Performance Analysis in Climbing
Climbing is a fast growing competitive and recreational sport, attracting athletes of different age groups and with different aims who train regularly in an increasing number of indoor climbing gyms. Despite of the popularity of climbing, research on biomechanical aspects of climbing such as the contact forces is still in its infancy. A comprehensive analysis of the contact forces would help to deduce characteristics of successful climbing, to monitor performance development, and to assess the impact of training interventions.
Involved People
Dr. Peter Wolf
Although contact forces between climber and hold have been emphasized as an important component in successful climbing, affordable instrumentation to measure these forces are not available, especially for measuring holds with arbitrary shapes. In addition, forces are only rudimentarily recorded in climbing-specific tests, for instance, by instrumented hang boards. Therefore, we are developing cost-efficient instrumentations monitoring meaningful differences in climbing performance metrics. Our current focus is on contact forces in speed climbing and during campus board training.
Movement sonification constitutes a training intervention, which has been suggested to have a great potential to facilitate motor learning. However, the effectiveness of this type of training needs to be further explored in applied settings, which we will do, as contact forces between climber and hold are intuitively transformable to sound dimensions.