r/indoorbouldering

Hello dear people i may need a bit of help here, i would like to 3d print holdes for kids but coudnt find a proper models on the net, anything you can lead me to?

Thank you for your time.

My street shoe size is 42.5. My La Sportiva Skwamas are also 42.5; they were extremely tight at first, and my feet would be in a lot of pain after every session. They finally broke in after about two months—the material stretched, and while they are no longer painful, they've become too loose for effective heel hooking. Because of that, I bought a pair of Scarpa Drago XTs in size 43, and they fit perfectly and comfortably. I really love the sensitive feel of this shoe, though I’m not entirely satisfied with the heel cup design. I’m currently climbing around the V6 level indoors. I often see people recommending downsizing by 1 to 2 full sizes, which leaves me very confused since my Drago XTs are actually 0.5 sizes **larger** than my street shoes! Am I missing something here?

Been switching back and forth for a while. Dry chalk is great for friction but I'm going through it fast and the gym is starting to complain about the dust.

Liquid chalk seems cleaner but I'm not sure if I'm applying it right — sometimes it feels like it blocks sweat instead of absorbing it, and my grip gets worse mid-session.

What's your actual experience? Do you layer them? Different for indoor vs outdoor?

Hi guys.

I’ve decided to build the frame of the moonboard myself rather than order it from moon.

I was looking at some advice please:

1. What t-nuts and bolts to order.

2. Will the app still work without the led lights?

3. And if it will work, any advice on how to mark the holds so I don’t have to remember them everytime instead?

Was wondering if there are any training programs or workouts I should be doing that will help me climb higher grades? Currently stuck at v3 and have only one v4.

I brush holds on the wall when I am at the gym because I know it helps, but I never see people brush holds on the kilter board.

Are they supposed to? Is there a reason to not brush holds when climbing on Kilter board or other similar things?

Just recently started doing calisthenics, mostly because I've had to take a break from climbing for a couple weeks because of finger injuries, and I needed something to keep me from going crazy.

I'm finding the calisthenics really challenging, in the best way, and I'm feeling stronger and leaner after just a week or so. My shoulders and hips in particular feel stronger and more stable.

Anyone find that practicing calisthenics aids your climbing?

I’ve been climbing for 7months and I’ve seen some improvement, at first my main issue was fear of falling and the confidence I had in myself and my skill but as that was conquered I noticed another weakness I had which was how my fingers would always stiff up and hurt if I did a long route or slowed down while climbing, while talking to one of my friends he noticed that I was double jointed and told me that’s probably why I have that problem since my ligaments are softer than normal. No matter how often I climb or how hard I try I can never get over this hurdle any advice would be appreciated

I’ve seen a lot of videos the last while where climbs are being graded something like V2-4 by the gym, which just entirely blows my mind? I’d understand for morpho problems or higher grades with less consensus, but I’ve also seen gyms indicate short or tall problems just by tape colour.

Would be interested to hear any benefits people find with grading systems like that. I also understand gyms have an incentive to scale progression for lower grades, but at least at the gyms I’ve been to beginner grades like V0-V4 typically have meaningful skill jumps to the point where I’d feel like such big grade brackets would frustrate me more then make me feel like I’m progressing?

Obviously grading in an of itself is subjective but interested in people opinions of the psychology of it!

I've been climbing about 10 years on and off - mostly indoors and lately have been hearing a lot of hype about chalk alternatives - specifically fumed silica (silica silylate). Years of poorly ventilated and poorly cleaned indoor gyms have me curious if this is a serious replacement.

What's everyone's take on the new chalk on the block? I've read some posts about chalkless and maglock (which also uses magnesium carbonate) and seemed to get mixed opinions. The other week another company came into my local gym advertising aerogrip (another fumed silica based product but in liquid form). I like the idea of it but does it actually perform better?

A few weeks ago I posted here about the fact that there's no mental fatigue research on climbing, despite it being one of the most cognitively demanding sports out there. The discussion was genuinely useful, and a lot of you described exactly the kind of thing the research predicts: route reading falling apart after long work days, commitment dropping, feeling mentally foggy even though your body was ready to go.

Since then I've been collecting responses from athletes across multiple sports, and something interesting is emerging. Climbers describe the effects of mental fatigue differently from endurance athletes. Runners and cyclists tend to talk about effort perception: the same pace feeling harder than it should. Climbers talk about cognitive processing: not being able to read problems, hesitating on sequences, losing the ability to adapt mid-route. It's early data and I can't draw conclusions yet, but the pattern maps onto something the research has been hinting at for a while. Sports with high cognitive-perceptual demands might experience mental fatigue through a different mechanism than sports where the primary demand is sustained effort (Smith et al., 2018; Van Cutsem et al., 2017).

If that holds up, it would mean climbers don't just get tired brains like everyone else. The way mental fatigue degrades climbing performance might be fundamentally different from how it degrades a time trial or a 10k. And that matters for how you'd manage it.

I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Derby and I work at Lattice Training. This is a cross-sport study building a proper measurement tool for mental fatigue in sport, because the existing ones were designed for clinical settings and don't capture what athletes actually experience.

I'd genuinely like to hear from climbers on this: how does mental fatigue show up differently in climbing versus other sports you do? Is it purely about decision-making and route reading, or do you notice effort perception changes too? And do you think the climbing community underestimates how much your cognitive state before the session affects session quality?