Month: December 2011

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.