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5 mistakes every beginner makes in bouldering

Kelly Tompkins
5 min readJan 11, 2020

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Learning these can keep you from developing bad habits.

Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

Unless you try out bouldering with a group of friends that stay with it, you might be bouldering alone at first like me.

These are the mistakes I made when I first started climbing. If I had had a mentor or someone to show me the ropes at the very beginning, I probably would have been a lot better off than I am currently. I was climbing with bad habits that would have eventually injured me. If you work past these pitfalls, you’ll be way better than me when I first started climbing.

There were habits that I had started to build up that weren’t good habits and it has taken a few months to correct them. So, don’t be me and learn from my mistakes.

Climbing the wall like a ladder

When you first start climbing, your instinct is to get up the wall however you can. As humans, we’ll use past experiences to get us along and it definitely applies here. Our approach to getting up the wall is the same as getting to any higher place in our day to day lives- we climb using a ladder. So imagine this. You put your feet and hands on the starting hold and there’s a hold to your top right and then right above you. Which one do you grab?

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Kelly Tompkins
Kelly Tompkins

Written by Kelly Tompkins

Austin,Texas sober girl. Lover of horror movies, cats, and fitness. Occasional bad poet.

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