Do you care about climbing better?

Kevin DeWeese wrote:

*shows soft underbelly* 

I prestrate myself before your alpha guy aura

Just call me Kenny Powers 

Your title is "climbing better". Your questions are "climbing harder".

I'm almost 68, climbed for not quite 10 years, and have learned that "harder" and "better" ain't the same. Climbing and otherwise.

Insert any rude joke ya want here. 

John Gillwrote:

Try to find the flow. It doesn't come easily if you are addicted to the difficulty scale.

Wise words, obviously. John, we used to talk about you in whispered tones way back in about 1972. My climbing partner, Rik Rieder, was inspired by you to get his many FAs in the Valley.   So it’s pretty cool to see your posts here all these decades later. 

Training i.e. gym climbing is all some of my friends do anymore. 

Chris Wernettewrote:

Training and working hard to get better is my definition of fun. I love suffering alone in the gym.

But also I noticed all the highly rated routes at most crags are 5.12 and up. Like the 3.9/4 stars on MP type of routes. You don’t find many 5.8s with that rating. I want to unlock those routes one day, they seem even more fun than the routes I’m working on now.

“Steep and striking” = “relatively hard” probably 80% of the time.

Inside you there are two wolves. One wolf wants to reach his/her potential and send hard, scary routes. The other wolf wants to have a nice time on scenic 5.7s.

I played...

I don't care about climbing better (grades) but I do care about climbing safer.  I'm too old to get hurt anymore. Been there, done enough of that. That's why I still train both in the climbing gym and lifting gym.  The stronger I am, the more of a margin of error I have, the less likely I am to fall and get hurt.

Kyle Gilbertwrote:

Inside you there are two wolves. One wolf wants to reach his/her potential and send hard, scary routes. The other wolf wants to have a nice time on scenic 5.7s.

Amen

changed the question wording for the pedants 

I’m a yes on the question of do I train to get better at climbing. But you’ll never find me in a “climbing” gym. I don’t really count climbing on plastic as climbing at all. My climbing goals are big wall oriented, so I train endurance by trail running and do strength training with weights in a standard gym. I have to modify the usual weight lifting program that focuses on hypertrophy in ways that support my climbing goals. That’s hard to describe and I won’t get into that here. But generally, training hard in the off season helps me begin the rock climbing season stronger and climb better.

Can you make "sometimes" a box to check?