judge and jury should the worse of happened that you would struggle to justify that. No matter how experienced or obviously talented Jim Pope is(I hope he is not a relation of the Pope in the court case I mentioned!). As such I can’t help feeling that maybe there is a case of putting the cart before the horse. In that could you not teach someone to lead on easier better protected routes first and then let them push themsleves as time permits.

Like I said though, I have no idea the extent of the relationship between the climber and the coach. I am happy to receive comment either way. However to any budding coaches out there I would also add just because one coach is doing it, does it make it the right thing to do. I think the Whymper quote works well here:

Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.

In that think what are you going to say to the parents, the police, the judge, jury and yourself if it all goes wrong.

I am not sure whether I am a digital immigrant or digital native, having been born in 1975, I very quickly came into contact with the ZX81, I was just going to universoty when the internet was invented some twenty years ago. So today there are now many candidates who are enrolling on the Mountain Training UK qualifications who are very much a part of the internet revolution.

When I did my winter ML two years ago, I made my logbook with word, as I felt it looked better than the traditional MLT logbooks. This year as I was developing iCoach Climbing, I decided to automate and create an online version of the Mountain Leader Training Logbooks, and used my experience of working on training and assessment courses and the comments I have heard from various assessors to add top tips to the system to help guide candidates to fill in their logbooks with the information that those assessors are looking for.

These logbooks are now live on the site and offer anyone a free solution to storing their logbooks online. Whilst not part of the system at the moment I will probably eventually allow coaches, leaders and instructors to opt in to publish their logbooks as a form of online CV highlighting their experience.

For the time being there is only an export option which can easily be cut and pasted into a word document to create a highly professional logbook for training and assessment courses and include as part of application.

One way that I think the iCoach Coaching logbooks will help is to have the logbook available to the growing number of people who regularly use the web for facebook and other social media on a regualr basis. So your logbook won’t be filled away and need finding everytime you need to add to it but available 24/7 at the click of a mouse whether you have your own computer or a friends.

Below is a tutorial on the coaching logbook system. To use this you need to be a registered user. However there will never be a charge for the use of this feature, only the enhanced coaching features if you want to become a registered iCoach Coach, which allows you to view your clients training data, manage coaching groups and add routes to either individual clients or whole groups.

I have mention my new iCoach Climbing website on here already, and have managed to programme a way that coaches can monitor clients with the platform. At present you have to register as normal for the site and then register to become a coach. This has several steps to it all of which are aimed at promoting an ethos I would like to see on the site from coaches, the second is down to child protection issues and requires you read the child protection policy and answer some simple questions on it.

I am really keen to get some beta testers who coach climbing to trail the system and give some feedback. So whilst in the future I suspect I will have to charge a small fee each year for updating coaches records and processing application part of which needs to be done via email, as I didn’t want the eCRB forms to be placed in the database for data protection issues.

At present when registered on the site you can monitor your clients training and log training for them. You can also view the performance profile exactly as the client does. Anyway if you are a coach or you know one who might be interested in a free trial of the coaching facilities then either register with icoach climbign and get started on the registration process or email me through the site and ask a few more questions.

There is a news item on UKC about Sharma’s latest climbing feats, you can follow the link to the full article. However there is a great quote about goal setting. Where chris says’

“I think it’s good to have short, medium and long term projects, things you can do in a few days, things that maybe take a few weeks and then ones that are more long term, at least that seems to be the best way for me to stay motivated and not lose psyche trying the same route over and over again. It’s important to mix it up.”

I really like that he finds this useful, it has reasonably sound scientific underpinning from research in sport that having a multitude of goals that build on each other. I have written a few things in the past if you go up to teh catogories menu and mental skils it will pull up the related post from this blog.

I know its only October, but given we have already had a dusting of snow and a couple of years ago we had some amazing winter conditions in November. As such I thought I’d take the time to mention a few things about the winter skills courses I run and what they include.

Essentially my winter skills courses look at taking a summer hillwalker and turning them into a winter mountaineer. I use the term mountaineer as unlike summer mountain walking or scrambling, winter requires more complete skills. A simple slope you may walk up in summer can become a 1000ft death slide if you don’t know how to look after yourself.

As such we start by teaching you about ice axe and crampons and show you how to use them to keep yourself safe. Often this involves finding a nice area and essentially playing in the snow for a day. During which we teach you how to walk in different styles with crampons, as different angles and snow types make a big difference to how you try and get you feet to stick. We also show you how to use you ice axe to both pervent a fall through either cut stepping or axe placement.

With those basic skills established we then can go on an exploration of the mountains and get you to look at the added complexities of navigation and avoiding hazards like conices or avalanches. By the end of a two or five day course you will be ready to tackle your own challenges in winter conditions.

We run our courses to meet individual needs and as such we don’t have any fixed base and instead are happy to travel around either Scotland or Wales to either find conditions or help you tackle some of the best remote peaks in the UK in winter conditions. In the past we have been to the following areas on winter skills/guided peaks.

• Extensively across Snowdonia North Wales.
• Glencoe
• Fort William
• Cairngorms
• Torridon and the North West

In order to book on a course in Scotland you need to contact us to arrange a date and destination to suit your needs, especially if in Scotland. Sadly we can’t offer the conditons guarentee as we do in Wales.

Being based in Snowdonia it give us much more flexibility with our courses and we welcome you to provisionally book weekends or week days throughout November and December. Whilst we can’t guarentee good conditions what we will do is offer all of your 50% deposit back if the conditions aren’t suitable for a Winter Skills. Similarly we also suggest trying to contact us for last minute courses should the weather play ball and winter suddenly arrives.

Find out more about:

Welsh Winter Skills Courses

Scottish Winter Skills Courses

The title of course comes from the great Wolfgang Gullich, whilst he didn’t invent training for climbing, he is certainly the person who used it to skyrocket the grades of the time. I mention this as this morning a friend came round for some ‘training’ advice. Now I am not the sort of coach that often writes out a training plan for anybody. Instead I like to give people a framework that they can use to judge their own schedule.

The reason for this is so many things can get in the way of training and climbing, and for most having a 8 week program laid out is somewhat daunting experience. They feel like they should follow it to the letter, Whereas life isn’t like that. If your ill or have to have a few days off because of work/life commitments, the plan basically fails.

Instead I try to get people on board with finding there weaknesses and spending 4 weeks focusing on developing those weaknesses before reassessing them and moving on. There is a performance profiling system on my icoach climbing website for this exact purpose.

When training those weakness I also recommend that you either mentally or physically record each session. The sole purpose of this is that going to a wall and doing the same session over and over will not result in any change. We have to push ourselves at every oppotunity to improve. That could be through more routes, the same number of routes but harder grades, a greater number of route per hour, more trainign days a week and a whole host of other factors that can overload the body and make us build muscle for strength, power endurance or stamina.

Far more important in my mind is apply overload to every single session you go to the wall. If your not feeling strong go for more easy routes. If your feeling good go for difficulty. If you haven’t got long focus on bouldering. Having a piece of paper with a strict program to follow will soon become dull to most, mix it up, remember your there for fun as well as training and adjust what you do dependant on how you feel or even who you are climbing with will help you stay motivate and focused on small gains between every session.

As a climbing coach I am always keen to think outside the box, it was why I decided to spend two years studying an MSc part time to see what sports science can do for climbing. During that two year journey I realised that there was a lot of information about the best practice for sports psychology, performance physiology and effective coaching of technical skills that can be applied to climbing.

In particular I was interested in goal setting, where goals can take on different meanings and functions. So whilst its great to have a outcome or dream goal like climbing a specific route or grade, sports science has shown that it is more important to have goals that are aimed at processes you need to improve to reach those goals.

Those sports scientists have gone further than that and developed a form of performance profiling that was designed for elite athletes to find the most important five processes to work on for a short period before reassessing their performance and setting another five goals. I always though that the process of performance profiling could be automated, but didn’t know how to go about it.

A little research later and I realised that I needed to learn to code php and combine it with a database. So one day I sneaked into the computer sciences department in Bangor University and put a sign up asking for a coding tutor in php and mySQL. After three hours of teaching about database normalisation and a link to some online tutorials I set out programming. After much hair loss and frustration I eventually automated that performance profiling system for rock climbers.

The next step was based on a thought from many coaches that if you do the same thing over and over again you won’t improve just get really good at doing the same thing. Having seen the BMC’s training logbook that was the next thing I set about coding and implementing a way to see the results more easily. As logging all your training by route means that I could program a way to explore the data in more meaningful ways. So at present the overviews show number of routes, average grade and average rate of exertion if you choose to use them.

The perceive rate of exertion is a subjective scale with which you can score each route as to how hard you found it from 1 to 5. It is included because it can show improvements in performance before you see a marked increase in grade. This added sign of improvement can help you stay motivated as it is potentially a finer measure than the grade you climb.

With both these in place I them turned back to the performance profiling that has around 50 attributes that are related to climbing (if you use the system and can think of other attributes I am happy to add them to the system). I initially decided to have the pages in my book “How to Climb Harder” where you can find subjects relevant to those attributes. However I quickly realised it would be great to write articles for those attributes, but the coding was taking up so much time that I remembered I had already written dozens of articles and that there were dozens more written by other people.

Having been at the forefront of the wiki revolution in new route reporting in North Wales I thought why not code a way that I or anybody else can add links to articles, blog post or videos from around cyberspace, and instead make a repository of online resources for climbers and coaches. These are linked with the attributes in the performance profile so now when you do you profile you get a reading list for each attribute.

As a coach I also hope that eventually as I code more features and increase the functionality that more and more climber use it, and even coaches come along and monitor their clients with the system. As I have also coded a complete Mountain Training Logbook system and a way to monitor clients performance. There was also talk of the new coaching award requiring trainee coaches to be mentored by more experienced coaches and whilst I have not added this feature yet it too is planned in the future as is an Open Source Climbing Award that is linked to the national curriculum.

My point is that the site is now functioning well, and I am busy when not busy working dreaming up new ways to use the site. I have many ideas and only me to code it but for me it is more than just a site but a great way to learn a new skill as who knows what the future holds but there will come a point where maybe my body fails me and I need a new career.

The last thing I have coded is a advertising banner feature and if you have made it this far and are interested in some free advertising in return for help to promote the site then get in contact with me via icoachclimbing.com.

There are set of video tutorials that highlight the functions of the site and how you can use it.