Why I Moonboard

At the beginning of 2024 I made a resolution to spend more time training on the Moonboard. Why?

The first obvious reason is that with z-vertigo now having a 2019 set I have a mb really close to home! The second is that I really wanted to have some kind of objective, legitimate way of measuring improvements in my climbing. I'll expand on this point in this blog post.

For the past few years now I have been getting pretty serious about getting better at climbing. So I do all the usual things that people do when they want to get better at climbing - watch Youtube videos on training and climbing technique, buy and read books and training manuals, doing various technique drills, stretching exercise, fingerboard training, taking videos and analyzing my movement, and so on.

Because I have now amassed so many videos of myself bouldering, I can start looking back at my past climbing self and you know what, I did improve. I am stronger than ever and my technique looks loads better. My flow on the wall and the quality of the movement has improved. I appreciate that I have a long way to go before my full potential is met, but I know I am better. But, the agonizing thing is that there is little to no improvement in my climbing grade in the gym. 2 years later, I am still a middling 4-5 bar climber (using fitbloc's grading system as it is my most consistent home gym; roughly translates to V3-4).

I can already hear people saying: Don't focus on grades! You are not supposed to! It is bad for your mental well being to be over-focused on grades! Grades are arbitrary anyway, so why care about them? Focus on things you can actually work on, like strength, movement, technique.

And you know what, I agree. My climbing philosophy and approach has never been about grade chasing anyway. But it is dishonest to say that I don't care about grades. I pay attention to grades because I want to know if I am getting better. I think that is pretty reasonable.

Grades and routes in climbing gyms have always had an arbitrariness to them in the first place. A small, select, usually un-diverse group of routesetters decide what holes go where on the walls. They decide which colors are harder and which colors are easier. Routesetters also move around a lot, and their own setting changes as they gain more experience. The gym's style and focus changes over time too. My personal view is that local gym grades have undergone significant inflation in the past year or so--not necessarily a bad thing because it means the standard of climbing has gotten so high among climbers here! But, when you take all of the above together, it does not make sense to use gym grades as your benchmark, especially when you are in it for the long run and want to track progress over many years. Personally, I intend to keep climbing deep into my 40s and 50s, and I want a more objective way of measuring my improvement.

Enter the Moonboard as one solution to this problem.

Although I've been climbing for almost 10 years now, I have only intermittently climbed on a board. But, with little or no access to permanent, real rocks here in Singapore, the board is your next best alternative in one's search of a long-term benchmark. For instance, the 2016 board that I messed around with at the og Climb Central in 2018 (?) is still around! (Maybe not at the exact spot but it still exists in many other gyms). The exact same routes are still on the mb! Wuthering Heights on the 2016 has been my project for a long time, and I've finally sent it earlier this year at fitbloc. There is a longevity and permanence in board climbing that is much needed in my pursuit of climbing excellence. Perhaps the mb could be a more meaningful measure than fitbloc bars.

Given that we are now just a few months from the end of 2024, I figured that it was a nice time to reflect a bit on the mb journey. I set myself two goals: (1) Complete all the V3 benchmarks on the 2019 and (2) Complete any V7 (even the softest one) on any board. These are lifetime goals, because board climbing is hard and I didn't want to be unreasonable. So far, I am 17/41 on the benchmarks and my highest grade on the mb is (softest) V5 on the 2016. Pretty respectable. I also really like these goals because they force me to build a solid base but also to try and push my limits.

Even though it has been less than 1 year, the consistency that the mb offers has already been very helpful in so. many. ways. Let me list them below in no particular order:

1. I have a couple of V3 benchmarks on the 2019 that are revisited quite often. Each repeat brings with it a lot of information about micro-improvements that I could work on, even though I have already "sent" the route. These benchmarks also give me clear signals about the health of my fingers and shoulders. So I know if it is a day that I can push hard, or if I should take it easy. This is super important for staying injury-free.
2. Climbing on the steep is so good for understanding about many aspects of climbing technique. Body tension is a big one. There are also a lot of intricate things about footwork that I've learned about--like how to engage my calf muscles to actively pull in with the toe; how to generate power and momentum from the toes and the lower body. Board climbing also helps me to refine my judgment on which technique to use in the appropriate situation: for instance, when it is better to have a "frog"/hips facing the wall position vs. twisting in/hips perpendicular to the wall position; when to flag normally or back flag, when to use a full crimp or three finger drag grip, when to cut loose or when to dig your feet in and stay on the wall. All of these are excellent opportunities to refine the most fundamental climbing techniques, and judgment can only be developed through experience making these "technique" decisions over and over again. Commercial sets are too varied and stylistically diverse to offer a similar level of consistent experience for developing judgment quickly.
   
3. Board climbing offers an important space to refine the efficiency of climbing movement. This could be a whole blog post, but in my opinion, all climbing moves that are efficiently executed have a similar form: The power is generated from the feet first, lower body and hips, and energy is translated up the trunk and then your arms/hands do their thing. [True even for a campus move!] An issue that I struggle with (and still do) is that while I can do this well for easy climbs, when things get difficult I start to forget about the lower body and start to overfocus on pulling with my arms. The Moonboard takes no prisoners. If your technique is inefficient, it would be very difficult for you to crank through the problems on pure strength alone, even on the "easy" problems! You can't cheat by just being super strong. You need to be both strong and technical to send stuff on it. Climbing more on the Moonboard has helped me to ingrain these principles so that efficient climbing technique comes a lot more naturally, regardless of the difficulty of the move or route.
   
4. A great way of building explosiveness that isn't too risky. First off, I am a smaller climber than most climbers who put up the benchmarks and log repeats on the app. Many of the beta videos simply don't work for me as the taller climbers usually do not need to cut feet to send V3 benchmarks. At first, this was a bit demoralizing, but then I started committing to the cut loose and worked on getting better at making up for the distance by being more powerful and explosive and learning how to generate more momentum with the feet and hips. Somehow doing this on the board felt safer to me and it offers a controlled environment where I could really work on these aspects of my climbing: I am never too far from the ground! In contrast, commercial sets do not always offer such "safe" opportunities to work on explosiveness--I have to wait for a dyno/route with big moves to be set in my grade range, and in a manner and location where I feel safe trying it multiple times.
5. This is already a ridiculously long post but I just quickly mention other things the mb has been good for: training contact strength and endurance. The latter seems un-intuitive since mb problems are like 30-50 seconds at the longest (for me at least) and they are usually very short routes. But! In those 30 seconds you are fighting with everything to stay on. There are no rest positions where you can chill and shake out. In that short amount of time my body learns how to consistently maintain a high energy output, more than the couple of seconds here and there for commercial sets at a moderate level.

It is safe to say that I am a huge fan of the Moonboard. At the end of the day, it is just really a fun thing to do. To pull on and just try super hard on every single move, in the simplest, no frills set-up. Looking forward to future sessions on it and I can absolutely see it as being a key part of my training for many years to come. I am also looking forward to spending more time on other boards and learning about them. Don't know who will ever read this but if you made it to the end, you are as much of a climbing nerd as I am and I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic :)

TLDR; I came for the "objective" grades, stayed because the Moonboard is a fantastic training tool for climbing. Hugely underrated. Highly recommend.