For Me, Fall Practice Was Bad Advice

In the fall of 2018, I stood at the base of my current project: a 12a on a gray-brown cliff looming over the highway at Arizona’s Virgin River Gorge. Not even six months earlier, I had breached 5.14. But since then, everything had changed.

Earlier that summer, while I was on my way back from a successful trip to Madagascar, my father had a stroke. I found him incapable of remembering conversations and unable to walk. Amidst psychological overwhelm, my climbing grade plummeted. My mental strength was like a carefully stacked house of cards. One small shake would bring it all down.

The Virgin River Gorge (VRG) is renowned for its spaced bolts, committing moves, and slippery feet. It boasts some of the most difficult climbs in the United States. A strong wind blew my hair into my face as I reached the third bolt of my project, and my forearms thickened with pump. Cars rumbled below as climbers struggled above, some swinging left and right on dangling ropes. I yelled “take” to my belayer, but the din of the gorge traffic sifted the sound to a whisper.

The runout section ahead of me held a series of traversing moves without bolts. I would not be able to take or clip. I held on for as long as I could, visualizing myself taking a huge fall, maybe even careening to the ground. I had no choice but to attempt a sideways move to a crimp. But my body was a curtain that, when pulled aside, led nowhere. I summoned strength from within, but came up short. My muscles had nothing to offer. Pumped, head spinning, I cowered back to the previous hold when my partner finally heard my call and took in the slack. I let breath flow out of me; I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it in. But I successfully evaded the fall.

When my psychological stress over my father manifested as physical weakness, I grew frustrated. I no longer trusted my body. I had no tolerance for fear or desire to confront it. My fear clashed with my desire to improve. I became determined to make 2018 my best climbing year. So I started studying mindset, reading books, and listening to podcasts. However, the suggestions I found weren’t helping me climb through my fear.

Pure motivation had pulled me through in the past; it now failed me. My heart now beat in panic, rather than excitement, anytime I gazed at a cliff. My palms would sweat with tension instead of anticipation. I no longer had the desire or energy to counter my fear. I worried I would never return to the climber I was. Inevitably, I wouldn’t.

Fall practice: A standard prescription for fear

The main strategy I found over and over for quelling anxiety while climbing was fall practice. Since fear of falling is “something that 90% of climbers have,” as Hazel Findlay wrote in an article for UKClimbing, this universal aversion resonates with most. Fall practice seemed to me the most common climbing training advice outside the famed 7-3 hangboard routine. Athletes desperate for a quick solution to their fear of the sharp end are seduced by the simplicity: fall practice sessions promise to lessen or eliminate your fear. My experience revealed the opposite. For me, the fear proved stubborn. The more I fell, the worse I felt. The promise of fall practice withered with every attempt.

So I sought advice from mindset experts. I gained insight from a conversation with Eric Hörst, founder of Training for Climbing and author of Maximum Climbing. He told me, “Ultimately, learning to expertly manage fear is a long-term endeavor—there are no quick fixes.”

I dove deeper into the concepts behind fall practice to learn more. Incremental fall practice is based on the psychological treatment known as exposure therapy, which is the repeated, systematic exposure to cues that are feared or dreaded. It’s simple: If you have anxiety while climbing, you take falls. Then gradually over time, falling becomes less scary. Your fear response weakens; the unknown becomes known. Through experience, you gain the knowledge to assess danger accurately and adjust your fear perceptions accordingly. You’re no longer distracted by falling. You can focus on climbing.

But if I took a fall on a day I felt stressed or fatigued, I didn’t have the bandwidth to try again. The shock to my system would compel me to return to the ground. I questioned, What if fall practice doesn’t work for me? Or worse, what if it escalates my fear? 

When fall practice doesn’t work

Months after I tried the 12a at the VRG, the dread lingered. The anxiety I felt about my father’s chronic condition continued to trickle into my climbing. Climbing felt like a mirror of the mental challenges I was facing in “real” life. I sought further advice from Madeleine Crane, psychologist, founder of Climbing Psychology, and co-founder of Unblocd. In our conversation, she said, “If someone is really struggling in their regular life, they will have trouble falling in that context.”

Why fear sticks for some climbers

According to studies on fear conditioning, it turns out that people like me who are experiencing anxiety have difficulty unlearning fear responses and may be less able to control or suppress their fear. In the context of climbing, an athlete’s response to fear becomes stickier. A 2018 study corroborated the possible incompatibility of exposure therapy with anxiety disorders. A climber’s response may generalize and broaden beyond fearing falling itself to fearing the crag, the rope, and dread the very idea of climbing.

The benefits of fall practice may not last

Every day felt like conquering the same mountain of fear, only to have it roll back down like poor Sisyphus’s boulder. My inability to build tolerance felt illogical until I came across the research of Michelle Craske, a University of California psychologist. Craske suggested that progressively exposing yourself to your fear doesn’t predict long-term success; the fear can return. Even if fall practice works initially, the effects don’t always last.

Charles Keatts, a climber for more than 25 years who I worked with as a mindset coach, still experiences intense fear even with regular fall practice. His fear stems from a lead climbing accident, when he hit a ledge and broke his ankle. “Fall practice worked for me before I had my accident,” he told me. “After that, it can help, but only for that day. Every day is new.” It was both a comfort and discouragement to see that I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t seeing a sustained decrease in anxiety through fall practice alone.

Exposure methods can reactivate trauma

When I kept picturing myself tensed on the 12a at the VRG—not just imagining a fall, but an aftermath involving injury. It was helpful to discover that sometimes, exposure-based methods (like fall practice) can inadvertently trigger counterproductive reactions. Psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, warns that past adverse experiences—whether a bad fall, PTSD, or even something generational—can alter the brain’s wiring.

The internalized memory of adverse experiences can amplify automatic body-based fear responses such as fight, flight, or freeze, like it did for Keatts post-accident. Fear can more easily escalate into panic. Applied to climbing, this research suggests that past experiences might trigger more extreme fear responses while climbing.

Not all stress is created equal

Panic is no training ground for improving mental strength. Not all stress is created equal, according to Hazel Findlay’s fall practice training course. Eustress, or beneficial stress, can sharpen you. Distress, or panic, can fray your edges. So it would follow that taking falls in an overly heightened state of arousal due to anxiety or past trauma—with a cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline pumping through our veins—can make us more afraid, not less.

Fall practice is only effective in a state of eustress, wherein it can enhance confidence. The key is tuning into your internal state. When I push, do I feel the thrill of flight awarded by the soft catch of the rope? Or is my nervous system sounding alarms? We’ve all heard the phrase, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But the line between growth and harm is thinner than we might think. Not every fall makes you braver. In some cases, it can make you more afraid.

Worse, since our brains are neuroplastic, we build neural connections through experience, and studies on fear suggest that taking whips can backfire, building associations between falling and fear. Fear can become automatic. Panic arrives every time you tie in, even if nothing bad happens. If this association develops, it takes time to undo it. We must train falling without negative consequences until the association is broken. It must become extinct. All this research left me wondering: Why not just quit climbing and never have to face fear again?

Why we keep climbing past fear

Despite the emotional strain in my life, I still wanted to push myself, to improve. I could wait for the emotional strain I felt at the uncertainty of my father’s recovery to fade, but I didn’t want to. So when you’re struggling with fear and anxiety, but fall practice isn’t working for you, how do you climb past fear?

When climbers come to her for help, Crane begins with a simple question: “Why do you climb?” We, as climbers, exist in a culture that worships a perpetual state of pushing our limits, teetering on the edge of distress. But why submit to this calculated suffering? Don’t we have enough stress in our daily lives? Why, really, do we choose to face fear at all? The answer is often a desire to improve, but not everyone wants to improve. Some people climb to detach. Others to enjoy nature or community. “We, as humans, have this tendency to push ourselves further,” Crane told me. And while there is this curiosity to push yourself, not all of us want to leave our comfort zone, nor do we have to.

Stop focusing on fear

Ultimately, after more than a year of learning to manage my fear, what got me through was remembering that falling is an essential part of climbing—but it’s not the point. The purpose of mental training is to climb better, without fear interfering. Climbers who struggle with fear often echo the refrain: “I should do more fall practice.” It’s a pressure, an internal wall. A should.  Instead of obsessing over the fall, I found that directing my attention to the moves, the precision of my footwork, and the tension in my body allowed me to continue past my fear. Instead of focusing on the fall, I also had to learn not to fall, not to take, not to stop. When I gave myself wholly to the climb, the fall became nothing more than the shadow of my ascent.

In an increasingly unstable world, facing fear can feel like a small accomplishment. Yet there is no prize for pushing ourselves into a state of fear that no longer benefits us. We must also learn when to say “take” when falling may harm us more than help. If we panic, we can burn out and even slow the process of building mental strength.

Years after I first spoke with my client Keatts about his accident, we checked in. “My last fall in the gym was real and fun. I am less anxious in general,” he told me. He had started Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a treatment supported by van der Kolk, to help him move past his injury. “EMDR seems to have helped, but when I’m tired or on the first climb, I can panic more. Stopping to rest calms me. Then, I can go up or take the fall.”

After hearing about Keatts’s progression, Hörst’s wise words came back to me: “Since we’re all in a ‘different place’ mentally … some make great strides in learning to ‘fall while trying’ (on a safe route) in just a single season, while for others it can take many years.” Training ourselves against fear is a lifelong process.

It took me four more years to climb my second 5.14. Now, I have no trouble falling. I crave a challenge. I approach fear with curiosity, not caution. It has become less about the fall and more about testing the strength of my focus. In place of panic, when I face fear, I wonder: Can I tame the wild invisible force today? After all, it is not the absence of fear that makes climbing pleasurable, but rather the presence of it and our decision to keep moving despite. Let’s give it one more go. Forget the fall. Let’s climb.

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