How to Set Fun and Skill Building Routes on Your Home Climbing Wall

I hear from a lot of my climbing friends that they just don’t use their home climbing wall. If I could break down the reasons why into three broad categories, it would be: 1) some climbers are just too good to get a lot out of a home wall that isn’t the kind of training wall they would use at the gym; 2) they simply enjoy outdoor climbing too much to spend time climbing indoors; 3) they get bored using the home wall and find the limited climbing surface to be monotonous.

Well, I am very unlikely to ever be so good that I can’t get better by just climbing more, regardless of the medium. I am not a professional climber (or even a professional blogger our YouTuber). I do this stuff as an avid amateur in between the times I need to make a living.

I enjoy outdoor climbing a lot too, but interestingly, I like it so much and enjoy pushing myself in the outdoors so much that I feel like I need to actually and truly train for some of my adventures or risk serious bodily injury or even death. Given that, I need to spend time training in ways that allow me to push myself to exhaustion without the consequences including potential grievous harm; the indoors let me do that.

And as far as having enough surface area to make a string of interesting climbs, even if you do take that a surface area that is exactly the size of my current home wall (8 feet by 12 feet), the Kilter Board wall of that size has 4940 different boulder problems on it. And a Kilter Board always uses the exact same hold in the exact same positions. What if I swapped out one of the edges for a sloper, or so on? So, it’s a lack of work or imagination or both, not the problem with the wall.

I have found that I use the home wall the most. I’m a busy Dad with work and family commitments. I can get in a good session on the home wall in between meetings, if I need to. That’s even better than the fifteen minute bike ride to my local climbing gym let alone a big day outdoors. And since I want that “controlled environment” training to be a part of all of the stuff I do, it’s a nice option to have.

Admittedly, I also am the kind of person who enjoys incremental improvements. So, I can climb the same few routes for awhile and still get satisfaction from doing more efficient climbing or doing the climbs faster or being able to do more laps in a circuit before my endurance gives out.

But I also think that people just don’t know how to approach route setting in a way that creates and intrinsic desire to climb the route, and so that’s what I hope comes across loud and clear in the video. If we route set with a purpose - and we assume that purpose is meaningful to us - then we will be well motivated to try hard on that route and get out of it what we hopped to get as we imagined the problem.

So, take a look at the video, and maybe your own home wall will start to look differently to you.