I went to the wall with a friend yesterday who was nervous about falling off, so we did some fall training to help her get over the fear. We started with simply clipping the lower off and rather than waiting for the rope to go tight make it tight by instantly jumping off. This was fine when I was belaying her, but I did take quite a bit of air, as my friend had a fair bit of rope out when I jumped off and I might weigh a bit more than her!
We next moved onto lead falls, so found a nice overhanging route with big holds, and got her to climb up until she felt comfortable jumping off, Giving her the aim of getting the bolt level with her chest, as a start, and moving onto until she was above it.I also introduced her briefly to dynamic belaying.
The key to this training is a progressive approach, where you try and push yourself a little everytime. Some people will take an age to increase the distance they fall, some will be happy basically jumping from above the bolt after one or two goes. The trick is to allow the person falling to make there own decisions as how far they push it.
The second point is the most important one, which is safety. I know we all check each others harnesses and knots and belay plate before we lead a route. When you engage in this type of fall practice for both confidence in the system and safety I make sure I really overtly check and double check everything. Another important point is that the belayer knows what they are doing, as if they don’t there is the potential to drop someone quite badly, if necessary have them backed up.
A further issue is that having taken one or two falls onto one end of the rope it will have been stretched, and the knot will have tightened. It is important to let the rope relax, so it can stretch again. So get in the habit of switching the ends, and giving the rope time to relaxed after you have given it some extreme stretching.
There are other ways to get over your fear of falling, and which one to use would depend on the type of fear you have. If you’d like to have a days help with you fear, then Mark Reeves the author of the Climbing Coach, has study sport psychology to an MSc level, and can offer you a personalized program to over come your fears and improve your grade.
