Back in March I started focusing on ways I could become more athletic and faster and that very quickly led me to this guy Tony Holler and the Feed the Cats program. Pretty much the only thing Feed the Cats does besides sprinting is something called 'x-factor' which is a whole smorgasbord of high intensity athletic movements. Jumping, bounding, lateral movements, etc. The basic idea is to do things that fast people do well and that slow people do poorly and try to get better at them. Immediately I saw a connection to climbing because climbing is almost nothing but an endless variety of novel high intensity movements.
So I've been incorporating this movement practice which got me thinking about the ways that athletes inhibit their movement. The psychological definition of an inhibition is a voluntary or involuntary restraint on the direct expression of an instinct." And I think it's a much better word than saying someone is too scared or too lazy or too incompetent. It acknowledges that we all have these internal speed limits and warning signs and through conscious practice we can get closer to our full potential.
It's common in climbing to encounter moves where you're flinging yourself through the air towards a wall and you have to generate enough momentum to get your body to the wall to be able to grab onto a hold. 99% of people will stop their momentum or intentionally undershoot for a hold to try to keep themselves safe. Often they'll reach for the target hold but leave the rest of their body as far away from the wall as possible. You can see that braking system kick in so clearly when you watch people try to jump to something. And then most people will gradually kind of feel it out and build confidence by inching closer and closer with each attempt so they override that safety system. Anyway one of the first things I did to try to work on movement and inhibition was set up a gym mat on pads and say 'I want you to tackle this mat as hard as possible.' I wanted them to get more comfortable with moving their body very fast through space towards something.
Growing up I can remember thinking to myself in high school that I was a really inhibited person. I didn't use that word but I very vividly remember making a connection between being slow and the fact that I was uncomfortable with things like taking my shirt off at practice and getting on roller-coasters and generally shy. The really fast guys on the team carried themselves in a way and did things that showed they had a much broader comfort zone. I'm not saying there is a 1:1 correlation between social anxiety and performance but I do think it makes sense to think that if you have a pretty inhibited personality that you're going to struggle to push yourself really hard. A quality of high level athletic performance is that it looks unrestrained.
One issue we're running into now as we try to improve general athleticism off the climbing wall is that the kids are slow to trust training that doesn't look like climbing. So they'll say, "that's dumb. I'm not doing that." or they feel embarrassed or they go through the motions of the exercise but they're just kind of checking the box (I was very much this person as an athlete. I'll do what I'm told to do but in the back of my mind I was like 'can't we just go run?' The one thing I did basically outright refuse was the weight room because I was very self-conscious in there)
I can understand why if you're someone who really loves climbing and wants to get better at it that you would be skeptical of crawling around on mats and turning your body in all sorts of weird ways. I get that the connection between rotating your body on the ground and movement on the wall isn't immediately apparent. It's going to take time and convincing and ultimately it's going to take successful examples to really get buy-in. My big goal this year is to find ways to connect the two and make that more salient.
The last thing I'll say is that at the younger level and those who are newer climbing: they love doing off the wall movement practice. I think some of them would be happy to do an entire practice of rolling and crawling and jumping on the mats. My guess is that a lot of them are at a developmental stage where that movement practice is really relevant and they're less invested in climbing and they don't have the grip strength and their hands start to hurt about 30 minutes into practice so getting to move around without holding onto something is a welcomed break.
Inhibitions. Interesting stuff.
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