Alannah Yip’s Top 4 Tips for Sport Projecting

Alannah Yip is one of Canada’s most decorated climbers—indoors or out. Not only was she the sole female to represent Canada at the Tokyo Olympics, she’s also sent Pulse (5.14a) and Room Service (V12) in Squamish, B.C. I recently interviewed Yip at the Arc’teryx Climbing Academy, where we talked about her illustrious (and recently finished) comp career, her hair loss due to Alopecia, mental training, and her transition to full-time rock climbing. You can read our conversation here.

The next day, Yip gave a sport climbing clinic which I eagerly attended. She dropped a lot of knowledge beneath Squamish’s famous granite crags, but four things stuck out to me for projecting sport routes at your limit:

1. 1. On figuring out impossible moves: Stick clip up and ask for a take so you can get weight off your arms, and feel all the available holds and test all possible body positions. Consider working down from key holds or rests, rather than solely working up.
   2. Warm up: It’s not just about injury prevention. Yip can’t climb her hardest without a proper, full-body warm up including shoulders, fingers, and hips. She does 10-15 minutes of ground warm up before doing her first pitch. On that first warm-up pitch, the goal is to warm up—not send! Yip has taken on 5.9 before if she get confused. She stresses: Do not get pumped on the warm up. If she’s doing a 5.14a project, for example, she’d warm up on an 5.11+ and then a 5.12+/13-, and then do finger-specific warm up on a hangboard.
   3. Be efficient when resting: It’s easy to get impatient at rests, and leave them before you’ve milked them for all they’re worth. Yip likes to decide how long she needs to be at that rest beforehand, and then have her belayer set a timer to hold her accountable.
   4. On big projects, set smaller linking goals: We all need smaller victories on the way to clipping the chains. Before giving redpoint attempts, Yip will make a goal of linking from the ground to the end of the crux. Then she’ll try to link from the beginning of the crux to the chains. These overlapping links help mentally, too. She will make more mini-goals the longer term the project is.

The post Alannah Yip’s Top 4 Tips for Sport Projecting appeared first on Climbing.