Hold design supports learning and transfer of climbing fluency

Abstract

Being a discipline with a broad range of genres, rock climbing is an activity where participants seek to generalize the skills they learn in different performance contexts. A training strategy for achieving skill transfer was explored in a group of experienced climbers. Specifically, we tested the effect of practising on three routes, each of the same difficulty, but where handholds supported opportunities for using either a single technical action or multiple actions. Transfer of climbing fluidity in terms of the geometric index of entropy (GIE) of the hip trajectory was then assessed. We expected that learning would be induced on the route where multiple actions were usable. Results revealed that GIE showed a learning effect only when practice was undertaken on a route designed with multiple graspable edges. Practice on the multi-functional route best explains why the participants' successfully generalized climbing fluency under transfer conditions.

Keywords::

• entropy
• climbing affordances
• skill transfer
• motor learning
• metastability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project received the support of the CPER/GRR1880 Logistic, Mobility and Numeric and the funding of the French National Agency of Research [grant number ANR-13-JSHZ-0004 DynaMov]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.