Psychological

The concept of mental toughness is fairly modern, the idea is that it is various personal attributes and skills a person has to cope with difficult situations.

Determination is about your willingness to try to succeed despite what can feel like the odds being stacked against you.

Being and state motivated is a key part to reaching you goals, whether that be motivation to train or get on routes that you know will be hard for you.

Whilst it is not possible to truly exert control over your emotions it is possible to understand them and as a result try to minimise the disruption to your climbing that can happen when you trigger an emotional response.

This is your ability to remember long and complex sequences for sports routes and boulder problems. In general, this area is covered under the imagery section.

This is our ability to control what we are focused on when climbing. Again this can have positive and negative effects on our performance, as such we need to understand what we focus on, why we do and how we can maintain that appropriate focus.

The human body has evolved to have a fight or flight response to what our brains consider scary situations. By understanding what the common response and behavioural effects are we can start to become aware of when we trigger that response and start to rationalise what we feel.

Self-talk is the little voice in your head that often only starts talking to you when the going gets tough. Often to undermine your confidence or belief.

In sports science, they refer to this as Self-Efficacy, or one’s belief in there ability to carry out a specific task. So your confidence on a rock type you are very familiar with will be far higher than when you are visiting a new rock type.

99% of athletes report using some kind of visualisation in their training or sport. Whilst for many it is just an image, we are going to cover the PETTLEP model of imagery which shows that imagery is a combination of a visual image, kinaesthetic feeling and an emotional response.