Does Height & Weight REALLY Affect Climbing Ability? | ft. Karly Rager & Casey Elliott 

I believe that if finger strength is not directly related to the climbing grade, the model must be poorly constructed or there must be an error in interpretation. Despite this, I think it's great that there is starting to be more data analysis in climbing. Nice video!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I've taken a look at their blog post, and the biggest issue I see is that most of the variables they study are HEAVILY correlated to each other. For bouldering their top 3 variables are "max hang, max weighted pull up, days of experience climbing outdoors". You can see how someone who has spent more time climbing will have gone outdoors more days, and tipically will be stronger in both the back and fingers than a less experienced climber. For sport climbing the max pull up falls to top 5, and an aerobic endurance exercise on the campus board springs to the top. You can see how a stronger climber will be able to develop more critical force, thus leading to more endurance. The post is a bit lacking in the study of the variables themselves: no cross-correlation of the variables, no PCA (principal component analysis). It's no use saying "this has an influence of 25%, this has an influence of 20, and this has an influence of 19" when all 3 variables are deeply correlated to each other, and measure basically the same thing, thus hiding the effect of still important variables that aren't as influential, but are not repeated. Also, no mention of variable scaling, which might induce some errors: low variance variables will show less effect if the variables are not scaled. Sampling bias is also a problem they allude to in the video, but overall, the claims are really adventurous for the analysis that's been done. Variables are way too related to each other, and simplifying the dataset into the main factors (finger strength, back strength, endurance, experience, BMI) rather than a different number of variables measuring each of these would lead to more insightful results. I would love to have a look at a paper detailing the analysis, I'm sure the blog post is leaving stuff out, but as I say, big claims.

When we speak about genetic/bodycomposition (height, weight distribution, etc.) in sport, we talk about 2 things. Firstly, the ceilling an athlete can go. In this case, is there a body that help you climb v17 in our case. We know than anybody with enough experience and hard work can climb v10, but there is a point where it can become impossible. For exemple, I don't know any climber who weight more than 200 pound climbing V15. Secondly, the speed you can get good at climbing. This one is complex, because there is no methodology that can discriminate between the factors that effect your progression. Factors like your genetic (body composition, muscular capacity, etc.), your background (athlete from another sport), your historic (the age you started climbing), just the place your are mentally (capacity to learn, how passionate you are, which training protocol do you use, etc.) In other terms, its hard to make those claims because there is many variables and we cannot easily discriminate between them, what did what. But we know that climbing is strength/weight sport and we know from other sport how body composition affect the performance at the highest level (Gymnastic, Olympic weight lifting, and many other athletics sports). It would be weird that climbing is an outlier. That said, its true that with a good training protocol and enough time we can all climb hard and enjoying our sport.

This is such a good example why we can't always trust data and that data can be munged to fill many obviously incorrect claims.

I feel like the context of weight isn't stressed strongly enough here. No, going from 22 BMI to 17 BMI is probably not going to be great for your climbing; no you don't need to be anorexic to be a strong climber; but there's no way I would believe that going from 27 BMI to 22 BMI couldn't be a great thing for your climbing, especially if that 27 BMI is fat and not muscle.

It could mean that a lot of people could be spending time better doing something other than hang boarding. Would be interesting to look into that better. Would also be interesting to do the survey on a larger group.

Im sure we could go further and break down by body type (height, torso length, femur length, wing span, ape index,...), grade, and style of climbs (and discipline) and see how it distributes.

So after all that nonsense weight is important. Ffs. Talking for the sake of talking. So many variables....soooooo many....being lighter will help. Fact.

This post provides misinformation. I’m assuming, as it’s unclear, the interviewee wants to make these big claims rather than helpfully explaining the nuances of the data. Using myself as a case study, I lost twenty pounds and found a set of exercises, like pull ups, and the V4 climbing grade much easier. Then I added 20 pounds back in a weight harness to remember what it was like, and pull ups for example and certain V4 climbs were harder or not possible.

It’s great to see people trying to dig into the assumptions climbers have about bodyweight.