Sport Climbing Tips - Introduction & Equipment

Sport climbing is the practice of climbing with pre-placed anchor points and often (but not necessarily) a top rope so that even the relative novice can learn the moves and mindset of climbing while reducing the risk of setting their own 'protections' when scaling the unknown. This just means that the focus is taken away from the intricacies of attaching yourself to the rock, and is more on the moves from one point to the next.

People have climbed for as long as they were bright enough to notice that some places were higher than others. No childhood is complete without at least one attempt to shin up a steep bank or hang off a tree, and rock climbing is a natural extension of that. If you've ever seen those vertigo-inducing pictures of climbers seemingly clinging like flies to sheer faces you'll know that it's an extension that can go a very long way towards the extreme. Yet while the adrenalin factor of climbing is unquestioned it is also a surprisingly cerebral sport in which the techniques are really about problem solving in three dimensions.

The obvious place to get started in sport climbing is on an artificial climbing wall. These have popped up all over the place and often take the form of fully-equipped indoor climbing gyms. Artificial climbing walls come complete with overhangs, cracks and hand or footholds as well as bolts you can hook onto with your carabiners (the D-shaped clips which all climbers carry). Usually the grips are colour coded or numbered to give different routes up the wall, so that while you can use absolutely any point that comes to hand (or foot) in the beginning you can progress by restricting yourself to prescribed routes of varying difficulty.

The first thing to learn when getting the hang of a climbing wall is a technique called 'belaying' which gives you the reassurance of a safety rope leading from you, up to a point above you which acts as a pulley, and then back down to a partner who can keep you safe even if you were to get it into your head to throw yourself backwards off the wall.

Climbing gyms will already have these top ropes suspended from points above the wall. To use them you will need to pull on a climbing harness which embraces your hips and thighs in a decidedly forward manner. You will then be shown how to tie on to the rope so it won't come undone while at the other end of the rope your belaying partner will be similarly harnessed up plus the addition of a belay device. The device works by adding enough friction to the rope so that your partner can easily apply a brake to your fall with one hand. As you climb up the rope the belayer takes in the slack, sliding it through the belay device in a precise sequence which ensures that the brake hand is always on the rope and in position ready to stop a fall. With the slack gone, even letting go of the wall altogether means the climber won't fall but will dangle instead. Not elegant, maybe, but infinitely less painful than plummeting.

In order for this to work well it is essential to have a series of calls between climber and belayer that establish and check that each has tied on correctly and is aware of what the other is doing. Most climbing gyms will make you take a simple belay test to ensure you're ready to go play without supervision. And after that the wall is your oyster.

You don't have to be suspended hundreds of metres up to perfect your climbing moves. Practising traverses, grips and jams on rocks so low you don't need ropes for safety is called bouldering and has pretty much become a sport in its own right. Many indoor gyms even have a bouldering area where grips and overhangs are only a metre or so above thick landing mats. If you're bouldering outdoors (and for preference even when practicing indoors) then you should have a friend to act as a 'spotter' waiting to help catch you or slow your fall if you slip - even a tumble from a metre high can cause injury if you fall badly.


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