bmi and onsight survey

Hi all:

As might be expected in the winter months, there are a couple of recent threads on body weight and how important it is (or isn't) for climbing.
mountainproject.com/v/anyon…
mountainproject.com/v/how-m…

I was thinking it would be interesting to do a little survey to see what correlation, if any, exists between body mass index (bmi) and onsight lead or bouldering grade.

Obviously, it won't be that hard to mess with the results by giving me bad data. However, rather than just discarding results that seem impossible (ie, you have a BMI of 60 and you onsight V14), I've asked for you to fill in your username so that I can contact you for clarification if something doesn't make sense. If you don't feel like giving your username...don't fill in the survey. Also, I will not contact you for any other reason besides an improbable result: this isn't some kind of marketing ploy, just curiosity. Hopefully, others will find the results interesting as well.

I will NOT post any individually identifiable information based on this survey, ie "so and so username's weight is X".

After a few weeks I'll close the survey and post up the results.

There are scales for trad, sport, and bouldering. You can fill in one scale, two, or all three. Height, weight, age, gender, and username are required fields.

And with that:
surveymonkey.com/s/V99PKP3

Cheers,
David

[EDIT added 3/13/14: We're working on the data, and currently we don't have enough responses from women to achieve any kind of statistical significance. It would be great if we could get 5 (or more!) more women to respond.]

You are going to get a lot of different results that may or may not tell you anything of value. I'd wager that onsight ability correlates much more with experience level than bmi. But what do I know? As far as survey monkey ideas go, I like this one.

Jon Zucco wrote:You are going to get a lot of different results that may or may not tell you anything of value. I'd wager that onsight ability correlates much more with experience level than bmi. But what do I know?

It'll be interesting to find out...assuming that anyone fills in the survey.

Hard to measure "experience" although obviously it's hugely important. Still, a lot of people who've been climbing a year climb much harder than others (such as my middle aged self) who've been climbing much longer.

EDIT: if anyone (including Jon!) can figure out a good way to ask the "experience" question, I'd be glad to work up another survey...

Yeah, it's difficult to accurately quantify the other variables like experience, risk tolerance, training frequency/intensity, etc.

This one you're testing is one that can be pretty much exactly measured (assuming people are honest with the survey... and themselves). I hope you get some good data from it.

I looked at your survey, but did not fill it out. It is an interesting question, but I didn't fill it out because I think that you are using the wrong metric. Specifically, I think that "consistent" onsight grade (>90%) is a poor measurement of peak performance. This "consistent" grade is more a measure of your ability to climb cautiously and solidly on routes that are really quite easy for you. It doesn't really tell you how strong/fit you are; it more tells you how good you are at not screwing up on your warm ups. Also, my "90% consistent onsight" doesn't change regardless of my fitness level. I can get injured, gain 5 pounds, and not climb for 3 months, and then still come back an be able to onsight at that level. At this grade, I usually don't have to even try very hard, and only fall off if I get confused or miss a hold/sequence (if you re actually trying hard, you will fall off at least 25% of the time, and probably more). As such, I think this level of consistency is more a measure of experience, baseline fitness, and technical proficiency, not of peak performance (which is when your strength/weight and BMI really matter).

"Max onsight" is a better measurement of performance and will be more sensitive to BMI, but it is problematic as well, since it can be skewed by a flukey/lucky onsight on a route with a laughably soft grade, or that happened to fit you perfectly. A better measure, to me, is the "top 5 max" or "top 10 max"; this is the highest grade at which you have onsighted 5-10 times. It is essentially your max onsight grade, with outliers removed and a requirement of some degree of repeatability.

The "50/50 onsight" grade is another good metric. This is the grade you onsight about half the time. To me, this is what I usually think of as my "consistent" onsight ability. This doesn't mean I never fall off of it, but rather that I consistently have a good shot at onsighting this grade, across a variety of climbing styles. On any day, I go to a crag and try a few routes of this grade, I should be able to onsight at least one of them that day, unless I'm climbing like poop or I'm at Rifle (where no one onsights anything, ever). I do, however, have to try really hard any time I want to onsight this grade. Again, BMI will matter more for this grade, since you are getting into the "try hard" zone where an extra 5 pounds will be noticed.

Note that my comments apply mostly to sport climbing and bouldering, where pushing peak performance is the primary objective. For trad climbing, the 90% consistency onsight grade has much more relevance.

I had the same thought, JCM. Though you seem to have articulated it much more effectively.

This is where my thought about experience level came in. It seems that measuring someone's grade at which they experience a 90% success rate will have a lot of overlap with more mental variables like experience, risk tolerance, etc.

To more accurately measure fitness, which I would think is more related to bmi, a 75 or 50% success rate would be more applicable.

I would measure it by highest grade on sighted and highest redpointed

Thanks for the thoughts... My angle with the "consistent" thing is that I was interested in subtracting out the non-fitness variables like how much you want to do the route, how many times you've tried it, luck, style, tactics, beta, perfect weather conditions, etc.

Also, whatever the question is, it's the same for everyone, so "what is the hardest grade that is easy for you" seems like a reasonable question.

Lastly, I'd admit that the survey does include a bias of mine, which is that for myself onsighting in unfamiliar territory is the climbing skill I most admire and want to improve in myself. I understand, though, that this might be kind of old-fashioned and that other people value other metrics more.

Another thing to keep in mind - height and weight do not give a very good estimate of BMI considering muscle and fat have very different densities. My height and weight estimated BMI tell me I am borderline overweight, whereas a more accurate device (handheld thingy) tells me I am between underfat and athletic.

You can't quantify experience like Jon mentioned upthread. There are loads of people who have been climbing 20 years who have been on fewer routes than than super psyched people get in 3.

The onsight idea would work specifically for the Red or certain parts of a gym. Easy cruxes, no rests, and overhung.

How can it possibly work on vertical rock. I am weak as a baby right now, embarassingly so. On steep routes, I can onsight about 11- and often fail on 10+ if it's steep. Sure I have onsighted 12b on steep stuff. That really doesn't matter anymore, it was entirely fitness dependent.

On vertical stuff however, very little has changed. I still know how to jam, how to edge, how to plan, and how to execute. So even though I'm probably the physically weakest I've been in my adult life, 12a at a place like Shelf still happens about 50-60% of the time and 12b about 20%.

FWIW, when I redpointed 13c, my BMI was about 22. I'm currently 19.8.

MattL wrote:Another thing to keep in mind - height and weight do not give a very good estimate of BMI considering muscle and fat have very different densities. My height and weight estimated BMI tell me I am borderline overweight, whereas a more accurate device (handheld thingy) tells me I am between underfat and athletic.

Just to clarify, height and weight are the variables that are used to calculate BMI. They don't give a good estimate of BMI, they give you an exact value. BMI=mass in kg/height in m squared. That being said BMI doesn't always give a very accurate representation of body composition (fat mass vs lean mass) for the reasons Matt described (differing densities of tissue types). BMI is however a useful tool to estimate body composition so you can make statistical comparisons. Looking forward to hearing about your findings.

Probably the most useful BMI-type measurement for climbing would be a ratio of forearm circumference to weight.

Neil and Cassidy wrote: Just to clarify, height and weight are the variables that are used to calculate BMI. They don't give a good estimate of BMI, they give you an exact value. BMI=mass in kg/height in m squared. That being said BMI doesn't always give a very accurate representation of body composition (fat mass vs lean mass) for the reasons Matt described (differing densities of tissue types). BMI is however a useful tool to estimate body composition so you can make statistical comparisons. Looking forward to hearing about your findings.

My bad, I guess I was thinking of body fat percentage.

JCM wrote:Probably the most useful BMI-type measurement for climbing would be a ratio of forearm circumference to weight.

Popeye crushes 5.16

Spoiler alert: losing weight will help you climb harder. If you can accept this, gather whatever sample size of climbers you deem satisfactory, measure their climbing ability, have them lose 10 lb., then measure again. Unless you already have veins bulging out of your lower abs, you could lose weight and it WILL help your climbing.

Edit to add: if youy want to ask a question that doesn't already have an answer, try to determine at which point excessive weight loss starts to inhibit performance. There certainly is such a point.

Monomaniac wrote:Spoiler alert: losing weight will help you climb harder. If you can accept this, gather whatever sample size of climbers you deem satisfactory, measure their climbing ability, have them lose 10 lb., then measure again. Unless you already have veins bulging out of your lower abs, you could lose weight and it WILL help your climbing. Edit to add: if youy want to ask a question that doesn't already have an answer, try to determine at which point excessive weight loss starts to inhibit performance. There certainly is such a point.

yeah, my guess is that a before/after comparison is a far closer-to-isolated test than this sort of sampling.

Monomaniac wrote:Edit to add: if youy want to ask a question that doesn't already have an answer, try to determine at which point excessive weight loss starts to inhibit performance. There certainly is such a point.

In my above post, I used way too many words to allude to that question.

This is absolutely right and I've seen that point in myself. It's also worth noting that the point in which weight loss affects me negatively is very different among styles.

Monomaniac wrote:Spoiler alert: losing weight will help you climb harder.

Thanks Mr. Obvious! Lol.

Since I'm too lazy to maintain a low weight year-round, my million dollar question is this: what weight maximizes training effectiveness? I just started a training cycle where a weight belt was recommended for developing power. I kind of chuckled as I'm about that much heavier than I am during my prime sending season.

filled it out but i agree with on the the poster's above. Onsite ability is not a really good measure of climbing performance. Especially bouldering. I think ability to red point is a more useful metric to measure climbing fitness.
Also, i think a pretty fair measure of experience would be a question like " how do you classify your experience level?" and "how long have you been climbing"

i'm interested what you find.

Post results!

Monomaniac wrote:Spoiler alert: losing weight will help you climb harder. If you can accept this, gather whatever sample size of climbers you deem satisfactory, measure their climbing ability, have them lose 10 lb., then measure again. Unless you already have veins bulging out of your lower abs, you could lose weight and it WILL help your climbing. Edit to add: if youy want to ask a question that doesn't already have an answer, try to determine at which point excessive weight loss starts to inhibit performance. There certainly is such a point.

Hi Mono, I agree with all that for sure, and that's why I'm currently hammering away at my diet. I guess to me the point of the survey is figuring out how low I need to go before excess weight is probably not the major barrier for me that I think it is now. If I want to lead a given grade and my BMI is 2 points higher than everyone in the survey who leads that grade, that's an interesting data point. And if I get myself right into the middle of that pack, and I STILL can't lead that grade, then I need to focus on other issues.

48 replies to the survey so far, thanks a lot to those who wrote in. I'll give it a few more days to see if we can increase our "sample size" and then start crunching.