Driven up the wall!!

Its turned into a fantastically busy Autumn for me with work educating coaches, climbing wall staff and providing NGBs in walls from Queensferry (the one on the Welsh border) to Glasgow to Perth (great new wall that) and Orkney. There has been some advice for wall mangers, CWA Trainings, FUNdamentals of Climbing and Foundation Coach Training. Great fun and now the snow has taken a short holiday I have no regrets about being indoors!!
More pictures and captions on my Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/climbwhenyoureready.mountaineering/media_set?set=a.1239267069449741.1073742207.100000993792059&type=3

Climbing Wall Award Training

Dave and I were working on a Climbing Wall Award Training with students from West Highland College's School of Adventure Studies. On the first day we went to The Ice Factor and on the second it was Three Wise Monkeys. Its great to have 2 good walls so close to use now!
Earlier in the week I was down at The Boardroom as part of my role on the ABC Training Committee where I also got a chance to try out the new Wild Country Revo belay device.

 The Revo

 Jimmy thinking about good practise in belaying

 Talking tying in

 Low hands

 Warmups

 Games

 Bypass

 Pen passing

 Draw an Instructor

 Can you see the likeness?

Review

Developing Climbing Coaches

 Initiation

 Observation

 Converstaion

 Concentration

 Co-ordination

 Catch this!

 Review

 Climbers' journeys

 Practise

Getting Tactical-Route reading

 Route reading 2

 Routereading 3

 Not going to win a Turner Prize

 Following the Route

Psychological aspects-better desensitisation to falling

I just spent the last 2 days running a Development Coach Training Course at Glasgow Climbing Centre. It was great to work with Kristie from GCC and Rob of Climb Scotland to draw on their extensive personal coaching experience and help them understand and recognise why much of what they do already works so well. At the same time I was able to feed a few useful ideas to them on where they might develop further. Climbing Coaching is really starting to reach a stage where there is a varied and interesting body of knowledge behind it now. There is so much for to coaching climbing than physical training and i'm always fascinated to see some of the technical, tactical and psychological concepts at work. Over the last days I got the guys to coach me and each other in some areas of our climbing performance and I learnt a few things about both my climbing and some ideas I can use in coach education- as well as helping K and R develop too- a triple win!

Back to the wall

Spent today at 3 Wise Monkeys with 4th years on the Adventure Performance and Coaching Degree course and some of their lecturers today. My role was to help give them some climbing specific tools in order to be able to understand and break down their long term students movement. As well as some a good mobilisation based warmup we looked at classic FUNdamentals movement as well as speaking a lot about observation and assessment (holistic, deductive and analytical options). The lecturing team had brought some top notch video capture equipment for the afternoon session too.