gyms.

How does this help?

- It improves your route-reading ability. In other words, your ability to look at a new route and figure out how to climb it before you actually get on the wall.

- It improves your repertoire of rock climbing moves and your overall technique because every new route you climb will train your muscles in different ways. If you climb the same routes over and over again, you body won't learn anything new. The repeated moves become easier because your muscles have "memory".

Eric Horst, writer of several excellent training books for climbing better, once described a climber who would climb at the same crag every weekend. This climber got so good that he could dance pirouettes around every single route at the crag. One day, another climber accidentally broke one of the holds on a route and the "expert" climber could no longer climb that particular route any more. Don't let this happen to you.

Add variety to your climbing sessions.

- Try climbing with only one hand, or one leg.

- Practice traversing on a slab without hands, balancing with your feet. This is excellent for training your footwork and your balance.

- Climb using "first touch" rules, meaning that once you have placed your hand or foot onto a hold, you cannot shift its position even if the position is awkward. This forces you to think about how you use a hold so you optimize your moves and reduce the number of unnecessary moves (which obviously wastes energy).

- Try bouldering with a group of friends and give each other boulder problems to work on. Bouldering tends to be a shorter, more powerful sequence of moves that is guaranteed to improve your footwork and your strength.

- Do laps up and down a route that you can complete but still find challenging. Don't pick one you could climb in your sleep - you must feel like you are really giving your muscles a good workout. This will help to build your endurance.

5. Monkey See, Monkey Do

A terrific benefit of climbing in a group is being able to see how others climb. It gives you ideas for new moves that you can try when working out a problem on the wall. Sometimes another climber may have a better move that conserves more energy and it makes better sense for you to follow that move rather than the one that you figured out yourself. You can learn a lot by watching other climbers.

Sometimes watching another climber climb a route helps to make climbing the route feel more

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