As you level up in climbing, so do the challenges.

We have become collectors of dots. But there’s one major thing that happens when we connect dots that is entirely lost in mass dot collection: critical thinking.

Do you really have terrible willpower? Or are you surrounded by distractions and obstacles?

You have a climbing trip coming up. The rock is different. The style is different. Your pre-trip time is short and the number of days you’ll be climbing, even shorter…

Giving artificially low grades to climbs increases their perceived value for our training and development. The more something is mis-graded the more we naturally want to prioritize it.

Climbing starts off as this self-feeding cycle that has you wishing you could climb seven days a week. What happens when this cycle stops bringing improvement though?

Experienced climbers are incredible at lying to themselves.

There are an infinite number of lessons to learn within climbing.

Really hard climbing is always going to be hard.

Use strength to leverage every other aspect of your climbing, not replace them.

If everything you do is a finger workout, then when do your hands get a chance to recover?

You aren’t stuck, you’re just trying to skip too many steps.

There is a common theme between a grilled cheese sandwich and good training advice.

The more accurately we define our problems, the more approachable it will feel to find solutions.

Maybe the most understated way of getting better is to build fallback successes into your plan.

How much time should climbers spend becoming more well rounded vs. improving their strengths?

As cool as assessments and standards are, they can easily leave people settling for “good enough” when they have the potential to do much more.

Being able to quickly recognize familiar sequences is a crucial ingredient to harder climbing.

Climber performance metrics only tell a small part of a much more complex human story.

It’s far more comfortable for us to blame ignorance for our lack of progress than it is to blame our own efforts.