By Jeff Blum
As everyone knows the LA Boulders is Touchstone Climbing’s newest gym and first in Los Angeles. Not only is this awesome all bouldering gym an amazing facility with great wall angles, climbing and staff, but they also host great events. Over the past months there have been gear swaps, late night climbing sessions, and more.
Recently I sampled one of these events with the clinic called “Climb 2 v Grades Harder”. This was a workshop taught by Douglas Hunter who co-authored the Self Coached Climber. Douglas has a long and distinguished background as a climber and a coach. He brought a unique and coherent approach to optimizing ones climbing by structuring our time spent at the gym. This class was valuable to me as I am trying to push into double digits, as well as for the people that just started climbing last month.
The workshop opened up with a lecture section as we all gathered on the couches atop the top out boulder. After going through some of the material that Douglas provided, he diagrammed up some examples of movement and balance on the LAB’s TV. Then we got down to work practicing and learning some of the workouts we had just discussed.
One of the components of the class was to build a strong base for climbing, ie. being able to consistently climb at a grade on all angles and styles. Having the wonderful facility of the LAB to practice with we were all able to work on exactly what we needed to raise our climbing to the next level. Douglas walked around checking in on everyone providing support and taking questions about how the workouts were functioning.
After putting the workouts into practice we all had a better idea of where our current fitness level was and what we could do to optimizing our workouts moving forward. Douglas brought us together and we powwowed sharing what we had learned with each other. All in all it was a great class that taught me something new, re-motivated me, and was just a heck of a lot of fun. It’s exciting to see that the LAB is not just an amazing facility but is also bringing awesome people and events to the LA climbing community.
Jeff Blum is a member at LA Boulders who took one of the gyms first climbing technique clinic last week. He submitted this review to the Touchstone Climbing Blog. Stay tuned for upcoming clinics and events at LA Boulders on their Facebook Page.
