Indoor climbing is a recent addition to the ever more popular pastime of rock climbing. Developed initially for beginner courses in school buildings, indoor walls rapidly developed into a highly sophisticated training aid to beginner and athlete alike. Flat or moulded panels of wood or resin are nowadays covered with a bewildering array of multi coloured rock climbing holds intended to simulate the actual rock walls of the real game. For climbing enthusiasts, indoor climbing has become both a safe introductory environment and an intense and competitive training arena.
Much of the attraction of the recently developed climbing walls and rock gyms lies in the fact that the holds can be rearranged at will to increase or decrease the difficulty. Beyond that, the ease with which a particular venue’s route setters can alter things at the request of users means that training indoors can become very specific.
Holds are fastened to the backing panels with T-nuts and bolts. It is this mechanical simplicity that allows the climbing wall to be so easily and quickly reconfigurable. That simplicity also has a slight drawback, in that users and staff need to be vigilant for loose holds. Hundreds of climbers pulling on a hold, day in day out, will eventually loosen the nuts at the rear of the wall panel rendering the hold liable to spin when pulled on. The problem is easily solved though. Most venues make a hexagon key available so that holds can quickly be re-tightened from the climber’s side of the panel.
It is useful to be aware of the differences in product materials from which holds are moulded. The best artificial holds are currently made from polyurethane resins. You will often see batches of low cost holds available on eBay, but there is a potential problem here and a little bit of research is necessary before committing your money to these “bargains.” It is important to beware of polyester resin holds, which are often offered in these auctions. These holds are quite brittle in comparison to the more expensive PU equivalents. Polyurethane resin is much stronger and far more resilient in the face of repeated stresses from overweight and/or over-powered rock climbers. While I would not say, “DON’T buy them,” you should be aware of their limitations. Climbing in all its flavours is a game in which you make choices; where you live by the consequences of those choices. Both types of hold will usually have some type of sand impregnated into the outer surface of the resin moulding to impart a degree of frictional property to the final product.
The nature of the resins used to mould holds is such that almost any shape imaginable can be moulded somehow. This allows manufacturers to simulate naturally occurring types of holds in all their mad variety. The range includes: crimps, flats, jugs, slopers, side pulls, smears, pockets, underclings, and jams. If you can name it; someone’s used it to drag their carcass up a climb somewhere: and a manufacturer or home enthusiast will have moulded it.
The other beauty of the artificial holds is that they can be moulded in different colours other than “plain stone.” For training purposes these coloured sets of holds can be used to set the routes clearly. Colours indicate the sequence of holds for a particular route or problem. As artificial as this is, it does allow the visitor to work out the problem that the route setter visualized. The best indoor walls have regular resetting of routes as a high priority so that customers don’t become too jaded on the “same old, same old” problems.
Modern materials have made it possible to train on a wide variety of simulated surfaces and artificial holds that do their best to simulate the very real movements of rock climbing. Training for climbing has become a lot more comfortable than in the old days of really extreme rock climbing, it wasn’t unknown to find the hard guys training through the winter evenings by head torch at local outcrops, whatever the weather.