WANTED: Skills Clinic Ideas

I recently got a new job at my university’s outdoor program. Part of my job is to program and teach climbing clinics to students at the university. 

Our climbing facility is pretty small, but we have a lead wall, boulder wall, and rappel tower with a small ledge to work on. Most, if not all, of the clinics will take place in that space. 

With this in mind, what are some climbing skills you wished you knew back when you were a university top roper? Alternatively, what do you wish all the university top ropers at your local crag would learn?

PS sorry if this belongs in the beginners forum, but I figured I’d get better engagement here.

how to clean sport routes with a variety of common local anchors (ie, mussy hooks, ram horns, rap rings, and small chain links which you cannot fit a bight of rope through).

I always see college kids shouting up instructions to a new climber at a sport craig 

As mentioned above, cleaning various anchors to lower down is a great choice and should be priority.

Cleaning various anchors to rappel down could be second. When and why to lower versus rappel. 

How to set up an all-in-one rappel extension/tether using a double length sling and back up the rappel using an autoblock hitch

A fireman’s belay / firelady’s belay

How to use two prussik hitches to ascend a single or double strand of rope. Such as a rappel rope

How to tie off an ATC that is releasable-under-load A.K.A. Going hands free, or the beginning step to “escaping the belay.” Perhaps to make a phone call for help. I even find this handy for when some top roper or leader just wants to hang on the rope for longer than I want to grip the brake. Lol. If not using a Gri Gri. 

how to tie various knots: Figure of 8 Follow Through, Double Fisherman’s Bend, Barrel Knot, Bowline with backup, Flemish Bend, Flat Overhand Bend. When and why to use each.

making leg wraps to stop a rappel if you aren’t using a backup hitch.

Leave No Trace principles for taking care of the outdoors. 

how not to be annoying at the crag 

First knots vs. hitches. Gotta stomp out that shit. Then teach some knots and hitches...

Combine munter and clove into the same lesson as they are so closely related.

Friction hitches.

Teach tying off and releasing an ATC... have 2 people do it at opposite ends of a top rope.

Importance of communicating your plans to your belayer. IE how "I'm in direct" should never actually be said and leads to sooooo many accidents and so much confusion. Cleaning vs rapping different anchors and a few different techniques.

• Communication from the top when you are rapping should only be: "off belay" and possibly "can you give a firemans?"
• Communication from the top when you are going to get lowered should only include: "slack", "take", "lower"
  (Your belayer does not need to know if you are in direct, because then they may start to assume they can take you off belay and walk away... you might not want that. Instead be fucking clear about what you tell them. If you tell them slack, they give you slack, if you tell them take, they take, if you tell them lower, they lower you... If you want to rap, you tell them to take you off belay, and they do so.)

Proper rappelling with a slightly extended ATC-Guide style device and friction hitch backup... Converting this to ascending mode if you rap past an anchor.

Improvised rappeling if you drop your ATC/GriGri... Carabiner brake and all sorts of other "cool guide tools"

Crag etiquette, basic outside climbing guidelines, route reading from guidebooks/mp, stick clipping... food at crags, drinks at crags, dogs at crags, music at crags... rock cairns in general bad. Rock cairns for the descent for multipitch routes == godsend, don't knock down. Who maintains your crags? Where do you report bad hardware? What local climbing organizations can you join and what kinda positive things do these orgs do for the crags? What kinda FUN events do they put on? Roughly how often?

Pull brake under slide (or your acronym of choice for this style of belaying), how slip slap slide with hands up is a terrible idea with ATC, show some burned palms, etc... Show how slip slap slide works great and is the proper way to belay with a munter... because that's the direction in which it has the greatest braking friction for that... and there is no braking friction in this orientation for an ATC.

etc...

Pet peeve moment: the shuffle. Teach the shuffle. So many gyms don’t for GriGris, so many people think it’s letting go of the brake strand. Petzl even recommends it for the Reverso. But nowadays the thing I always drill in is understand the braking mechanism of your device, how not to interfere with it, and how to ensure you get your mechanical advantage, rather than any specific technique.

Which on that: slack management. Along with bad commands, which someone else addressed, poor slack management is probably the most common mistake I see among new climbers and probably the most common I’ve personally seen cause serious (as in, ambulance required) injuries in the gym. Though that’s anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.

Otherwise I agree with crag etiquette and ascending/rappelling. Admittedly I’m still weary of teaching anchor building in a group setting like you’re describing. Just seems like too much to be able to cover effectively with large groups.

Stress how important communication between the climber and belayer is.  So many things go wrong b/c of miscommunication due to not wanting to appear ignorant or just making an assumption rather than taking a few seconds to sort it out. To this day, if I'm not sure what's going to happen when my partner or I get to the top of the pitch/route I'll make sure we at least have a tentative game plan in place before leaving the ground.

One of the things I took away from learning from guides is the importance of ground school practice for newbies. If I'm going to teach someone to clean anchors they'd better be able to walk me through the whole thing on a mock anchor setup before I'm going to let them do it at height.   I guess this seems obvious: what I'm stressing is that you should practice it in a safe environment until it's dialed enough that You're (not) Gonna Die.

When all else fails... stay safe and just leave some gear.  

What’s your demographic?

All of the posts above mention various skills needed to transition outdoors. Those are all good, of course, but Is this even the goal of most people in your gym?

If the majority of them are happy with indoor bouldering, meet them where they are.

I’ve noticed that there is a lot of hunger in new climbers for some kind of rudimental coaching/technique training, bc there isn’t a lot of coaches out there working with adult beginners who aren’t going to the nationals in two years, who just want to “get better”, aka send that indoor V5. You can go over simple technique skills like “this is flagging (inside/outside/reverse)”, show them some drips like quiet feet/glue hands, movement initiation drills, etc. 

Also, these are college students, aka young adults, likely with very little knowledge of nutrition, or weightlifting background. A lot of your people could benefit from someone talking to them about weight training for opposing muscles/injury prevention/general longterm health. Why not make that a subject for some of your clinics? Not necessarily because it’s specifically climbing-related, you could do the same thing for kids who picked up squash in college… but you are dealing with the climbing club.

Lena chita wrote:

What’s your demographic?

All of the posts above mention various skills needed to transition outdoors. Those are all good, of course, but Is this even the goal of most people in your gym?

Thanks, that’s a good point I hadn’t really thought of. I was thinking most would be interested in the gym-to-outdoor transition, but there’s definitely those who are more interested in climbing in the gym purely for the movement and fitness. 

John Luke Lusty wrote:

If you have a rappel tower with a ledge that seems like a great opportunity to teach a wide spectrum of multipitch skills. Aside from the basics like rope management, belaying from above, and lead swaps you could go into pre-rigging rappels and self-rescue. Better for a smaller class of maybe 2 or 3 if you are the only teacher.

From what I understand our climbing facility was always meant to be more of a training/skills practice zone than a recreational gym, but that hasn’t really been the case lately. I really want to take advantage of the rappel tower/ledge. 

John Luke Lusty wrote:

Lena chita - am I incorrect in stating that there is little evidence for weight training with the goal of injury prevention at this time? I'm not knocking general fitness, but I've just never found anything that's been substantially proven - even stretching isn't recommended before a workout.

You aren’t necessarily incorrect about little evidence for direct link between weight training and injury prevention, specifically. I’m not a specialist in this subject, so do t take my word for it.

I wasn’t trying to focus on the injury prevention specifically. Just thinking that it’s common for new eager climbers to jump on the let’s-train-pull-ups bandwagon, but they aren’t necessarily thinking about opposing muscle strengthening, and overuse injuries, so it would be a good topic to introduce.

How to clean a pink tricam

A new thought is to direct these skills with the goal of becoming SPI certified. Run an SPI exam at the end of it. Then these participants would be partially on their way towards having some type of a certification (granted you still need a WFR but that is another thing you can put in your catalog of offerings). I'm sure you could take that curriculum and expand it out over the course of a semester.

Participants would walk away with the skills to get a job. It would also give you a bunch of job security and professional development that you don't have to pay for.

Or you could try and re-invent the wheel again...

Dynamic lead belay

John Luke Lusty wrote:

Lena chita - am I incorrect in stating that there is little evidence for weight training with the goal of injury prevention at this time? 

I'd be interested to see the studies, but at this point, I'm not concerned whether they confirm my anecdotal evidence. I've seen way too many cases of overuse injuries that have been rectified by antagonist muscle training. I teach injury prevention clinics pro bono at my local gym and I consistently see results from new climbers incorporating even just a seven-minute warmup routine.

Horst once said that reverse wrist curls are the #1 exercise you can do to prevent the dreaded epicondylitis pair.

John Luke Lusty wrote:

This is an excellent point. If your group wants to climb harder then I think bouldering clinics focusing on specific techniques and corresponding drills is a fantastic way to do that. Maybe get an opinion poll out to those participating in the gym to see what they are interested in!

And before running this poll, show them the statistics of climbing accidents. Where do climbers die: Is it in the gym or when they go outside? 

Since this is a university program, you should also show them the math: What's the cost of a standard trad rack and then how much a gym boulderer needs to spend. 

Maybe even include a discussion about global warming. Once they leave the gym and start travelling for climbing, their contribution to ruining this planet goes up exponentially.

Basic courtesy  when outdoors. Clean dirt off their shoes, leave the hammocks and tunes at home. Respect other peoples' space.

I've been instructing at a University outdoor climbing program for a few years, and many of the suggestions here work really well for us. We teach clinics all the way from top-rope belaying, to traditional gear placements, to rope rescue, and everything in between. It's really rewarding to see college kids employ those skills and take off! 

One thing I've been trying, and I want to try more, is to provide discourse around crag etiquette, management, inclusion, and respect. Specifically, discussions around sustainable land practices beyond LNT, understanding and paying respects to the indigenous history of the land, climbing language and behavior that is welcoming to new climbers, climbers of various body types, genders, races, cultures etc. 

I find that this is a ripe age group to tackle these ideas and I'm excited to see where our programming goes! 

Good on you for inquiring, Clayton. I wish there were more instructors with the humility to ask such questions.

+1 for an emphasis on ethics and etiquette. Barring explicit discussion of douchery and its relation to safety and access, many forms of climbing instruction introduce or reinforce rude and even outright dangerous habits such as: climbing in large groups, gangbanging routes, congregating in the fall-line, drowning out essential climber-belayer communication with unnecessary noise, etc.

For most new climbers, whose introduction to the pastime was videos of shirtless men screaming for no reason, it's important to emphasize some philosophical questions: Do you think anyone ventures into the outdoors to experience you? Do you believe that your (or you parents') taxes pay for route development and crag maintenance? Are you in Boulder? Then why are you acting like you're in Boulder? etc.