How do you know if you have bad or good technique? Is climbing efficiency the measure?

Here at Lattice Training, we attempted to answer these questions by creating a digital climb with force plates on each hand and foot hold.

There are some big questions floating around the climbing community which have not been definitively answered. What is more important; strength or technique? How do we measure good vs poor technique?

In the depths of Lattice, we’ve been thinking about how we can answer these questions and this video might be the start of something ground-breaking!

What we did was build a digital climb. And as the lightning struck, it was ALIVE!

For this study, we took 2 climbers of equal height and weight, Josh and Billy. But as climbers, we are very different. Billy being a strong international competition climber and V14/15 boulderer.

Josh…. well he’s not as strong – V10 on his best day.

We then set a number of moves/techniques using our digital climbing holds. These holds were able to tell us how much force we were applying to each individual hold, giving us the ability to objectively define movement efficiency or ‘good technique’.

What we discovered was fascinating and also left us with even more questions than when we started.

Now we need to know how to take this to the next level!

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