UKH

At the few indoor walls I attend, I have found the roped route setting to be a pretty high quality, setting nice flowing moves and enjoyable routes, however some of the grades appear to be widely out from a fair and reasonable grade, higher or lower.

im not sure how the setters agree on a grade, I’m not sure that the setter actually climbs the route clean on a lead or even top rope 

what is the good practice guide ?

should the setter actually do the route clean before grading the route ?

should there be a consensus of the grade with other setters?

or should a grade be suggested by the setter / setting team  and over a few weeks the punters have their opinion?

strange subject….  

Any thoughts or best practices?

My local wall puts a page at the bottom of the route or routes with a pen for the customers to decide. Most routes get opinions plus or minus a grade. 

The setter puts up a route that's about the right grade.

The whinier of the customers piss and moan about it because they think it's half a grade out.

The setter doesn't entertain their bullshit whether they're right or wrong, because it JUST. DOESN'T. MATTER.

Well, it matters a bit to some people, particularly consistency within a centre. For example, I went the other day to a roped wall, which I rarely do. We knew that we wanted to get about 10 routes done and the fairly consistent grading there meant that I could do just what I wanted, which was 10 routes of between 6b and 7a. If the grades were all over the place, it would have been harder to get the training I wanted from the session. Instead, felt a bit pumped for over an hour in total. Perfect. 

As mentioned above, a voting board helps maintain consistency within a centre, at least. If there is a large enough contingent with lots of experience, it will have real consistency too. The wall I went to has boring boards for about a week, I think, and then it gets printed as an 'official' grade. 

Alternatively, setters who know their stuff will be able to accurately grade their routes.

Indoor grading is just a bit of a shambles - it’s always going to be inconsistent, area to area, centre to centre, and setter to setter. IMO, as long as a centre is consistent internally so you roughly know how hard what your getting on is that’s all that matters.

To be honest, especially with bouldering, I think more gyms should stop using  normal outdoor grades, and just grade things internally. Lots of folk I know who climb outside for the first time are cheesed off and demotivated because their outdoor grades are massively lower than their indoor grades and the style of most indoor climbing just isn’t really comparable (less so with lead than with bouldering).

A setter giving a grade will be inherently biased. As they set it.  

Equally, if as a setter you climb sport 8+. The difference between a 5 and 5+ is quite frankly an impossibility to offer with authority. The setters authority will be far more accurate near to 8+. 

Average weekend wall goers like to be flattered that they are climbing well. If you're a 6b leader. Being spanked on 6as all day won't leave you with a warm fuzzy feel by the end of the day. If you've been dominating 6cs and the odd 7a. Then that's an awesome day. Let's go back to that wall next weekend! Wasn't it great?

Of course there's reality, thought and common sense amongst the ego, ability and commercial inputs to route setting and abstract scale giving to what is a feeling of effort or skill. 

It's never going to be perfect. I'd stop worrying about it too much. 

I don't completely disagree with the idea of having internal grading systems for bouldering and that seems to be the way most walls are going.

I do tend to find that indoor bouldering is heavily morpho due to the fact that the setters base them largely on their own dimensions and abilities. 

My daughter (148cm tall with minus 4cm ape) has climbed many V6+ boulders outside including a hand full of V7 and 8s, but indoor the harder sets are mainly based on big moves between slopers and there is little effort to force larger climbers into smaller boxes as they are often forced to do outside. My view is that many setters don't set to their own weaknesses enough, and this also explains the issue indoor climbers face when they go outside.

It would be cool to see indoor walls have a more outdoor skills focused set - with loads of small crimps, high rockovers, marginal feet, and mantles. That would make the transition to outdoors less frustrating. 

I sympathise, but I think that shipped has sailed a long ago. Indoor climbing vs. outdoors is a bit like track-running vs. fell-running. All just different aspects of running/climbing. And variety is the spice of life! There so much more to the outdoors (no colour coding, polish, choss, lichen, wind, rain...) that it's futile to try and emulate it too much indoors.

Crimps will make a come back! 😉I guess there is more money selling large volumes. 

I still think the point about setters is valid. It would be good for to more effort to set less morpho problems or at least add additional options so that a given problem can be climbed with different sequences around the same grade. Same with indoor routes. Just takes an extra jib or crimp that would be ignored by those over 170cm, but would allow others to find a sequence even if it ends up harder.

I spectated a national youth comp where the cat A  and D shared a couple of the same finals problems - it was great to see how both problems posed challenges in each category and had similar numbers of tops and zones. Those setters knew what they were up to!

It was said that there are only 2 grades anyway...

1. Ones you can do
2. Ones you can't do

That's completely unhelpful though and life just isn't that simple. It's much more complicated. Actually there are 3 grades.

1. Ones you can do
2. Ones you can't do
3. Ones that you can't do now but could probably get in a few sessions 

Route setters need to label them for you as either grade 1, 2, 3 🤣

In the case of bouldering with V grades, it's like track-running vs fell-running would be if athletics centres claimed that a lap of a standard running track was a mile on the grounds that it made it easier to understand for beginners.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggesting that the point of indoor climbing was to make it 'easier for beginners'*. It just different, primarily in that it's more 'convenient' but less 'rich in experience'. Easier for beginners just suggests an attitude that indoors climbing is just training for outdoors (aka 'the real thing') which is about as defensible as "cragging is just training for mountaineering" (i.e., you should do it in big boots and crampons). Although I have seen people climbing indoors in big boot (no crampons as yet).

* It may well be, but that's not the point of it.

No, sorry, no shade on indoor climbing in general, I'm just talking about places that use V0 to mean "massive jug every six inches".

I don't think that this is the biggest problem in the world, but there is more to the apparent disparity that new-ish climbers find between indoor and outdoor grades, particularly at the low end of the V grade system, than just "real rock is harder to read" or something. A lot of walls essentially use a completely different grading system that happens to be written the same as outdoor V grades.

I largely agree with you on this, but I think there is an acceptable level of tolerance. Half a grade here and there is fine, but on more than a couple of occasions I've encountered an indoor route that was absolutely miles out.

Now it doesn't really matter, but I've just arrived at the wall, and jump on what is marked as a 6a which is a comfortable warmup grade for me, and it turns out to be a rather strenuous route that feel more like a 6b+ then I run the risk of getting flash pumped and having a real dud of a session and that's not helpful at all.   

Like I say though this has happened to only 2 or 3 times ever, so it's not a big deal, but it is frustrating when it happens!

Conversely, how many times do you think your friendly local setter has watched someone climb their new route with crap beta then had an intense session of frothing directed at them that the 6a they set is "definitely at least 6a+" because the indignant frotheur "onsighted a 6b+ last week" so knows everything there is to know about grades?

Probably...... probably more than 2 or 3 times.

They're quite right not to engage; they have better things to do. The bouldering needs attention too and them sideways parkour horseshit paddle dynos don't set themselves.

Oh for sure, you're absolutely right!

The Castle has an email address at the bottom of the grade sheets, something along the lines of nowaysthats6a@thecastle for feedback, so if something is way, way out customers so have somewhere to register their thoughts.  I'd imagine the fact that it's an email address filters out a lot of the lower level grumbling!

There's also the other side of the coin - just as often grades posted can eb a little soft, and we never grumble about them do we?  Just take the ego boost and move on!   

Agreed. My local wall has done the 'decent thing' and has its own grading system (1-6) with no implied correlation to the outdoors.

As that climber, I try to take my inability to get up that moderately graded route as signifying *my* weakness that needs working on rather than the setters inability to grade accurately. Usually.

Took a while to reflect on this, and I think your idea of "high quality" and my idea of "high quality" are legitimately different... 

My preferred local wall faces me with an amazing variety of problems. Brutal fingery crimps. Desperado frictiony slab-based stuff. Comical overhangy things. Yes, some parkour-reminiscent chuckles. Smears. Thank-goodness jugs. Descriptive powers fail me - doesn't matter. Because I know that each problem will be around for a certain amount of time (might be about eight weeks ?) which I can take two ways - "thank goodness the wretched thing will change soon, I'll never manage it !" - or "hope I can crack this one before it goes"... And I also know that there will be some small flexible female, or lanky-high-power-to-weight person, or bravo dynoist, or whatever body type I don't have who'll be able to crush the problem in some totally different way from me that I'd never even foreseen. 

The grading ? It feels internally consistent. I mean, there's a problem ladder on which things seem to be in roughly the right order. And the problems of a particular grade are consistently worth me having a go at, but there are evenings when I get stuff that's three grades beyond my "normal", and evenings when I fail on stuff that's three grades "beneath" (hah) me. 

I'm very happy with it. The wall is generally recognised to be pretty good, local/nationally I think. 

It sounds to me as if you might not like it. "Nice flowing moves" and "I can do the Xbs but usually struggle a bit more on the Xb+s" sounds (and I am putting words into your mouth, but my heart's in the right place...) - sounds as if you're looking for some sort of borderline aerobic/strength workout, and my "solve the crossword puzzle of interesting moves" wouldn't suit you at all ? 

Doesn't solve your conundrum, but might help illuminate it I guess. 

I had a couple of hours on a wall in France last month. Great ! 37m of aerobic/strength workout, I could flash the 6a but lost a couple of kilos beseiging the 6b+. Nice time, probably excellent route-setting. If I went there a lot, I'd probably get stronger. I wouldn't trade it for my usual place though...

Y

I think best practice is just get on with it.  The odd over or under graded route isn't the end of the world - half the time you get a nice ego boost, half the time you get a reality check.

I agree its nice to have a feedback sheet, but more importantly routes are reset frequently enough that its all a bit academic anyway.

My issue with route setting is less that grades are wrong but more that (at least in London where most of the walls are pretty short) routes are often very bouldery - but they don’t get tested as much as the actual boulders for understandable reasons.
So lead setting feels less predictable in terms of difficulty, especially if you’re on the short side, but there are also a lot of moves that are just grim rather than enjoyable (and trying to get the training load right is really tricky). 

I'm surprised nobody makes a simple E-ink label with: grade, set-date and up/down vote buttons specifically for climbing walls. Seems like something that might actually be appealing and useful to both customers and businesses.

jk