Quite disconcertingly, I've had feedback that some of you are feeling demoralised due to lack of improvement and also some say that e routes are too hard cos you haven't topped any route in months. Here's my 2 cents worth!
Firstly, to all those injured personnel out there, I know that the desire to train is high but you must control yourself! take a break. Immerse yourself in something else - be it schoolwork, drugs, anime or porn. There's definitely more to life than climbing(subjective). Forcibly climbing with injury can only do you harm. For eg, you have an injured knee but you still climb and hence overcompensate by pulling more with your arms or kicking off with the wrong leg. That would cause you to engram wrong moves... Or worse, cause the injury to detioriate and then you need to take an even longer break. I know kiat possibly caused extra injury to his finger by climbing with an injured shoulder.. :(
Unfortunately, for most climbers, it takes a lot more discipline to take a break from climbing than to keep climbing...
Next up, improvement worries. If you're climbing 3 x a week and wondering why you're not improving as fast as your friend who's climbing 5x a week, the answer is obvious. He's climbing harder than you!! I know that to chase the seniors, in yr1-sem1 there was this memorable period when I climbed 13 days non-stop. Of cos it couldnt be sustained due to muscle fatigue. But you get the idea.. Climb harder! On non-trg days, there are lots of things to do too..uncompleted routes, all the different 30move endurance routes, add3, ARC etc.
Of course, time spent in the gym is not all-important. The way you climb is very important too. Of fundamental importance is that your body remembers all the moves that you do (engramming) and hence each time you do a route the right way, something positive is added to your muscle memory. In contrast, each time you do a route by powering through it, your muscles learn something negative. SO, it's not that important to complete all the routes given to you if it's just by muscling through..because you learn nothing! But each time you do a route, learn from others if you see a particularly efficient way of doing it.. When you are finally able to compelte a particularly hard route, the lesson is not over yet either! Try to repeat the route again twice in good form to complete the engramming process...
