Getting past your first bouldering plateau

Early progress in bouldering comes almost entirely from learning to use your body rather than from getting stronger. Weight moves over the feet, the grip relaxes, and problems that were impossible become straightforward. That is a large, fast gain and it runs out.

What replaces it is slower and less visible, and the thing that most often blocks it is that a beginner’s technique improvements have stopped while their strength has not yet caught up. The temptation at that point is to train the strength directly, and the specific problem with that is timing: connective tissue adapts far more slowly than muscle does.

In rough order of how much they return for the effort:

• Climb easy problems with deliberate feet — Volume on ground you can already do, with the single rule that you look at each foot until it is placed and do not readjust. Boring, unglamorous, and the largest available gain.
• Downclimb everything — Climbing back down instead of jumping off doubles the movement per problem, builds control, and is what the BMC recommends acquiring early for exactly this reason.
• Climb with people better than you — Watching somebody do a problem you cannot teaches sequencing faster than attempting it alone. Ask what they were thinking, not what they did.
• Rest properly between attempts — Three or four minutes, genuinely. Most plateaued climbers are doing endurance work at maximum effort, which trains neither.
• Rest days between sessions — Two or three sessions a week with rest between beats five sessions of fatigue, and the difference is larger than beginners believe.
• Try problems you are bad at — Everybody gravitates to the style that suits them. Slabs if you like overhangs, overhangs if you like slabs — the plateau is usually style-shaped.