Does being taller make climbing easier? Answering this question with data!

Not convinced this can have meaningfully interpretable results because 1) response bias and 2) probable heteroskedasticity

I expect upward bias

J W wrote:

Trinidad, I think it’s cool that you want to gather more data. Without data, we’re just guessing.

And it’s also cool that so many people have pointed out areas for additional consideration in how to frame your questions.

The forum is often a bit of a shitshow, but there are some impressively knowledgeable, thoughtful, and experienced people here, some of whom have given valuable feedback here—free of charge!

If you’re sincere about your inquiry, which I fully believe you are, those perspectives can help you get what you’re looking for faster and more effectively, and above all, more accurately.

With any endeavor of this kind, there remains a possibility that the direction is simply the wrong one, and no amount of fine tuning will result in relevant or reliable data. But trial and error isn’t bad just because we more readily find the errors.

For myself, I think that height is not only not a trivial consideration, it makes a significant difference—but only in the very localized context of individual moves on individual sections of individual routes/problems.

But I don’t know. That’s just based on personal experience and observations, which by definition are highly biased.

How it plays out broadly among new to intermediate climbers?—as you say, limited information exists.

Carry on!

I really appreciate this response! And I completely agree! I think all the perspectives that have been given are super helpful. And maybe it is the case that this is just flat out the wrong way to go about it. But we won't know until we try (or at least I'm not smart enough to know until I try, and I've heard similar from people who are smarter than me that I've talked to). 

I completely agree with your assessment that height helps/hinders on individual moves or sections of routes/problems, but less for climbing as a whole. But we'll see what the data looks like (not that it'll answer that exact question very well)!

Adam Rwrote:

Good thing everyone is taking this so seriously because this is very serious. 

Hahaha I agree! Such a serious topic! 

No, all joking aside, I think this entire discussion is pretty silly. But it's one that's been had enough, multiple times every day at every gym and crag across America and probably the world, that I think it's worth at least trying to answer. Being tall, I may have the discussion more often than most, and I'm probably told that my sends "don't count" more than most for the same reason. What can I say, with all this talk, it's gotten me curious!

What about hand size? Y'all shorties have smaller hands better for grabbing smaller holds on harder climbs. 

Some really genuinely bad data practices going on here, as there is with most climbing data sets. 

The main issue is that climbing is a self-selecting sport. Users develop the routes. At the competition level, routes are set for users. In both cases, climbs that are done are only done by users at a height that will work for it, e.g. if a route requires you to be 6'4" to send it, it won't be sent until someone 6'4" gets on it, with the same being true at the low end of the spectrum as well. Since climbing is self-selecting in this way, it doesn't tend towards a userbase that fits a specific height phenotype - the userbase generates its own challenges. As a result, as seen above, the height of climbers generally follows a normal distribution.

As a result of this, since there are more climbers of an "average" height (within 1 sigma of the mean), most of the world's best climbers will be "average" height. Climbs at the upper end are more likely to be established by "average" height users, and there are more "average" height users who will try them. So that's it - since most people who climb are "average" height, and as a result, most people who develop new climbing opportunities are "average" height, the best height to be is "average". There's an implicit bias in the data - trying to tease out any other correlations or trends has to negotiate the immediate bias

If your question is "does being taller help you move upwards on technical, steep terrain?" then the way to answer that isn't a poorly constructed survey (what "scientists" did you talk to? Good lord.) It's to get a random assortment of un-done climbs, on a random assortment of rock types and climbing styles, and to then get a random distribution of climbers and have them rank them by difficulty in some way and use that to tease out which body types do best on which styles of rock. But even then, that won't account for a climber's experience on different rock types prior to the test, so you'd have to actually just use non-climbers. But that also won't account for overall body compositions and athletic background, innate sense of movement and body awareness, propensity to put out, etc. 

So - the real lesson in this is: If you desperately need to cling to a specific attribute that you do or do not possess to feel at peace with not meeting a certain level of performance you expect to/hope to reach, you should instead consider spending your $300 on a BetterHelp subscription instead of another Lattice training program and try to work back towards having fun with the sport. Change what you can change and accept the things that you cannot, yadda yadda. Grades are all BS anyways.

Adam Rwrote:

What about hand size? Y'all shorties have smaller hands better for grabbing smaller holds on harder climbs. 

You ever heard of slopers and pinches? Anyways, there was a link to a "study" on here a while back about how the "pulp" in your fingers has more correlation to crimp strength than finger size. 

Easy answer.
Absolutely yes....and no.

Not Not MP Adminwrote:

You ever heard of slopers and pinches? Always there was a link to a "study" on here a while back about how the "pulp" in your fingers has more correlation to crimp strength than finger size. 

Nope, not in hard climbing anyway. Slimpers? sure 

I've always said that the ideal climber body is a 5'8" female with a +6 ape index with reasoning being:

• gets the benefit of better balance as a shorter person (this has always been an assumption)
• female mass distribution in the body is on average lower than that in males, which further makes balancing/standing on your feet easier
• being smaller means weighing less
• massively positive ape index helps make up for the shorter height

It's also situational: while a taller person having further reach and being able to skip holds or something like that is obviously annoying and really apparent, there are plenty of other situations that are made significantly easier by being shorter, like certain dihedrals or narrow face climbing.

Doctor Drakewrote:

I've always said that the ideal climber body is a 5'8" female with a +6 ape index with reasoning being:

• gets the benefit of better balance as a shorter person (this has always been an assumption)
• female mass distribution in the body is on average lower than that in males, which further makes balancing/standing on your feet easier
• being smaller means weighing less
• massively positive ape index helps make up for the shorter height

It's also situational: while a taller person having further reach and being able to skip holds or something like that is obviously annoying and really apparent, there are plenty of other situations that are made significantly easier by being shorter, like certain dihedrals or narrow face climbing.

According to AI, the heights of the top climbers in the world ranges from 5’8” to 6’1” with an average of 5’10”. That’s different than the numbers quoted in the original post?

The top male boulder in USA is only 5’4”.

Anecdotally, Ive never seen tall people climb that hard at my gyms?

Maybe they can but it’s not challenging enough for them to continue climbing so the occurrences of watching them struggling isn’t high enough to observe?

Schrödinger”s cat for tall climbers?   

Adam Rwrote:

Nope, not in hard climbing anyway. Slimpers? sure 

Once you start to climb harder you'll realize that smaller holds does not always equal harder grades   

Aside from crack climbing, finger size has little relevance to climbing hard. 

Survey issues aside, "Does being taller make climbing easier" isn't even a well-defined question.  It's 2^n questions, where n is the number of height-correlated variables to potentially control for.

Let's take one height-correlated variable called "weight-to-strength ratio" as an example. Suppose the data showed:
- optimal height for all weight-to-strength ratios combined is 5'10"
- optimal height for any one weight-to-strength ratio is 6'2"
Each would be a useful answer to a valid question, but it's not obvious which question is the "interesting" one, so people would continue unwittingly talking past each other.

Not Not MP Adminwrote:

Once you start to climb harder you'll realize that smaller holds does not always equal harder grades   

Aside from crack climbing, finger size has little relevance to climbing hard. 

Leverage?

Surveys are bad science. Surveys of average climbers and anthropometrics are even worse science as they don't actually test for height and its impact on actual climbing ability potential. Its a validity error that is all over recent publications in climbing.  All of the good research into the anthropometrics of climbing have looked at top performance climbers, people very near their potential of their bodies, and have shown the same obvious thing. Climbing potential is most highly determined by weight, not height.  The POTENTIAL for your climbing ability is best if you are shorter than the avg (5ft 9in for men, 5ft 4 for women in the US and Europe) and lighter than average. This makes sense from every biomechanical viewpoint: mechanical advantage is worsened with increased joint, muscle, and limb length; increased weight/surface area for every hold with larger hands and feet having a smaller amount of their surface area on every given hold, strength to bodyweight ratio decreases as trained individuals gain mass, decreased heat shedding with larger body size, etc. All of this of course takes into account that technique, strength, flexibility, cardiovascular level, mindset, and probably planetary alignment, can affect potential. However, height, does not help. Smaller and lighter are the advantageous 800lb gorilla in the room.  

Now let the Lilliputians and their bitty pitchforks out

David Draperwrote:

Climbing potential is most highly determined by weight, not height.  The POTENTIAL for your climbing ability is best if you are shorter than the avg (5ft 9in for men, 5ft 4 for women in the US and Europe) and lighter than average. 

Source? 

Lattice would disagree with your idea that light is right, in fact all their training media they put out also generally disagrees with you with them saying don't be concerned about putting on extra weight if it benefits strength gains. 

https://latticetraining.com/blog/bmi-and-climbing-part-3-all-8a-nu-climbers/?srsltid=AfmBOop56YL7VgPmi18qvXXqx3hppPXMThVyjYUMyN7ozoY725nVNZs-

The little work they did on height is much older than I remember but can be found here.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120102100/ latticetraining.com/2017/08…

David Draperwrote:

Surveys are bad science. Surveys of average climbers and anthropometrics are even worse science as they don't actually test for height and its impact on actual climbing ability potential. Its a validity error that is all over recent publications in climbing.  All of the good research into the anthropometrics of climbing have looked at top performance climbers, people very near their potential of their bodies, and have shown the same obvious thing. Climbing potential is most highly determined by weight, not height.  The POTENTIAL for your climbing ability is best if you are shorter than the avg (5ft 9in for men, 5ft 4 for women in the US and Europe) and lighter than average. This makes sense from every biomechanical viewpoint: mechanical advantage is worsened with increased joint, muscle, and limb length; increased weight/surface area for every hold with larger hands and feet having a smaller amount of their surface area on every given hold, strength to bodyweight ratio decreases as trained individuals gain mass, decreased heat shedding with larger body size, etc. All of this of course takes into account that technique, strength, flexibility, cardiovascular level, mindset, and probably planetary alignment, can affect potential. However, height, does not help. Smaller and lighter are the advantageous 800lb gorilla in the room.  

Now let the Lilliputians and their bitty pitchforks out

Where did you get this? Average male World Cup climber is 5’10”. Ondra is 6’1”. Janja is 5’4”. 

Frank Steinwrote:

Where did you get this? Average male World Cup climber is 5’10”. Ondra is 6’1”. Janja is 5’4”. 

5’ 8.5” was the average in the photo I printed regarding male lead climbers with IFSC World Cup ranking over a ten year period.

Frank Steinwrote:

Where did you get this? Average male World Cup climber is 5’10”. Ondra is 6’1”. Janja is 5’4”. 

Agreed, but the bias towards average height may simply be that most people are those heights?

Honestly, if height made that much of a difference, every climber would be tall.

phylp phylp wrote:

5’ 8.5” was the average in the photo I printed regarding male lead climbers with IFSC World Cup ranking over a ten year period.

Makes sense, 5’8.5” is pretty close to average height…

Tal Mwrote:

Some really genuinely bad data practices going on here, as there is with most climbing data sets. 

The main issue is that climbing is a self-selecting sport. Users develop the routes. At the competition level, routes are set for users. In both cases, climbs that are done are only done by users at a height that will work for it, e.g. if a route requires you to be 6'4" to send it, it won't be sent until someone 6'4" gets on it, with the same being true at the low end of the spectrum as well. Since climbing is self-selecting in this way, it doesn't tend towards a userbase that fits a specific height phenotype - the userbase generates its own challenges. As a result, as seen above, the height of climbers generally follows a normal distribution.

As a result of this, since there are more climbers of an "average" height (within 1 sigma of the mean), most of the world's best climbers will be "average" height. Climbs at the upper end are more likely to be established by "average" height users, and there are more "average" height users who will try them. So that's it - since most people who climb are "average" height, and as a result, most people who develop new climbing opportunities are "average" height, the best height to be is "average". There's an implicit bias in the data - trying to tease out any other correlations or trends has to negotiate the immediate bias

If your question is "does being taller help you move upwards on technical, steep terrain?" then the way to answer that isn't a poorly constructed survey (what "scientists" did you talk to? Good lord.) It's to get a random assortment of un-done climbs, on a random assortment of rock types and climbing styles, and to then get a random distribution of climbers and have them rank them by difficulty in some way and use that to tease out which body types do best on which styles of rock. But even then, that won't account for a climber's experience on different rock types prior to the test, so you'd have to actually just use non-climbers. But that also won't account for overall body compositions and athletic background, innate sense of movement and body awareness, propensity to put out, etc. 

So - the real lesson in this is: If you desperately need to cling to a specific attribute that you do or do not possess to feel at peace with not meeting a certain level of performance you expect to/hope to reach, you should instead consider spending your $300 on a BetterHelp subscription instead of another Lattice training program and try to work back towards having fun with the sport. Change what you can change and accept the things that you cannot, yadda yadda. Grades are all BS anyways.

Sounds like you understand this stuff a lot better than I do! The word "scientist" is very broad, and I suppose I should have been more specific. The people I consulted with are A) very busy, and B) deal much more on the data side, so I could see the method being screwed up. As you said, grades mostly BS anyway, and I'm obviously not the best one to run a full-scale study on this. I really appreciate your feedback, and I think it's valuable. It's been my guess from the beginning that the data will show an average height - as you suggested as well. I'm gonna keep the survey going anyway, just because I'm curious and it's taken a lot of work. Love your last paragraph by the way!

Trinidad Collierwrote:

Sounds like you understand this stuff a lot better than I do! The word "scientist" is very broad, and I suppose I should have been more specific. The people I consulted with are A) very busy, and B) deal much more on the data side, so I could see the method being screwed up. As you said, grades mostly BS anyway, and I'm obviously not the best one to run a full-scale study on this. I really appreciate your feedback, and I think it's valuable. It's been my guess from the beginning that the data will show an average height - as you suggested as well. I'm gonna keep the survey going anyway, just because I'm curious and it's taken a lot of work. Love your last paragraph by the way!

It’s the highest population sector.