6 min read Bouldering

Bouldering

It has been more than a month since I wrote my last post. I could say it's because I've been busy with studies and works, but the main reason is that the majority of my spare time is on bouldering recently.

What a lovely place!

The first time I heard about this place was when I tried to search for a bouldering gym on Google Maps around 2022. My friend S is an enthusiastic climber. Back when I was working in Shanghai, he took me to the gym once, but I don't recall the details of that memory anymore; that was about 8 years ago. He posted some clips on social media, and I was "sort of" motivated to try bouldering. But nobody around me climbed and Urbana Boulders wasn't within walking distance from campus. That changed last month when a friend from the lab mentioned the gym again, said she sometimes climbs there, and kindly suggested we could go together. And that became my biggest motivation, having a "gym homie" is just better than pouring yourself tons of pep talk or videos, gaslighting yourself to be a "better one."

My gym homie recently suffered a minor foot injury, and I hope she recovers soon! Luckily I still had some motivations to go there on a weekly basis, more than four times a week so far.

Start

Soon after starting my first bouldering session with her, and some brief introductions about the gym, the grading, her climbing experiences, etc., I became quite hooked on bouldering. Mainly because of the joy of problem-solving, almost as if I was solving a coding or math problem (and also getting to see tons of memes and supportive videos from the online bouldering community).

Now, 7 weeks into bouldering, I've learned quite a bit, not just from YouTube videos, but also from in-person interactions with other beginner and intermediate boulders at the gym.

On the bouldering aspect, there are some terminologies and techniques I've learned and found quite useful, and some of them are just interesting. Giving "beta" to another person means providing clues about a certain route, a "project" is equivalent to a "route", having a route "sent" means you have successfully topped it, and "topped it" means you reached the top. I've come to understand how using "core power" is extremely important for balance, both physically and "mentally." In terms of strength, while my finger strength is still pretty weak, my biceps are surprisingly getting used to climbing some V3/4 as I progressed.

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Week 2/3. I was climbing on a V2-4 route.

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Week 7. Two V3 routes. I think the major difference is the use of core power to balance.

Mentally, climbing helps me recover from stress, as I simply can't find joy in just running or lifting in the gym. I think probably most people nowadays learned about climbing because of Jimmy Chin's Alex Honnold documentary, "Free Solo." The storytelling about how Alex became the first one to climb El Capitan, without a rope, had me shocked and impressed for a long time after I first saw it several years ago. I still remember that dialogue he said in the movie:

“It takes small steps to accomplish a quantum leap […] you face your fear because your goal demands it.”

Alex didn't just show up and start to climb because he had the guts (duh, he sure does). He visited the route frequently before the final free solo, practicing and memorizing each move. It reminds me of an old Chinese saying, "Without accumulating small steps, one cannot reach a thousand miles; without accumulating small streams, there is no way to become seas and rivers." (不积跬步，无以至千里；不积小流，无以成江海). This saying, in many ways, is a reflection of Alex's life philosophy here. Of course, one also needs a great deal of courage to do what he did. I once saw a clip from the Norwegian professional climber and YouTuber, Magnus Midtbø, where he was doing a small free solo project guided by Alex, and even he appeared to be terrified.

Bouldering has helped me focus on the tasks I hope to accomplish, both physically and mentally, in this monotonous place filled with cornfields. I'm just delighted that my friend introduced me to it at this time period.

Ideas

During my several bouldering sessions, I found that applying some computer vision techniques to analyze the posture of a climber seemed interesting. I asked my friend to record me climbing a V3 (I know different gyms have different scales - here yellow means V2-4, and since this climb was somewhat hard for me, but not overly so, I decided to classify it as middle level) to explore this idea further. Two concepts came to mind.

The first is a virtual trainer that helps analyze a climber's posture and then provides tips on how climbers should adjust their positions at certain points. My thought was to apply state-of-the-art pose estimation on the video, extract the 3D positions of each major joint of the body, and analyze how a climber moves relative to their pelvis and the angles at each joints. It could also provide analysis on the center of mass of the body, to help climbers gain an intuitive understanding of how core power can improve their climbing at an early stage in their journey. Adding pressure sensors to the boulders themselves might also be a good idea, I guess?

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A video with pose estimation using MMPose. This is route is about level of V3 (V2-4).

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Another video with 3D pose mapping, also used MMPose. This route is V0-2.

The second idea consists of several parts.

  • Scan the bouldering gym and reconstruct the virtual boulder wall using NeRF or other state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction models.
  • Input the climber's body data, obtained either via pose estimation or physical measurement. This would include strength data, such as finger and arm strength, as well as weight data for different parts of the body.
  • Insert a doppelganger agent into the reconstructed 3D scene, and have it climb in the scene using the same route and approximately the same body data.
  • Beginner climbers would then climb for the first few times, using the set of movements from previous attempts in the virtual scene as a guide. If the climber falls, a virtual coach would suggest one or more possible approaches the agent could adopt to avoid the fall.
  • As a bonus (though not exactly practical at the moment), a deep network could be used to train the agent for countless iterations and explore how the climber could evolve…

As far as I'm aware, there are already some existing applications like belay.ai and climbalyzer.com. I came across belay.ai when a friend shared a video from Magnus Midtbø, the Norwegian climber I mentioned earlier, in which he collaborated with the team to demo the software. I'm looking forward to more of their updates and perhaps I could delve deeper into this topic in the future.

There are some other papers I found that discussed this topic:

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I started taking notes here, check it out!

Notes

Now, watching YouTube videos, IFSC competitions or Catalyst Climbing's Louis has become my routine after meals. I find the bouldering community as welcoming as can be, with so many influencers sharing their experiences, footage, funny videos, and words of encouragement from various perspectives. I thought I'd jot down some notes here as a reference for my future bouldering sessions as well:

  • Do 5-10 minutes of warm-ups before each session, do dead hang, do lift up if possible
  • Rest about 5-10 minutes between each climb, relax the muscle before; social!

Reference

Also, here are some videos I find quite helpful:

Let's end here with a Emil Abrahamsson's meme video.