Rock Features, Grips, and Moves: Climbing Terms for New Rock Climbers
You can learn on your own. You can learn through images and experiences and contemplation about both. But if you want to enlist someone to help you learn, then you are going to need to be able to communicate. That’s where having a common language comes into play. Yes, that can mean the dialect: English, French, Spanish, Swahili, whatever. But it also means having terminology that each of the communicators understands as the same thing. A door is a door, and we both know it’s a part of a wall that can be opened and shut to move through the wall/barrier. So, we I ask you to close the door, you know what I mean.
Well, what if I told you to look to your right, find the flared crack and look for a two-fingered Gaston. Could you latch on to the climbing hold in the way I described. For some of you, yes you could. For others, that’s just confusing jargon.
The thing about jargon, though, is that it becomes necessary when we need to talk fast. Instead of the above, I could say, “find a crack in the rock that gets narrower as it gets deeper and then find the place in the crack where you can take your index and middle finger - and then turning your hand so that your thumb points down - place those two fingers into the crack and push away from you.” But, by the time I get all of that out of my mouth - and with you not looking at me because you are looking at the climbing wall - you are getting tired and frustrated.
Being able to name things and thus talk quickly about those things is a big part of bringing coaching or colleague support into the equation for just about anything.
It was with this in mind that I made this video. It’s for new rock climbers and with an eye for understanding the terms and concepts, not for being proficient at all of the moves. But, one of the things I’ve noticed about being exposed to new concepts is that I usually start to try to apply the new concepts. Simply by knowing what a Gaston is, you might be better inclined to try that grip on some climb where your other options just aren’t working for you.
As they say, knowledge is power.