Having serious intentions of improving my technique with both personal climbing and coaching youngsters in mind, I’d bought Dan Hague and Douglas Hunter’s The Self-Coached Climber back in January and started to read it. But then I’d largely moved outside for rock climbing with the coming of better weather at Easter, and only just started to work systematically at the exercises this week with some rainy summer holiday days to tempt me back onto the wall. So I’ve spent a couple of sessions concentrating on Chapter 4 (Turning and Flagging), which takes you through various backwards and same-side-in traverses, flagging and drop knee exercises before making you try to apply them in one final trickier activity (passing your farthest point), and can see myself repeating these regularly now that I’ve got the gist of them and understand what they’re doing for me. But it’s going to be difficult to work equally systematically through the next chapter (Controlling Force: Movement Initiation and Movement Centers), which starts with several exercises requiring ‘a slab with many large, comfortable footholds’ that I’m simply not going to find on the slab-less Ice Factor walls. :-/
For the interested, The Self-Coached Climber was enthusiastically reviewed by Dave MacLeod a couple of years back and I’d certainly agree with everything he said on the basis of what I’ve read, tried and watched (on the DVD) so far!