Playfulness in Performance: Rediscovering Joy in Climbing.

Getting burnt out on climbing is one of the more common reasons people plateau, fall out of love with climbing or even quit altogether. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but fortunately one that is just as easy to avoid! So how do we get burnt out, and how do we avoid it? 

Performance 

Prioritising and over emphasising performance is usually a sure fire way to burn out. It’s impossible to perform at your limit all the time, and if performance is your main metric to measure your success or joy in climbing, it will rarely be fully topped up. It’s all too common to see people move from hard project to hard project, and eventually just bite off more than they can chew, and run themselves into the ground only to stop climbing altogether and never come back. I’ve seen people who once they couldn’t operate near a previous level, simply hang it up and stop climbing. Or worse still, they muddled on having more and more negative experiences in their climbing, and slowly began to resent it.  

If I think back to what climbing first meant to me, it was the physical challenge and pure love for moving on a wall or piece of rock. Just feeling holds under your hands, and finding a position to make a move, was enough to put a smile on even the worst day's face. But as time goes on, we forget what climbing meant to us to begin with, and can become fixated with the next goal and the next goal, missing the opportunities to fully explore what climbing has to offer. So how do we dodge this trap? 

Play 

In recent years, I’ve found a big benefit in my climbing through giving myself time to simply ‘play’. No structure to a session or period of climbing, no goals and training, just pure motivation. Is that motivation usually to try hard? Yes, but it can often be to do so in weird styles or different aspects of climbing. So what does that look like? Sometimes it’s just ditching my ego and spending an hour on slabs that I find hard, even if the grade doesn’t suggest so. Sometimes it’s just experimenting with how many ways I can do a move on rock, or re-climbing a brilliant circuit at a local crag to enjoy a day's climbing. Sometimes it might be to climb a whacky new boulder problem to make a fun video.  

This focus on play and bringing joy back into my climbing has given me some good breaks from projecting, and allowed me to transition nicely between phases and seasons, maintaining motivation and having a good alternative plan for when injuries or busy periods crop up. Pushing yourself and improving is one of the most rewarding things you can experience in the sport, but it also comes at a cost. And sometimes, just switching the focus is enough to hit the reset button and keep things moving! 

Keep it fun!

Eliot