Indoor Rock Climbing Basics

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Video Transcript

Angelica LeMinh: They say the most significant barriers to success are the ones we place upon ourselves. I am Angelica for watchmojo.com and today I am here to face my fears and challenge myself to a little indoor rock climbing okay. So Jean-Marc maybe you can tell me a little bit about how indoor climbing came to be?

Jean-Marc de la Plante: Indoor climbing came about with climbers that were super motivated and they wanted to train during the winter. So they built walls in their basements in their houses. Okay, so I am all stretched out, warmed up.

Angelica LeMinh: So let's talk about the actual benefits of a workout from rock climbing?

Jean-Marc de la Plante: You will get food forearm strength, biceps, upper back but also as you get into the steeper climbing, you get a good ab work out and also you get to maintain the legs. It's not a very strong leg workout, but still you are always putting pressure on your legs pushing, pulling. We have seen some climbers that have switched to circus performance and stuff like that and the other way also. So you get a lot of people that are from gymnastics and they come to the gym and they can just climb like spiders. Same thing with climbers, they will switch to a sport like yoga or anything like that and it's easy.

Angelica LeMinh: So how tall are we in here today?

Jean-Marc de la Plante: The walls here are about 50 feet depending on where are you in the gym. Outdoors, if you are going to be climbing a root usually it will be at least twice the height. When you are at outdoors there is the added challenge of trying to find the holes whereas here they kind of obviously pop out of the wall and it makes it easier and it's also a controlled environment. So there is no wind, there is no rain, there is no cold, there is no approach, you don't need to walk half an hour to get to the cliff. We try to compensate with that by tweaking the difficulty levels of the root so something that's a little bit harder indoors, it would be actually a bit easier outdoors.

Angelica LeMinh: That's good that you mentioned the levels of difficulty. How do you mark your progress?

Jean-Marc de la Plante: All the roots that are in here when I say a root its the path that you can take up the wall. They are all man-made. So somebody's job is to come in here and put up the stones and make a root that's challenging and at that same time it's fun. That person, when they are done they will give a difficulty rating and you can track your progress with those grades.

Angelica LeMinh: How do you pick a good partner?

Jean-Marc de la Plante: First of all I want to pick somebody that's close to your weight, if you are holding them with the rope you don't want to go flying, get the whole of the root. But you do want to also pick somebody that's going to challenge you and that's going to try to push your level a little bit.