Sports Psychology for Climbers
Headpoint Training is more than practice falls… here’s why
Our guide to sports psychology basics applied to fear of falling in climbing, why your head-game goes beyond fear, and how our approach is different from what you may have heard of before. (No, we don’t do “Rock Warrior’s Way stuff”... we do Headpoint Training).
Quick Navigation Links
Introduction & Motivation
I (Karly) have been professionally coaching head-game in climbing for over 5 years now–this includes managing performance pressure, fear of falling, mindset, and more. Headpoint Training was the very first program at Project Direct. To date, it is one of our most successful.
Headpoint Training is usually not what people think it is going to be. Climbers often sign up to work with us to “get over” fear of falling or to “get over” performance stress, but we frequently hear our athletes say they feel like they have plunged into a new world at the intersection of sports psychology, philosophy, and climbing.
We take a much more holistic approach to mental training. It’s probably not just falling that you want to be comfortable with–it’s going for an uncertain move with composure. And, while related, those are not the same experiences.
We call summer “Headpoint Training season” around here because it’s when we see athletes, intent on clipping chains and putting all their experience and training towards their goals, get frustrated. This season is also when our mental landscapes’ development (or underdevelopment) takes the center stage of our climbing experience.
Common Misconceptions about Headpoint Training
When we tell people that we work with folks on their head game for climbing, we get a few of the same responses again and again…
“Oh, so you teach people how to not be a ‘little bitch’?”
“Oh, so you do fall practice. Can’t people just do that on their own?”
“Oh, so you do Rock Warrior’s Way stuff?”
The fact that these are the typical responses is why we decided to write this piece. If this is what we’re frequently hearing in-person at the crag, that means this mindset is probably even more common than what we’ve heard firsthand.
The answer to every single one of those questions is resoundingly and directly, “No.”
Below, we are going to clearly identify the differences between our approach and what those questions above imply.
More broadly, we understand that these folks rarely have any intention to be dismissive about what we do or dismissive of the effects of peoples’ mental landscapes on their climbing experience.
Rather, it’s likely that they are:
1. Trying to fit our work into the boxes and language in which they have heard about in the past. This is a ubiquitous human experience: when we encounter something new, we try to relate it to something similar we have seen before to make sense of it and make it make sense in a way that fits within our world view. We all do this until we are presented with additional information or new information.
2. Lacking the vocabulary and education to expound those experiences more comprehensively. People don’t know what they don’t know. For example, until someone teaches you what a scorpion kick is, you aren’t going to have very many good ideas for how to dissipate momentum beyond “just get rid of it”. If someone hasn’t developed the language to understand how mental training relates to our physical experiences, it’s going to be difficult for them to understand how to train their headgame. Mental training doesn’t have specific or obviously perceivable physical associations, so it can be even harder to categorize and identify.
And whose job is it to educate on this? Well, frankly, if we want to make the difference that I say we want to make, it’s our job. Rather than complain about misunderstandings, we believe it is critical to share this information and educate a broader population.
Digging into this productively also takes a set of vocabulary that is at least somewhat congruent, so that ideas can be traded back and forth and considered. Then, on top of all that – it takes personal experience with these concepts. The origins may seem ethereal, but the results are undeniably tangible.
As you read this, first, you will learn some of the most basic vocabulary that anyone that proposes to help you with head -game or fear should be able to understand and explain to you. If they do not know this stuff front-to-back, it is a big red flag and we suggest working with someone else.
Second, you will learn how we use the reworking of cognitions as habits (with somatic de-sensitization) to make more long-lasting changes in your climbing in Headpoint Training.
Third, within that framework, we are going to weave in the concept that your head-game is physical and not just in your head. Your emotions and habits have physical responses in your body, involuntarily governed by your nervous system. And these qualities of your nervous system and personhood are what you have developed from your unique life and circumstances.
Most importantly, you have an ability to adjust them over time – like we do with a bench press in the weight room.
Finally, we will answer those questions that we said frustrated us at the beginning. But bear in mind that this piece’s intention is not for us to vent. It’s for us to educate climbers about a topic we care so deeply about that we want literally everyone to have access to this information, whether you are a rostered athlete or not.
Even if you don’t feel like your head game holds you back, I’d like to challenge your take that head-game can only be a negative or neutral quality. What if some work on your head game could push you forward? What if it could actually be a strength?
Thanks for joining us in this one–let’s dig in.
Sports Psychology Basics
Language is the doorway to understanding.
When we work with our Headpoint Training athletes, we start with developing language to explain and understand the variables involved in the climber’s mental landscape. If the only vocabulary we have for our mental experience of climbing is “scared” or “not scared”, it’s like going into a hardware store and assuming we can only use a hammer for the task at hand when what we really need is a tool we haven’t heard of yet.
Below is our guide to basic sports psychology vocabulary that serves as an absolute minimum knowledge required for working on your head game for climbing, fear of falling, or performance pressure.
Nervous System – There are many branches of this system in your body, but the overall goal of the nervous system is to perceive external stimuli and help your body adapt to it internally. In this article, and for our purposes as climbing coaches, we are primarily concerned with a branch of the Peripheral Nervous System called the Autonomic Nervous System (contains the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems as outlined below).
Sympathetic Nervous System - Your sympathetic nervous system is best known for its role in responding to dangerous, intense, or stressful situations. In these situations, your sympathetic nervous system activates to speed up your heart rate, respiratory rate, and deliver more blood to areas of your body that need more oxygen. But this system is also activated when you are just physically active and helps you handle situations that involve all types of arousal (excitement, stress, fear). The neurotransmitters that are the most active here are norepinephrine (also known as noradrenaline) and epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) and they transmit signals between neurons and target tissues. Ever gotten sweaty before a job interview? That’s your sympathetic nervous system saying, “Hello”. Ever had to take a poop before a redpoint burn? That’s also your sympathetic nervous system saying, “Hello”.
Parasympathetic Nervous System – This is the side of the coin that helps you calm down, relax, recover, and reset. Your parasympathetic nervous system is in a constant back-and-forth with your sympathetic nervous system. The responses of both of these systems are adaptable and specific to you, your life, and your climbing experiences. Just like we need a recovery day after a difficult strength workout or hard climbing session, your nervous system needs that recovery time too and your parasympathetic nervous system provides you with that.
Psychological arousal – Psychological arousal (will be referred to as just “arousal” going forward) happens when your sympathetic nervous system is turned on. It is the opposite of “chilling” on the couch in the A/C. Adrenaline and its precursors are released by your adrenal medulla and those neurotransmitters are changing your heart rate (imperative to understand as a route climber fighting pump…), blood flow, and respiratory rate. There are also impacts on your digestive system (increased blood pressure, aka you need to poop at the crag or are not hungry at all when the pressure is on) and your field of vision. The extremely interesting thing about arousal is that, hormonally, it’s the same thing whether it is a positive, neutral, or negative experience. You being wigged out of your mind above a subpar nut placement and having all your best friends throw you a surprise birthday party are going to trip the switch in the same way (up) – but it is in your habitual cognitions and experiences in life – that will determine if you are experiencing stress or eustress (excitement). At the end of the day, we also feel the effects of our arousal diminishing – the switch is turning down as we chill out.
Eustess / Excitement – This is the more positive end of the spectrum of arousal. You’re stoked! Your friends did throw you that surprise birthday party, you finally got to see Rufus du sol in concert, or you just sent your project. Dopamine, serotonin, stoke, hugs–we are amped! But in a good way.
It’s important to note that stress doesn’t have only “bad” effects. In manageable doses, stress can improve focus and motivate you to try your hardest. Then, your nervous system needs time to calm back down and “adjust” its calibration for stress. This part is so similar to training in the weight room. You stress your body, it breaks down a bit, you rest, you recover that micro-damage, and then you come back to the weight room 2 days later a little stronger. A little stress is great – and the emphasis needs to be on getting the right “dose” of stress for your personal nervous system.
Stress – This is the less-positive spectrum of arousal. You might be scared, stressed on a redpoint or onsight attempt, or feeling the eyes of everyone around you–these feelings will activate your nervous system, and you likely perceive these feelings as negative or as a threat.
Trauma – This is the biggest one we want you to understand if/when looking for help with a fear of falling. Your nervous system is calibrated based on your past experiences in life and in climbing. There are amounts of stress that you can benefit from, recover from, and adapt to. That’s what we want.
What we do not want is to get your nervous system so stressed that when the stressor is removed, your parasympathetic nervous system cannot bring it back into a neutral state. That is the definition of trauma – when the stressor is removed, you do not recover or adapt. Your nervous system was injured by that stimulus.
In the weight room, this looks like lifting way too much for your current strength level before you are ready. In the weight room, this is an injury. In head-game coaching for climbing, this is trauma, and it hurts. It negatively impacts your ability to work with your fear of falling because it was too much, too soon, for you.
This is what happens when someone tells you to just take the whip without understanding where your arousal levels are sitting relative to a given stressor. No strength coach worth their weight in snot would assign the same bench press weights to six athletes at different levels, and no head-game coach worth their snot would assign the same stressor to 6 athletes working to manage their fear of falling.
Focus – Focus is your ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of time even if there are other things that could potentially enter your sphere of consciousness. Humans are notoriously poor at this – According to ___ that monks can take up to 10 years to develop 3 minutes of uninterrupted focus. As climbers, we can interact with many distractions on a climb, and we can develop tools to get back to what we were trying to focus on. Fear of falling, redpoint stress, unhelpful internal dialogue, that email you forgot to reply to, that cutie that’s watching you climb are all, simply, distractions. You may have a more or less developed system for managing them, but in essence, we want to help you get better at managing distractions while you climb, so that you can climb at your physical limit more skillfully. This is the entrance into the cognitive side of the work we do with athletes in Headpoint Training.
Awareness – Awareness (or mindfulness of focus) is the capacity to notice when your focus leaves you and where it goes. Being aware that you are starting to get up high in the arousal scale before you are totally wigged out is a vital skill. By the time we are at a 10 out of 10 on the psychological arousal scale, we are being controlled by our limbic system and we cannot make decisions based on anything but our pre-wired habits and survival instincts. To avoid getting to this state, we teach our athletes tools to foster awareness of focus and arousal levels, and employ tactics to come back into a manageable place before things get out of control.
Neurons - These are the basic building blocks of the nervous system, responsible for transmitting signals through electrical and chemical means. A few neurons themselves don’t form a thought, but they are the building blocks of your nervous system.
Schemas – Schemas are what your brain has wired for any word or stimulus. When you read the words “sushi, fly-fishing, desert, sport climbing, fear, or birthday party” your brain gives you a specific image of those things that are specific to you. Each person’s schema for every one of those will vary. Your schemas for “20 ft whip, 5.11 onsight, 5.13 redpoint” are also different from another climber’s. Schemas are developed through your experience over time – and, they are adjustable, adaptable components of your climbing experience.
Scripts – Scripts are a level higher in the hierarchy of these responses. Schemas include your role and relationship to the script. “20 ft whips are exciting but manageable for me” vs. “A 20-ft whip is terrifying and I would never.” In that moment, you may be interacting more with your PAST experiences, not with what is in front of you. Understanding this is a key step in creating and habituating new experiences and responses that keep you involved in what is physically in front of you, and not a habit that your brain wired for itself years ago.
Habits – Habits are essentially your scripts in action. For example, maybe you’ve struggled on overhanging routes in the past, so when you look at one you have NEVER TOUCHED, you might make an assumption about how it’s going to go–regardless of what is actually, physically in front of you. What you say to yourself as you go for those crux moves has tangible effects on your climbing, and it’s habitual. Habits take time to change, but it is possible to change them.
Flight, Flight, or Freeze Response (limbic response) - If you get into the highest levels of the arousal scale (10/10 or bright red), your body may have a limbic response. This means you are no longer able to make logical, measured decisions because your body is now operating out of its limbic system. All it cares about is making sure you survive. This instinct is in all of us. It is impossible to re-wire neural habits in this space, impossible to think rationally, and if the stimulus gets too intense, it can cause trauma–making work on those neural pathways even harder at lower stress levels in the future. If you ever find yourself here, or if anyone ever pushes you into this space with their “mentorship”, please know that this is not okay and does not need to be a part of your climbing. The stimulus that would cause this response is different for everyone and finding the right “dose of discomfort” for you is imperative to working through stress without entering this state.
Alright, we will pause the vocabulary there – please bookmark it for later as needed. But also, if someone says they can help you with your head-game and they cannot define literally all of those words above, please do not work with them on your headgame. They simply do not know enough to keep you out of a trauma and/or they may reinforce unsustainable cognitive functioning in your climbing. You can tell them we said so (people come to us in our waitlist form submission with stories of these past “mentorship” experiences every week, so we are not just blowing steam here. It is happening ALL OF THE TIME in this industry, and we are so done with not calling it out).
Our primary reasoning for this is that people come to us frequently that have been put into traumatic states because their “mentor’s” advice to “get over” their fear of falling was just to take whips – whether their personal nervous system was ready for that or not.
That’s like us giving everyone we are coaching a bench press workout of 4 sets x 4 reps @ 150 lbs. For some people, that would be a great stimulus, while others would literally get injured. When someone’s advice on “getting over” your fear of falling is just to take the bigger whip, they are essentially prescribing you something that could cause physical trauma to your nervous system and body – and ultimately hurt your relationship with climbing. You can tell them to shove off and show them this article.
Fall practice does have a place in mental training, but it is by no means our primary tool. When we work with athletes on taking practice falls, we set personalized boundaries and programming depending on the athlete’s background and goals.
Cognitive Re-patterning
All in all, whether you are afraid of the fall, avoiding the fall, afraid of failing on the last move because you are “about to send omg am I sending omg is this real”, you are being distracted – sometimes this is your nervous system trying to keep you safe – but ultimately, you need to adjust that response to the distraction to something more helpful.
And often, that distraction is because your nervous system is aroused and a bit overwhelmed, so it’s dropping you into autopilot so it can just try and keep you safe. Autopilot in this case consists of all the cognitions you’ve had over time that have had positive or neutral results in your climbing (and in your life). They are “wired” as the easiest and more automated path for your cognitions to run on so your body can get its focus back to keeping you safe.
We all have these cognitive habits. The point of Headpoint Training is to uncover them, take a look at them, and change them as needed to help you operate more lucidly in times of intensity. The micro-moments of decision making that we use to define a “good” head game have huge, tangible effects on our climbing – but they are only truly known through awareness & developed through re-patterning in lower-stress situations.
And, these habits do not always need to be about falling.
Performance Stress (Not fear of falling)
Some extremely common cognitive habits that we hear each week in Headpoint Training that don’t have to do with a fear of falling…
“Oh shit, this is the hard part”
“Oh, god, I don’t want to take this fall”
“Urgh, I hate that hold”
“Omg! I’m sending! Am I sending?”
“I’m so pumped – there is no way I’ll make the next move… take”
“This isn’t the go”
“omgamiscaredwhatifigetscaredwhatwhereisthenextholdwtfamidoingTAKE”
Ever had these moments? That’s you, being distracted. Don’t worry, it happens to all of us.
Your cognitions form physically wired habits (neural pathways) in your brain. When you are stressed, you will not be able to choose new habits because your body is going on ‘autopilot’ to focus on the perceived threat at hand. At the highest ends of this stress, you can be governed by your limbic system. You need to create new neural pathways in lower stress environments if you want something else to pop into your head in higher stress environments.
For example, taking falls that scare the piss out of you is not a situation where you can re-wire neural pathways.
Fall practice is less than half of what you need for a formidable head-game. A head-game that is developed over time honors your body, mind, and the engine that ties them together: your nervous system.
And for the record, coaches still encounter these thoughts too–especially in limit-level cruxes. Our habituated cognitions might say, “Oh man, maybe this isn’t the go…” but we’ve practiced how to catch these unhelpful thoughts and reroute them.
The goal isn’t to never have these thoughts–the goal is to be aware of them and manage them in a way that you can habituate and that helps you in these moments.
Obviously, we would all love to be monks that never get distracted – but the more I read about the human ability to focus uninterrupted, the more I see that maybe that isn’t the most feasible target. Remember, it can even take monks something like 10 years to be able to achieve 3 minutes of uninterrupted focus.
Rather, the skill (not the “trick”… the habituated skill) is to catch these upticking distractions before they become overwhelming and you flip into a response that feels out of your control.
If 0 on the arousal scale is you chilling on the couch and 10 is you losing your mind and completely freaking out on a route (from fear, performance anxiety, or any other distraction) – you have a time frame (10-40 seconds) in which to pull that train back to the station where you can make decisions based on your internal motivations, logical problem solving, and stoke for a climb.
These cognitive skills are what we develop with athletes in Headpoint Training over time. The refocusing strategies that work for YOU can be different than what work for me, but we pull from a well-developed library based on experience and conversations with athletes, find what works for you, and habituate it over time.
So when things start to get a bit uncomfortable and the athlete drops down to autopilot, their cognitive habits are supporting them and keeping them in the game.
Let’s go back to those initial comments…
Addressing the misconceptions with a better base of knowledge
Question: “Oh, so you teach people how to not be a little ‘bitch’?”
Answer: Absolutely not. The suggestion that head game is a character trait demonstrates a lack of knowledge of sports psychology, the broader context of what we are trying to change about our approach to this topic, and the climbing industry at large.
If that sounds a little abrupt, well, we would challenge you to question why calling people little bitches is more acceptable.
Our cognitions, the grooves they spin on, the physiological effects of stress/excitement, and our response to stimuli are malleable, trainable qualities. Just like what we do with a bench press or a hangboard.
We just help people find the right dose of discomfort and where they can reconfigure their cognitions to a place of neutral, problem solving in a way that works for them. They practice, create new neural habits, and the results speak for themselves.
By defining cognitive change as mental training, we can approach it with more curiosity, consistency, and achieve new habits that make our mental skills a strength -- not just a weakness to “get rid of”.
If we treat mental habits as a character trait that we need to ‘fix,’ we lose out on the knowledge that sports psychologists have been developing for years. If more practice falls don’t ‘fix’ us, we can take that to mean we just don’t have ‘what it takes’. That line of thinking is a dead-end – it’s outdated and not trauma-informed.
Question: “Oh, so you do fall practice? Can’t people just do that on their own?”
Answer: We certainly help people with and do assign fall practice, but most of the folks that graduate from Headpoint Training report the cognitive side of the equation as the skill that really takes their climbing to a different place and that stays with their climbing for the long term.
Question: “Oh, so it’s like the Rock Warrior’s Way stuff?”
Answer: If you read the Rock Warrior’s Way, there is some great stuff in there (especially the chapter about non-acceptance rhetoric and behavior, big fan). But, notably absent is any information on habits and the physical effects your nervous system has on your heart rate, blood-flow, or respiratory rate. There is not one mention of trauma, your nervous system, and what stress truly is for your body. We believe that these concepts are vital for us to understand ourselves and work on our head-game. In our approach, we help you bring together the cognitive and physical worlds, not separate them. We don’t do “like Rock Warrior’s Way stuff”. We do Headpoint Training, and this methodology is different from what is proposed in the Rock Warrior’s Way.
Aside – if the RWW worked well for you, we support that 100%. But Headpoint Training has a very different approach and we don’t want you to think it’s the same. And, frankly, we are tired of being thrown into that box.
Parting Questions to Consider
As we close up this blog (if you read the whole thing, thanks for spending your time with us!), we want to leave you with a few parting questions and food for thought.
Is less arousal better? Really though, is it best to be completely chilled out for climbing? Or, is there a sweet spot of arousal (maybe 4 or 5 out of 10, or green on a rainbow) that actually helps you stay focused? If so, how do you start to cultivate that for yourself & get to know your nervous system in a way that you can keep yourself in the sweet spot?
Instead of needing to “get over” something, can you learn to manage your fear like a distraction? Just because it comes up, doesn’t mean you’ve failed in your head-game effects. Rather, can you take a look at your cognitions on route and see if they are refocusing you and helping you? This is a lot of what we do in Headpoint Training. White it takes time, the results are incredibly long-lasting and amazing for your climbing.
What if you approached your mental game with as much vigor as your physical training? Really though, how much time have you spent learning about physical training? How much money have you spent on gadgets and training tools and gym memberships? If you have spent a fair amount of time and money on the physical side of things and you feel like your headgame is holding you back, what would happen if you dedicated that same effort and time to the psychological side of your climbing? We hope this blog opened up that world to you beyond what you had heard of before and possibly piqued your interest into this world.
What if your headgame was a strength and not a weakness to “get over”? We’ll leave you with the thought that your headgame could be more than a hindrance–with time and effort, it could be a strength. It could push you forward just as much as a workout in the gym. All you need to do is invest your time and effort into the pursuit.
Written By
Sources
Kross, E. (2021). Chatter. Crown.
