The gym gives you wall-to-wall matting; outside, you build the landing yourself. Put pads where you are most likely to fall and where a fall would hurt most, keep them level with no gaps, and re-check after every attempt; landing on a pad edge or in a gap is a common way to sprain an ankle. Spotting protects the head and neck and keeps the climber on the pads; it is not catching. Fingers together, thumbs tucked, and agree beforehand when the pads move and when the spotter steps back. Research on outdoor bouldering injuries is scarce: one Swedish study had only nine boulderers, and every one of them was hurt in the foot or ankle.
A route you've rehearsed goes faster and smoother than the onsight, with lower heart rate and lactate. Start with difficulty: Eric Hörst suggests somewhere between two letter grades below and one letter grade above your hardest redpoint of the past six months. On how long to siege, there are two camps: Hörst says move on if it hasn't gone after 10 tries over 4 days; the long-term camp treats many sessions as normal. Only coaching experience backs either side; no study settles it. Work it in 3–5 sections, solve the crux first, and link from the top down. Rest longer between goes and keep moving: sitting still for 20 minutes actually lowers performance.
Getting a route from bare wall to open means stripping, washing, setting, forerunning, adjusting and grading; an online survey of 162 setters found about 40% of their hours go to forerunning. In Taiwan, the CTAA's 2025 Level C setter course required an entry-level setter certificate and the CBT, a redpoint of 5.12a and bouldering V5, and cost NT$7,000. In the same survey, 78.5% of setters had been injured at work. Pay for setters in Taiwan and the rules for the CTAA's Level A and B setters are not publicly available.
Taiwan has about ten published bouldering areas and two bilingual guidebooks. Without a car, and climbing around V2 in the gym, start at Chung Tai Chan Monastery in Beitou: about 17 minutes on foot from MRT Qiyan Station, with flat ground and low boulders. With a car, Li-Yang near Taichung has mostly good riverbed landings and problems mostly from V0 to V5. None of these areas has a bouldering notice from a land manager that we could find, which does not mean anything goes. Taiwan is wet: mountain areas get overgrown with moss again, and riverbed areas depend on the weather and the river.
In a German prospective study of indoor boulderers, the legs accounted for only 23% of injuries, but those injuries were more severe and more often caused by jumping off the wall. A French fall survey found 85% of injurious falls were involuntary, so downclimbing and lowering your jump height matter more than landing form alone. Being unable to walk four steps after a sprain, or tenderness at the back edge of the ankle bone, is what emergency doctors use to decide on an X-ray; a sprain that still hurts after 6 weeks needs a return visit.
Stop hammering the problem from the start for a sixth time. Break it into sections and start from just before the move that stops you. Watch someone climb it: in one study, climbers topped more often after a live demonstration than with no preview. Change one variable per attempt and film it. Rest 3–5 minutes between full-effort goes. Whether you must match the finish hold depends on the rules: competition rules require both hands on it, gyms vary. Downclimb instead of jumping whenever you can.
A 2023 systematic review found that a strength training intervention prevented shoulder and elbow overuse injuries, but the evidence comes from two reports on one cohort of student climbers, and it doesn't apply to fingers. Finger flexor strength averages about six times extensor strength, and only direct extensor training changes that, but the link between the ratio and injury is still speculative. The once-a-week, three-circuit prevention routine (external rotation, core, legs, forearms) is coaching consensus, not a research finding.
"Three points of contact" was climbing dogma until the 1950s; today it is a beginner drill and a safety rule on loose rock. What you actually need to learn is "shift your weight onto the other three, then move the fourth." Hugging the wall helps when you are holding still; when you move, find the plumb line. Straight arms save your biceps, not necessarily your fingers.
Dynamic moves are sorted by how many points stay on the wall: a slap keeps at least two, a jump keeps one hand on, a dyno keeps none. A deadpoint means catching the hold at the instant your body stops rising and hasn't started to fall, usually with your feet still on the take-off holds. Use them when a hold is too far or you're too tired to reach slowly. Done well, dynamic moves aren't necessarily riskier than static ones; the worst case is the half-committed attempt, so pick static or fully dynamic. Start with small deadpoints on big holds with your feet staying on.
Medial elbow pain isn't always tendinitis; it can be a compressed ulnar nerve. Numbness, or pain after keeping the elbow bent for a while, points to the nerve. In a German case series of climbers' wrist injuries, pinky-side injuries were the most common, and about a third of patients still had discomfort after treatment. For diffuse wrist pain you can't pin down, the researchers recommend an X-ray, then CT or MRI if needed. A working guide for adjusting training: no more than 2/10 pain during an activity and for 24 hours afterwards (a physical therapist's rule of thumb).
Climbing until you're pumped and falling off is not endurance training: Lattice argues it lands between the aerobic and anaerobic systems and trains neither well. If you pump out on easy terrain and can't recover at rests, start with ARC or long intervals at an intensity that barely pumps you. If you can't link one hard section, that's when 4×4s or 1 on 1 off power-endurance work comes in. Lattice, Eva López and Liu Chun-yen disagree on whether ARC should produce a light pump. Support for these methods comes mainly from physiology and coaching experience; no controlled trial has compared them head to head.
When you climb, the aerobic and anaerobic systems work at the same time rather than taking turns, and each time you let go to move, blood flow brings oxygen into the forearm and carries metabolites away. As Lattice puts it, the aerobic system needs volume and the anaerobic system needs intensity; climbing until you're pumped out lands in between and trains neither. Below critical force you can keep climbing; above it, the clock starts.
Foot problems are common in climbers: one on-site examination of 144 climbers found foot pathology in 86%, nail problems most of all. Bunions are clearly more common in high-level climbers, but these are cross-sectional studies and can't show the shoes caused them. Studies disagree on whether downsizing is linked to pain; a bouldering study found more serious injuries among people wearing heavily downturned shoes. The practical answer is two pairs: a comfortable pair near your street size for most climbing, and a tight pair only for hard attempts.
Flexibility affects climbing performance, but less than strength and endurance: in a 2000 study it explained only 1.8% of the variance in performance, and the authors of the IRCRA test battery suggest it may be a 'threshold' quality where enough is enough. General tests such as the sit-and-reach barely relate to climbing ability; climbing-specific hip tests do. A 2023 systematic review found no association between stretching and overuse injury, so train mobility to put your feet where you want them, not to prevent injury.
Start footwork with three things: keep your eyes on the foot until it takes weight, place the front of the shoe precisely the first time, and make no noise. Warm up on routes two grades easier with quiet-feet and sticky-feet drills. 'Climb with your feet, not your arms' roughly holds on vertical walls; the steeper the wall, the more weight shifts to your hands, so on overhangs the cue becomes 'keep your feet on the wall'.
Tell the three grips apart by two joints. In an open hand the fingers are only slightly bent. In a half crimp the middle joint bends to about 90°, the fingertip joint does not bend backwards, and the thumb stays off. In a full crimp the fingertip joint bends backwards and the thumb wraps over the index finger. The full crimp puts the most load on the A2 pulley; one biomechanical model puts it at 36 times the open-hand load. So default to an open hand or half crimp, and full crimp only when nothing else works. Hooper's Beta's 'open crimp' is a half crimp, not an open hand.
There is no dedicated research on home training; this post collects coaching advice from Lattice, Power Company, the BMC and Hooper's Beta. The minimum kit is a doorframe pull-up bar plus a hangboard or lifting block. Until you're experienced, keep hangboard sessions under 20 minutes and take weight off with your feet on a chair; use the bar for pull-ups and lock-offs and the floor for press-ups and core. Home training can maintain finger strength, but improving still means getting back on the wall.
Where climbers get hurt depends on where the data comes from: in a sports-medicine clinic more than half of injuries are fingers; in US emergency-department data half are lower-limb injuries, mostly fractures from falls. A head strike in a fall, new numbness or weakness, a deformed limb or a crack at the moment of injury means call 119 or go to the ED. A finger that pops and then swells, or finger pain in anyone under 18, needs a doctor soon. In Taiwan a physiotherapist treating an injury must work from a doctor's diagnosis or referral, so see the doctor first.
A German multicentre study of 77 acute climbing knee injuries found the heel hook was the most common mechanism, at 40.3%. In a separate case series of 17 heel hook injuries, every patient had sudden pain at the back of the knee, thigh, or pelvis and was limping; 15 did well with conservative treatment, but 11 had come for a second opinion. A pop followed by limping, a dent plus bruising, or a knee that catches or locks all need assessment by a doctor or physiotherapist.
On the same route, novices put less weight through their feet yet use more oxygen and have higher heart rates. When you plateau, run a quiet-feet test on a route two grades below your limit: if easy routes still pump you out, the problem is usually movement. The series follows the federations' teaching order: footwork, balance, turning, holds, dynamic moves, bouldering problem solving, resting and route reading, wall angles, cracks.