Assessment · Technique · Programming · Outdoors
Most climbers who plateau train harder at the thing they are already good at. If your footwork is the limitation, another fingerboard cycle will not help and may well injure you; if you are strong enough and lose your head above the third bolt, no amount of pulling addresses that. We start with a session of watching you climb and a set of simple measurements, then build a plan around what is actually holding you back — which is very often not the thing you assumed.
About us
The practice is run by a coach who competed for a decade and then spent several years working out why the training that suited a twenty-year-old competitor suited almost nobody else, together with a physiotherapist who specialises in climbing injuries and sees the consequences of badly written programmes every week. Between them they cover the two halves of the problem: making you better, and making sure the process does not break your fingers.
Everything begins with an assessment. We film you climbing, look at how you use your feet, where you rest, how you shift weight and when you rush, and we measure finger strength, pulling strength and shoulder function against your body weight rather than against a chart from a magazine. The first session usually reverses somebody's assumption about their own weakness, and the plan that follows is built on evidence instead of on what the internet is currently enthusiastic about.
Most of our clients are ordinary adults with jobs and families climbing three times a week, not athletes, and the plans reflect that: they fit around real schedules, they assume some sessions will be missed, and they are written to be sustainable for years rather than to peak in eight weeks. We also work with young climbers and their parents, where the priority is long-term development and not loading growing fingers, and with people coming back after injury.
Advantages
Six things a template cannot do for you.
Nobody gets a plan until we have watched them climb and taken measurements. Filming reveals what a climber cannot feel — a hip that never turns in, feet placed and then adjusted twice, a rest position that costs more energy than it saves — and simple strength tests show whether the limitation is really the fingers. In roughly half of first sessions the climber's own theory about their weakness turns out to be wrong, which is exactly why templates disappoint.
Strength is easy to train and easy to measure, so it dominates the conversation, but most climbers below a fairly high level gain far more from movement work. We teach it as skill practice with specific drills and immediate feedback rather than as vague advice to use your feet, and we film progress so it becomes visible. Climbers who spend a block on movement routinely find that the grade they had been forcing suddenly feels easy.
Fingers adapt far more slowly than muscles, and the injuries we see most often come from programmes that progressed the load faster than tendons and pulleys could follow. Plans here progress conservatively, include genuine deload weeks, and are written with a physiotherapist reviewing them. Being slightly undertrained and healthy beats being well trained in March and unable to close your hand in April, which is a trade most climbers only understand after the injury.
Fear of falling is not a character flaw and it does not disappear by being told to commit. It responds to structured exposure: taking planned falls of increasing size in controlled conditions, learning what the rope and the belayer actually do, and separating rational risk assessment from panic. Climbers who work through this properly often gain two grades on lead without getting any stronger, because they finally climb the way they do on a top rope.
A plan requiring five sessions is useless to somebody with two evenings free, and a plan that collapses when a week is missed teaches its owner that they have failed. Ours are written around the time you genuinely have, with priorities marked so a shortened week keeps what matters, and with the assumption that illness, work and children will interrupt. Consistency over two years beats perfection over six weeks by an enormous margin.
Gym strength does not automatically transfer to rock, where holds are smaller, feet are worse, the sequence is not marked in colour and nobody has set the route to be pleasant. We coach on real cliffs as well as indoors, teach reading, resting, clipping and route tactics on rock, and bridge the gap that leaves many strong indoor climbers thoroughly humbled on their first outdoor season.
Services
Assessments, one-to-one sessions, remote programming, fear courses, outdoor skills, youth coaching and return from injury.
Two hours of climbing while being filmed and measured, followed by a written report covering movement patterns, strength relative to body weight, mobility limitations, injury history and a ranked list of what would help most. Many people take the report and train on their own from there, which is entirely fine — the assessment is useful regardless of whether anything else follows, and it is where every other service begins.
Regular sessions indoors or on rock working on movement, tactics, specific weaknesses or a particular objective, with video review and drills you can continue between sessions. Some clients come weekly, some monthly to check technique and adjust a plan, and some book a block before a trip. Pairs and small groups of similar ability are welcome and often work better, because watching somebody else be corrected teaches a great deal.
Structured programmes written after an assessment — in person or by video — updated every month against your logs, with messaging in between for the inevitable questions about a tweaked finger or a missed week. Suitable for climbers outside the area or those whose schedules make regular sessions impossible. Plans specify sessions, loads, progressions and rest, and are adjusted the moment reality diverges from the paper.
A structured progression of practice falls in controlled conditions, alongside belaying technique, understanding of what actually happens in a fall, and the mental tools to distinguish real danger from the feeling of danger. Run as small groups over several sessions and individually for anyone who would rather not work through it in front of others. It is the single most transformative course we offer for climbers who lead.
Everything the gym does not teach: placing and cleaning gear, building belays, lowering and abseiling, route reading, rock types and how they differ, weather, access and the etiquette of a busy crag. Delivered as courses on local limestone and as guided days on longer routes, plus trips to areas further afield where the point is to climb a great deal and be coached while doing it.
Coaching for young climbers focused on movement quality, breadth of skill and long-term development, with finger loading kept appropriate to growth and honest conversations with ambitious parents. For injured climbers we work alongside our physiotherapist on graded return: what you can climb now, how to load a healing tendon, and how to rebuild confidence without repeating whatever caused the problem in the first place.
Contacts
Tell us how long you have climbed, how often you get on a wall, what you climb indoors and outdoors, any injury history and what you would like to be doing in a year. That is enough to suggest where to start, and the honest answer is sometimes that you need more climbing rather than more coaching.
Sessions are held at partner walls in the city and on crags within an hour's drive.