I recently asked my audience to tell me about their climbing training success stories so I could present them on the podcast, and I got some good ones! This story from Lea Cleary stood out to me and I think you're going to love it.
Lea is a 40-year-old woman from Boston who's been climbing for 15 years. She felt like she'd plateaued due to fear and performance anxiety. While she'd tried our Performance Route Training Program and made strength gains, she still felt very held back by her performance anxiety.
Then she started working with Coach Alex Stiger and while they continued working on her strength training and climbing technique, they really worked on the mental aspects of climbing. When she started working with Alex, the hardest sport climb she'd sent outside was one 5.10a, and after about 3 months of work together, she surprised herself by sending a 5.12a ("Fear and Loathing" in Red Rocks) in just 4 tries!
Since then she's been regularly sending 5.11's in the gym and feels way less performance anxiety and fear while climbing. She's able to regularly get herself into a flow state while climbing and just enjoy the process instead of being all revved up about performing well.
In this episode, we talk about what she and Alex did together to help her change her mindset, some tools they used, how she stays in the moment while climbing, and what helped her most with performance anxiety.
I hope this episode gives you some motivation and confidence that you, too, can overcome plateaus in your climbing with a little intentional work!
