Shoutout to @jerntaa on instagram who asked if I could do a video on climbing grades converted to the campus board which in turn spiraled into this menace of a thing. Hope you all don't just chase the training grades from now on and still stay focused on chasing grades outdoors! After all, grades are everything.
You know, I'd like to think these are sandbagged, but since he actually climbs at a high grade, I feel like I trust his grading more than my average climber grading.
The variation in grading of different gyms and climbing areas also plays a role in the spreading of the data. People climbing mostly outdoor will sandbag the data and people climbing inside will be softer.
I'm feeling a collab coming on 👀. Seriously cool to see people's subjective feelings about how hard these feats of strength are. We should do a video that shows the objective test data we've collected and see how close it actually is.
I imagine that people have subjectively graded things quite sandbagged for most of these isolated exercises. Would be super cool to see the comparison though! For another reference, I tend to have quite high numbers hanging 2-arms but my numbers get significantly lower when switching to 1-arm hangs. Most of this is due to the fact that I've spent my climbing career training 2-arm hangs and 2-arm climbing and have just started in the last year practicing 1-arm hanging. So then how do you grade the skill aspect of this? Food for thought I think since I'm obviously strong enough to be hanging more than bodyweight 1-arm, but the skill isn't there yet.
Objective data and some specific criteria for suggesting a grade would make this more useful…this is just an opinion piece. And maybe connecting a skill/exercise to its application on the wall would help people dial in the specificity aspect of their training.
Clearly from the spread of grades, particularly in the 1-5-9 vs 1-6-9, allot of the people voting cannot do the exercises that they are voting on. It would be interesting if you did the same survey but asked if the voter can do the exercises before asking what the grade is. Would be a good controlling factor in the data.
The reason that climbing is so interesting is that you can truly be more than the sum of your parts. Many climbers underperforming in these metrics will have climbed multiple grades harder than their highest completed training task. However, the finger strength metrics will always be the most telling.
@@EmilAbrahamsson its very useful it gives you a sense of what benchmarjks you should be able to do at a level of climbing or what you should train to hgelp you with certain grade levels
@@saxon8981 That’s not my interpretation. I understood it as each exercise graded as if it was a climbing problem. So actually combining exercises (which you could argue that climbing is - a combination of exercises) would mean that the difficulty goes up a fair bit. You can get good at any single exercise here without it naturally transferring to climbing a problem. I would also add that it’s one thing to psychically being able to do a climb, and another to combine physical ability with technique and problem reading. I might sound like a total bummer here, but that’s what I’ve found out to be true for myself. Feel free to correct me though!
I think it could be useful, you usually know just about what grades you can climb, and then you can use the consensus here to see if there are some exercises here you can probably start doing.
Really interesting, especially as a climber who's calisthenics and finger strength is probably significantly under the average for the level I climb at. I feel like climbing a V8 graded boulder can be done by someone with V5 finger strength and V4 campus strength. Problems are able to take so much more technicality and problem-solving into account than any raw exercise could. For reference, I project ~V7-9 and probably line up with about the ~V4 level exercises (as graded by Emil).
This reminds me of Lattice's assessments, where they relate your scores to the population of climbers climbing at a similar grade - a nice addition of data points to see what may be the factors that make certain routes/boulders seem easier or harder for you subjectively
I also feel like gender makes a big difference with these grades because pure strength exercises will just be harder for women. It would be interesting to see the difference between grade consensus for women and men.
I don't think Emil realises just how strong he is, that 100kg weighted pull up was actually pretty close and the world record is apparently in the 100-110kg range, hence the low grading from him!
that's the beauty of the consensus my friend, it doesn't lie. Ish. Who knows, could be a lot of errors in how people interpreted the questions :P But if you're like 2-3 V-grades of the norm, then it might be something to work on!
I think most of the data can be ignored because there isn’t much point in grading something you can’t do. And I would be that a lot of people who answered can’t do the stuff they were asked to grade.
I personally think everyone who feels they can suggest a grade should. I’m the survey people were asked to ignore stuff they didn’t feel they had a clue what to suggest on. Not saying it’s a perfect study though, far from it, and there’s never an absolute truth in grades anyway :-)
I think there’s no point if you’re an inexperienced climber who can’t do a certain exercise. Once you have experienced other moves and you’ve seen V-something in person even though you haven’t climbed it you can compare. For me, there were a few exercises I cannot do but I do feel like I can grade them quite well.
@@EmilAbrahamsson i think the question of grading/scaling is always intersting and i also think it might turn out to be usefull one way or another. Unfortunately it is not an easy topic at all and i think "simply" having people rate different exercises on a scale wont do the job, especially for very hard exercises a very small proportion of respondents cant do, just as Mister X has suggested already. I think simply stating "not to answer in case of doubt" unfortunately doesn't do the job (for example there are over 700 people giving a grad on the 1-7 campus move. I don't know who the 1.120 respondents in total are - maybe they are all all very experienced climbers, but still 2/3 of them suggesting a grade for a campus move maybe one person on earth ever executed sounds a bit high). However, i think, instead of asking for ratings on an existing scale, it might be more reliable to present two exercises at a time and let participants pick the harder one of the two and construct the actual ranking-scale out of all the binary comparisions. As i've said already, i think the idea of creating such a scale is great, so i hope you keep this project going and im curious to hear new findings about it.
Very interesting, it would have been nice to also ask if people can do the move and what their max grade is in bouldering, then you could also investigate the correlation of max grade to the ability of doing some exercises or use something like a boolean classifier like geekclimber did in a recent video like what grad you should be able to climb when you can do a certain exercise
@@EmilAbrahamsson Cool, also i am quite familiar with data analysis, machine learning and i am a climbing physicist so i so if you need some assistance i would like to help :)
@@mattiasgonczi My bad, i would not use ML directly, reviewing correlation and bayes classifier would be enough i think, i am just biased to relate these things with ML as it was also in the ML book i read altough its not ML in particular
@@mattiasgonczi an interesting thing tho would be, i fyou have large amounts of data, to take the ability to do certain exercices as features and label which boulders the personn can do and then predict by the input of whihc exercises you can do, which boulders you should be able to send or a send probability (of course it would mainly work for power boulders i think)
I climb v8 regularly but still can't one arm pullup haha. No way is it v6 kinda level. but i guess its kinda hard to compare with climbing grades. no way is a one arm pullup on a beatmaker edge only v9. Thats madness haha.
Wow this was super fun and interesting! Personally, after years of training it is hard to look back and give “easy” exercises a grade. Furthermore, it’s tricky abs you’re right that each individual has their own unique strengths and weaknesses, but overall each consensus seemed to be pretty accurate. Lastly, I think front lever is V10 lol
Haha I mean for me front lever and mono hangs are like V17... But that would be like somebody who doesn't have an easy time building arm/lat strength grading a OAP V17, it's just not fair to everyone else. But yeah, super hard to grade "easy" stuff. I was surprised to see my own suggestions being close to everyone else actually, albeit slightly sandbagged.
@@EmilAbrahamssonlololol v17 for a front lever? You are in desperate need of doing a couple dead lifts my brutha. If you can deadlift 2x body weight front levers become a v2-v4 move
Ratings like one arm pull-up and 1.75x BW pull-up being V6 seem suuuper sandbagged. Maybe being a very physically strong climber is influencing your perception of ease/difficulty?
Haha I'm not totally opposed to that theory.. Just tried to give my honest opinion! I could feel it changing when I got the "common" suggestions though, so I'm happy I included it.
I think it would be really interesting to see these graphs sub-divided into votes from those who have completed the exercise and those who have not. Might see a trend in sandbagging/airbagging from each side and the mean vote diverging, or maybe the average is the same which would be almost more interesting!
I think most of the grades were really close to the level of climbing. And that's why I thought it was weird for Emil to grade them so low. At the end he says yeah this is my max (for 2.2x body weight) so I put it at V12. But then Emil actually climbs 8B/8B+ so all the way to V14. That alone should tell that 2.2x body weight is probably closer to V14 than to V12. Also I realized I'm really weak at core wow. 5 sec L-sit 6A+?? I can barely do it and I topped a few V8, general level V7..
Try to L-sit with knees slightly bent (like 5 degrees). For some people the limitating factor isn't the posterior chain but either hamstring flexibility or quads strength, and that's not really a problem for climbing.
@@Ptitviaud1337 that's interesting cause as soon as I bend my legs just a little bit I can do L-sit considerably longer. Like I might just get to 5 sec or below with straight legs but if it's just about holding the legs up and not the form I can probably do twice as long. I'm gonna try it in training soon thx
@@precursor4263 Ah ! Thought so. You can try to isolate if it's hamstring flexibility by streching them (like 2 or 3 times, 20sec each with some rest), and then try a max L-sit after that. If there's any significal improvement, there you are. Anyhow, dont bother too much with it, L-sit is not highly correlated to climbing. However, it's surprising to see that you're "only" able to L sit for 10 sec, that's low in comparison to bouldering 7B! You should try to front lever with bent legs, or even tuck-front lever (look it up). My guess is that you would score pretty well on those. L-sit might just be no very useful for you.
Thanks for making the effort of collecting and presenting this data! I never knew that I wanted to know this. To me It's genius Coming up with this idea that would have never even occurred to me in the first place. Well done!
What I’m getting from this is Emil (and maybe strong climbers on average) lack the comprehension their strength relative to those grades 6 to 8 below their max. Emil was so massively sandbagging in that range. Not surprising, this is why sandbagging becomes such a thing. Also, there is a big difference between strength required to climb a grade and the grade of a hypothetical boulder that contained that one move.
Actually a fun analysis, I wonder how many others that is the case for. Next question: Can a V10 climber grade a V1? If not, can strong routesetters really grade climbs indoors?
@@EmilAbrahamsson My guess is when it comes to grading actually climbs, you can more easily standardise by thinking about the history of climbs you did in the past. This is maybe gets warped by time and as you get stronger but will still help. We don’t grade exercises, and they’re very different, so in doing so we’re almost inventing a new scale without the past experience to help. Therefore people start to grade around what they find hard, what they can do, and what grade they climb. Probably exaggerates strength biases. Regarding grading below your limit, and from personal experience, for several years 7b was my max. It felt really tough and so I gave 7b to any really tough boulders that I could only just do. For the last few years I’ve been training more, now I climb 8a+ projecting 8b. However, my gut response still is to give boulders 7b when I get first ascent and I found it tough. I have to try and imagine other climbers I know who do max out at those grades to recalibrate the scale. Applying this to exercises, my partner climbs v4/5 and was furious at pull up + 25% being v3. Anyway, i should say, nice video and thanks for putting the effort into doing the research!
This is very interesting. I have climbed two 7b benchmarked problems (one of which felt kind of easy once I did it) on the Moonboard and one that we graded 7b+ in our gym, however I can only do a pull up with 70% body weight, and can only do a one arm pull up on my left arm (which is a little weird since I'm right handed) which I did two weeks ago one single time, and I also can't hold the front lever or even straddle front lever (can pull up into it easily though). For sure an interesting subject. I feel like genetics in terms of our fysiology definitely play a big role too. For instance I notice that I have a very tough time at the top/end range of pull ups (one arm included) where it feels like I am almost fighting against myself - if I bend my arm I also can't touch my shoulder with my fingers because (I think) my forearm is pressing against my bicep, or perhaps it has something to do with the shape of my elbow joint? My climbing partner however finds the last 10% to be the most easy, like he is almost resting at the top locked in. This is makes reaching lock offs very hard for me. Interesting.....
I'm the same I find initiating a one arm pullup is easy but it's very hard to lock off the last 10-20% at the top. Maybe it has something to do with upper to lower arm lengh/ratio.
@@babsds0 Yes that is a possibility too which I have thought about but forgot to mention. Kind of annoying 😂 For me it gets hard at around 90 degrees, then easy for the next 30% or so and then very hard the last 10-20% yeah. Just super weird whenever I compare to the guy I climb with, because whether it is one arms or weighted pull ups, he always seem to do the last 20% so easy and can almost rest at the top. Weird.
I think height is a huge factor in this. Are you fairly tall? I’ve been noticing that all my less tall climbing friends are super strong at one armers, front levers etc., while not being better at climbing than me or other taller climbers. For instance one of my shorter mates barely maxes at V5 yet can rep out 5 one armers per arm. I think with shorter arms and less body weight all these exercises become way easier. I max at 7B but can’t do one armers, front levers or any other common benchmarks.
@@TheBanana202 I'm 183 cm. He is 180 cm or so. Around there. However I weigh 74 kg whereas he only weighs 63 kg. This obviously plays a role, however for weighted pull ups and hangs we can pull/hang around the same percentages.
@@TheBanana202 Actually being tall probably makes it harder for those exercices. Look at olympic gymnasts, they're usually pretty short ! Being short reduces the leverage, hence making it easier. However, equally important might be your physiology between lower body part and upper body part : having long legs in comparison to your torso will probably result in a harder front lever, for example.
This was an amazing video especially with the data following normal distributions and giving a solid V number for each. Really helps a V5 guy like me to see where I could benefit from training.
Having one arm pull up and front lever both at V7 was off imho. Personally I climb around v8 indoor and out and nowhere near the one arm even tough maybe physically in the optimal body group in mass, size etc. Front lever however has been ok since climbing around v5. Update, same applies to some of the finger strength grades by Emil. Ita like you said, you seem to sandbag your own strengths =)
It's very interesting to see what you and most people would grade a training exercise, and also the disparity between the two is quite telling. Us mere mortals cannot comprehend how hard a 1-5-9 can be. Though, if there is something that would definitely complement the dataset you have, is to know the climbing level of all the responders and whether they can do the exercises or not. From that, a bit of statistics magic (my hunch is sigmoid curves will pop up), and we can have an objective (though not perfect, careful) way of grading an exercise. Heck I'd be happy to have a go at that if I got the data. Your videos are awesome, and I love the data-driven approach that you put in it :) Thanks !
I really enjoyed this concept! Presented in such a way that the viewer still can see the range of people's opinions 👍 Really cool insight as well into weaknesses/strengths based on personal opinion of grading. Awesome Video Emil
Maybe also an interesting thing to consider in the Campus-category is ape-index. Just like %bodyweight is a good relative measurement for pulling power, your span also determines the relative difficulty of pulling a certain campus-distance (i.e. 1-4-7). And as a climber with a negative ape-index I feel this is often overlooked, but it probably is an important factor in people's opinion on the difficulty.
Love the idea of this video and quantifying grades for different training techniques or benchmarks. It would be more useful to have data of climbers who can send higher grades record what level they were climbing when a benchmark was reached for them rather than suggest a grade, however this would be much more difficult to get a sample for. Just a thought - keep up the great work Emil!
I should have said I don't really train these things. I weigh average 155 lbs, the only training I usually do are 1 arm pulls with a 20mm block but my max is about 35 lbs under my body weight. I do weighted Pullups but only use 70 lbs for reps. If I were to train these things "exercises" I would perform them better.
Very specific measurements were given for campus rungs but angle of board was not. What is the standard angle of a campus board? And is there a standard design for campus rungs that every manufacturer adheres to?
actually a super useful benchmark for my strengths and weaknesses, now pretty sure I have very low pulling strength compared to everything else, thanks
Joker (a boulder in the Peak District in England) gets V11 and is basically just a single campus (like the 1-5 in your video for example) on two slopey 8mm crimps so I guess that's a pretty good benchmark for this type of exercise...
Great video! Seems pretty spot on with how hard id imagine most of these to be. Would have been great to see some more smaller edge 2 hand hang like 8mm, 6mm, 4mm (for 5 seconds). Id put those at around V4, V7 and v10.
Really interesting! Bdw, could you publish the raw survey responses (maybe after anonymizing)? I’d be curious to see what other trends can be extracted from the data.
Really good to see campus board, been trying 1-5-9 but my wingspan is short. Able to do 1-5-8 with a lil bit of struggle on metolius rungs 12 inches apart. Always seen campus boards 12 inches apart
Funny thing is I could do a one arm pull-up when my climbing grade was V1 (never climbed), but then you also see people climbing V6 who can't even do a strict pull-up.
Great video as always, but I wanted to point out one thing. You've said that oap on 23 mm edge is easier than 23 mm hang and you gave it V9, but at the end of the video you say that 23 mm edge hang is in your opinion around V8. Is it incosistency or I've missed something ?
Love these types of videos! I think what made you sandbag most exercises is because you might undervalue the impact of strenght training. You are one of those athletes who spends quite a good amout of time on structured training. Most climbers (especially non-professional climbers) do not do that because of multiple reasons. Being able to train (also without injuring yourself) is a skill itself and has a good basis of genetic and environmental predisposition as well (how used you are to strenght training, from what age, how much volume you can sustain, how much intensity without injury or burnout etc). Let me know what you think!
Not sure if you asked this in you survey, but would be interesting to know what grade the respondents climb regularly / how many are professional athletes such as yourself, and if people who answered the survey are able to do the exercises (in the same way that when a new boulder is established, really the only people who comment on its grade are the ones who've climbed it, until a grade that is "confirmed" by enough people sticks). Just seeing that most people in comments consider your grades sandbagged, but as a professional athlete you probably find most of these relatively easy, while some people watching your channel /people who did the survey maybe aren't able to do the half of these excersizes at all and therefore the data gets a bit skewed, because people who can't do an exercise are then trying to grade it? Anyways, if you have that data it would be cool to hear about! Great video, entertaining and informative. Really original content that no other climbing channel has really dug into yet. Cheers!
Also, I think the aspect missing here is when you propose a grade. You can really only accurately do so if you are there or there about. I can only say that I know grades lower then 8a. From there on I would have no way to judge what’s a 8c or a 9a move. Most of us will not be able to grade 1-5-9. Does our perspective of the consensus really matter? All I know is I’m nowhere close to doing it.
Doesn't being able to hang 1-arm from a 23mm edge require that you can support your entire bodyweight with one hand? That would imply you could perform 200% bodyweight two-arm hangs on 23mm which is probably upwards of what you would see out of V12+ climbers and then including the pull-up actually applies more force onto your fingers because you're exceeding the force created by your body weight allowing you to move in an upward direction. I think V9 is way sandbagged for that exercise.
You can’t compare the 2 handed version of an exercise directly to its 1 handed „brother“. You use slightly different muscles and different coordination (intramuscular and intermuscular) when performing something 1 handed. Because of that you usually need 170-180% bw 2 handed to perform the same exercise 1 handed, like Emil said. Hanging from an edge and pulling yourself up are different grades because you need to have way better shoulder stability while hanging from the extended arm than you need while pulling and therefore engaging your forearm flexors, elbow flexors and shoulder extensors. All of this pulls you into a easier to stabilize shoulder position and simultaneously already stabilizes the shoulder. So I think Emil was right when grading the hang higher, not saying that the actual grades are 100% correct. He is correct about the 170% for 1 armers tho.
This will sound weird but if you've ever tested it you aren't twice as strong pulling or hanging with 2 arms than you are with just one, likely because you're apart from the single arm you're eliminating you're otherwise using all the same muscles just hanging with the one arm. Lattice released some data a while back and hanging from the beastmaker 22mm edge translates to around v10 on average.
Super cool video! I’m not sure I agree with the consensus, but finger strength and campusing are particular weaknesses compared to the grade I climb, so maybe just something to work at.
I've had this thought of grading climbing related exercises before, glad I'm not the only one :D. Also it's fun to grade every day tasks like doing the dishes, v3
Great video! Can you by chance follow up with some training videos so we can start knocking out these benchmarks? Would love a view to follow up from the “shoulders failing when hangboarding” what pro tips do you have to get these shoulders strong?
Good think to remember about campusing is the height of the climber, specificly the arm length. So 1-5-7 for 5'7 climber is completely different from 1-5-7 for 6' climber. And for 6' its quite easy, but for 5'7 it requires a lot of training
Certainly! Also brings the question, can we grade the same for somebody whose 5' as 6' at all? Especially outlier boulders like dynos or wide compression
@@EmilAbrahamsson and the answer is easy - we can't. But we all have passion to compete, compare and progress. Thats why you video is something that almost any motivated climber think about. Thanks for the amazing video!
I would be curious if you asked strong female climbers who climbs v10+/5.13d+ what BW percentage they classify as needed to climb certain grades in regard to pulling and campusing. For example, how many women have you seen do 1-6-9, which you thought of as v10/11 and what grade are they climbing. And I know all of this is all very arbitrary and doesn’t matter. Was just curious.
To be honest, I think this might be the way to standardize grading of actual boulders. As in: taking all relevent exercises, let a huge number of climbers at different levels do all these exercises, see how they fare and use this database to define grades. Then let the same boulderers do a number of boulders, e.g. defined ones as on the kilter board (Moon board starts too high) and use the previous data to now grade the defined boulder. They then could become a new benchmark. WIth a large enough sample size this could create a much better consensus that takes different strengths, sizes etc. into account. Seriously though, I doubt this would ever happen. Not because it would be impossible to do (could be an amazing collab, e.g. with Lattice doing the scientific part and a great number of youtubers organizing small to large events where people come to do these tests). Nope... I just think there would be strong opposition to do grading that way... Grading so far is a very subjective thing and there are enough people who really want it to be that way...
This is really fun and shows me just how bad i am at climbing :) Having climbed for 4 years, i have still not improved(probably because i get injured all the time) but my grade is around 6B+, never climbed harder, and got injured every time i tried to climb something more difficult(but i also never really felt like i was trying hard..) The exercises i can do as a 6B+ climber: 1 Arm Pull Up, bw+100% pull up(probably even more), campus 1:4:7(flashed it first time campusing) and front lever(always was able to do it, last year i was holding it for around 15 seconds). Coming from a 6 week flu, i want to concentrate solely on conditioning, wrist, finger, shoulder stability and core strength as well as toe/heel hooking. Not getting injured and still climbing regularly is the main goal.. As i definitely don‘t have to do anything for upper body strength, i hope that this approach will finally allow me to try hard and climb more without getting injured.. I have also a feeling that i‘m particularly injury prone because i have „too much upper body strength“ if that makes sense..
Haha it does sound like maybe you have an abundance of upper body power yes. I’d be surprised if I could help guide you up atleast 7As if you can do 1 armers and 1-4-7. Injuries suck though, I definitely think they’re connected for you.
That's very interesting. I have climbed two 7b benchmarked problems on the Moonboard and one problem grade 7b+ in our gym, however I can only do a pull up with 70% body weight, and can only do a one arm pull up on my left arm (which is a little weird since I'm right handed) which I did two weeks ago one single time, and I also can't hold the front lever or even straddle front lever (can pull up into it easily though). For sure an interesting subject.
Very interesting that it can be so diffrent from person to person, I have climbed 5 outdoor v8 but comparing to this results i am weak af! Here is the exercises I can do as a v8 outdoor climber: No one arms, no frontlever, campus 1:3:4 and 1:5, pull up +30% bw, 20 mm edge +25% bw
Just get a good coach/climber looking over your training, mental approach and technique. You could climb a whole numbergrade higher than u are currently with these strength stats (if you’re not lacking a significant amount of fingerstrength)
obviously the data are very biased. I would guess, people have their (max.) grade in mind and compare it to their level on the given exercise. So if i boulder V9 but can't do a one armer, i might rate the one armer higher then my max grade, and vice versa, if I climb V9 but can do a clean one armer i might rate it lower
Yupp! I’ve studied for a masters in computer engineer. Still have some courses left though, might be back one day to finish it off :-) climbing took precedence somewhere along the ride.. 😅
@@EmilAbrahamsson Cool man! I'm on my last year of my masters now, my climbing career never took off beyond a hobby. Best of luck in your upcoming competitions and keep crushing with the videos you produce!
Very cool idea and video! Another angle to get a grade would be to find out, how many climbers can do exersise X and compare this percentage to the percentage of people who climb a certain grade. If for example 1% of climbers can do 1-5-9 and 1% of climbers climb 8a+, then this could be the grade. Obviously, this would not work at all with non-climbing related exercises.
Would also be an interesting metric, but hard to find causation and not just correlation. The amount of people who can do one arm pull up is incredibly much larger than people who can do V13 for instance. The same goes for 1-4-7, both in the sense who can do 1-4-7 but can't do V7 and people who can do V7 but can't do 1-4-7 :P Numbers would get messy. Would be fun to try though!
Funny how the consensus for 147 was about the same, maybe even a little lower than a one arm pull up, but I feel like you kinda need to be able to at least partially one arm a 20mm edge to do 147
The consensus range is pretty good i think, although definitely agreed with Emil on some of the sandbagging. Also i have a friend who is a super strong crusher that got 1-7 on the campus board. It took him almost a month of training and at the time he was flashing V10.
Interesting, I've wanted there to be a consensus grade for these exercises for so long. Thanks for nerding out! However, shouldn't the grade be based on what percentage of climbers that climb a certain grade do a certain exercise? A one arm pull up at v6 seems very sand banged, since not very many limit v6 climbers (I'd guess less than 1%) can do a one arm. Anyway, glad the discussion is going!
I think a pull up is harder than v1 and the ranking should be equal to how many people (in %) or rather climbers can do it. I bet more people will be able to actually do a V2 than a pull-up even tho a pull up feels, for those who are able too, way easier.
Lovely video! It will definitely create some controversy. I personally don't agree with the consensus that hanging bodyweight from a 20mm edge is v2,v3. I'm quite tall and heavy so for me hanging at 20mm edge bodyweight for 5 seconds is close to possible but not there yet. I've done a fair bit of v3s (in different gyms as to benchmark better) and I really think if you can find something that suits your style (let's say slopers or big moves on slightly better holds) then you can be a v3 climber, but will probably fail at climbing up a crimpie v3/4
Sorry does your system does it correlate to what grade it in theory enable you to climb or is it just a rating for difficulty/usefulness? Either way very interesting. I've moved away from straight weighted hangs (I may go back when I plateau) but found finger tip pull ups (2 handed) way more useful. I'm currently adding small weight increments to sets of 5 reps. Your point about shoulders and max hangs though, I need to go back and check, coz that could be/has been a weakness. Thanks
Did you do any kind of correction for whether people submitting answers for whether they had actually done the exercise? For instance, it seems like V11 was a pretty common answer, and I wonder if that's just because that's the go-to grade for "hard grade that I haven't done".
I wouldve liked to see what people grade longer timed hangs as boulders often take a while to complete. My finger strength is awful, but with my background in calisthenics I can do a 60 sec 1 arm hang. Also i feel like people are putting grades they cannot climb..so they cant really say. I rarely ever seen v11^ in the gym
Cool idea, and love some stats even if this doesn't really translate to climbing. But that said it would be interesting to see how the consensus lines up with what those people can actually climb. Some of these seem fine but some are outrageously sandbagged. Like a one arm pull up V8!? Or 1-5-9 as V11 - that's a world class skill reserved for professional climbers so has to be like V14-15 at least, especially on 'medium' size rungs not the big ones, and certainly harder still if you're not tall
Shoutout to @jerntaa on instagram who asked if I could do a video on climbing grades converted to the campus board which in turn spiraled into this menace of a thing. Hope you all don't just chase the training grades from now on and still stay focused on chasing grades outdoors! After all, grades are everything.
☝🏽
climbing outdoors for me grade vise is always like being hit in the face but extremely fun! And addicting 💪
@Emil
Yves Gravelle did a 1-6-10 on what I guess is a standard campus board.
czcams.com/video/q9-kKlmtoz0/video.html
I think the consensus was fairly spot on, and Emil's grades were sandbagged in almost every category rofl.
Whoopsie
Yeah. This video is odd.
I agree
You know, I'd like to think these are sandbagged, but since he actually climbs at a high grade, I feel like I trust his grading more than my average climber grading.
The variation in grading of different gyms and climbing areas also plays a role in the spreading of the data. People climbing mostly outdoor will sandbag the data and people climbing inside will be softer.
I'm feeling a collab coming on 👀. Seriously cool to see people's subjective feelings about how hard these feats of strength are. We should do a video that shows the objective test data we've collected and see how close it actually is.
I imagine that people have subjectively graded things quite sandbagged for most of these isolated exercises. Would be super cool to see the comparison though! For another reference, I tend to have quite high numbers hanging 2-arms but my numbers get significantly lower when switching to 1-arm hangs. Most of this is due to the fact that I've spent my climbing career training 2-arm hangs and 2-arm climbing and have just started in the last year practicing 1-arm hanging. So then how do you grade the skill aspect of this? Food for thought I think since I'm obviously strong enough to be hanging more than bodyweight 1-arm, but the skill isn't there yet.
That'd be super interesting
Man we're a bunch of nerds over here in this sport 😂
Okay it’s been 4 weeks! Where is the collab????
Objective data and some specific criteria for suggesting a grade would make this more useful…this is just an opinion piece. And maybe connecting a skill/exercise to its application on the wall would help people dial in the specificity aspect of their training.
Clearly from the spread of grades, particularly in the 1-5-9 vs 1-6-9, allot of the people voting cannot do the exercises that they are voting on. It would be interesting if you did the same survey but asked if the voter can do the exercises before asking what the grade is. Would be a good controlling factor in the data.
The reason that climbing is so interesting is that you can truly be more than the sum of your parts. Many climbers underperforming in these metrics will have climbed multiple grades harder than their highest completed training task. However, the finger strength metrics will always be the most telling.
I'm actually really psyched to watch this, I think it's a very interesting but probably ultimately useless idea, but super intriguing nonetheless
Haha I'll take it. Useless, but also intriguing! Acrtually found it very interesting myself in the end, surprisingly
@@EmilAbrahamsson its very useful it gives you a sense of what benchmarjks you should be able to do at a level of climbing or what you should train to hgelp you with certain grade levels
@@saxon8981 That’s not my interpretation. I understood it as each exercise graded as if it was a climbing problem. So actually combining exercises (which you could argue that climbing is - a combination of exercises) would mean that the difficulty goes up a fair bit.
You can get good at any single exercise here without it naturally transferring to climbing a problem.
I would also add that it’s one thing to psychically being able to do a climb, and another to combine physical ability with technique and problem reading.
I might sound like a total bummer here, but that’s what I’ve found out to be true for myself.
Feel free to correct me though!
I think it could be useful, you usually know just about what grades you can climb, and then you can use the consensus here to see if there are some exercises here you can probably start doing.
its nice. it took a bit of pressure of me doing my one arm or front lever goal. im not at the benchmark yet, so its fine if i cannot do one yet.
Really interesting, especially as a climber who's calisthenics and finger strength is probably significantly under the average for the level I climb at. I feel like climbing a V8 graded boulder can be done by someone with V5 finger strength and V4 campus strength. Problems are able to take so much more technicality and problem-solving into account than any raw exercise could.
For reference, I project ~V7-9 and probably line up with about the ~V4 level exercises (as graded by Emil).
This reminds me of Lattice's assessments, where they relate your scores to the population of climbers climbing at a similar grade - a nice addition of data points to see what may be the factors that make certain routes/boulders seem easier or harder for you subjectively
remember that you are comparing your results to the data of a specific population: climbers who are interested into assessing strenght!
I also feel like gender makes a big difference with these grades because pure strength exercises will just be harder for women. It would be interesting to see the difference between grade consensus for women and men.
I don't think Emil realises just how strong he is, that 100kg weighted pull up was actually pretty close and the world record is apparently in the 100-110kg range, hence the low grading from him!
loved this video, but damn i feel like everything is sandbagged! (or i'm just very weak for the grades i climb)
that's the beauty of the consensus my friend, it doesn't lie. Ish. Who knows, could be a lot of errors in how people interpreted the questions :P But if you're like 2-3 V-grades of the norm, then it might be something to work on!
Oh, i took it as: damn i'm relatively superb at climbing, for my grades ;)
I think most of the data can be ignored because there isn’t much point in grading something you can’t do. And I would be that a lot of people who answered can’t do the stuff they were asked to grade.
I personally think everyone who feels they can suggest a grade should. I’m the survey people were asked to ignore stuff they didn’t feel they had a clue what to suggest on.
Not saying it’s a perfect study though, far from it, and there’s never an absolute truth in grades anyway :-)
I think there’s no point if you’re an inexperienced climber who can’t do a certain exercise. Once you have experienced other moves and you’ve seen V-something in person even though you haven’t climbed it you can compare. For me, there were a few exercises I cannot do but I do feel like I can grade them quite well.
@@EmilAbrahamsson i think the question of grading/scaling is always intersting and i also think it might turn out to be usefull one way or another. Unfortunately it is not an easy topic at all and i think "simply" having people rate different exercises on a scale wont do the job, especially for very hard exercises a very small proportion of respondents cant do, just as Mister X has suggested already. I think simply stating "not to answer in case of doubt" unfortunately doesn't do the job (for example there are over 700 people giving a grad on the 1-7 campus move. I don't know who the 1.120 respondents in total are - maybe they are all all very experienced climbers, but still 2/3 of them suggesting a grade for a campus move maybe one person on earth ever executed sounds a bit high). However, i think, instead of asking for ratings on an existing scale, it might be more reliable to present two exercises at a time and let participants pick the harder one of the two and construct the actual ranking-scale out of all the binary comparisions.
As i've said already, i think the idea of creating such a scale is great, so i hope you keep this project going and im curious to hear new findings about it.
Very interesting, it would have been nice to also ask if people can do the move and what their max grade is in bouldering, then you could also investigate the correlation of max grade to the ability of doing some exercises or use something like a boolean classifier like geekclimber did in a recent video like what grad you should be able to climb when you can do a certain exercise
Certainly. If I do this again with other exercises I'll include a boolean classifier and more metrics
@@EmilAbrahamsson Cool, also i am quite familiar with data analysis, machine learning and i am a climbing physicist so i so if you need some assistance i would like to help :)
@@StonerFB how would you use machine learning in this?
@@mattiasgonczi My bad, i would not use ML directly, reviewing correlation and bayes classifier would be enough i think, i am just biased to relate these things with ML as it was also in the ML book i read altough its not ML in particular
@@mattiasgonczi an interesting thing tho would be, i fyou have large amounts of data, to take the ability to do certain exercices as features and label which boulders the personn can do and then predict by the input of whihc exercises you can do, which boulders you should be able to send or a send probability (of course it would mainly work for power boulders i think)
I climb v8 regularly but still can't one arm pullup haha. No way is it v6 kinda level. but i guess its kinda hard to compare with climbing grades. no way is a one arm pullup on a beatmaker edge only v9. Thats madness haha.
One arm pull up is overrated. A lot of very good climbers aren't able to do this. One of the most important skills is finger strength.
@@sebastientardivel8179 i agree, once you get to v8+ the holds are usually so bad that you can't make use of your raw pull strength most of the time
Wow this was super fun and interesting! Personally, after years of training it is hard to look back and give “easy” exercises a grade. Furthermore, it’s tricky abs you’re right that each individual has their own unique strengths and weaknesses, but overall each consensus seemed to be pretty accurate. Lastly, I think front lever is V10 lol
Haha I mean for me front lever and mono hangs are like V17... But that would be like somebody who doesn't have an easy time building arm/lat strength grading a OAP V17, it's just not fair to everyone else.
But yeah, super hard to grade "easy" stuff. I was surprised to see my own suggestions being close to everyone else actually, albeit slightly sandbagged.
@@EmilAbrahamssonlololol v17 for a front lever? You are in desperate need of doing a couple dead lifts my brutha. If you can deadlift 2x body weight front levers become a v2-v4 move
@@LuLzezRoflcopter haha not quite for me my friend. I can deadlift around 3x but front lever is still difficult!
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the viewers who are wrong." - Emil
Everything is a lower grade because of my inflated ego lifting me up
Ratings like one arm pull-up and 1.75x BW pull-up being V6 seem suuuper sandbagged. Maybe being a very physically strong climber is influencing your perception of ease/difficulty?
Haha I'm not totally opposed to that theory..
Just tried to give my honest opinion! I could feel it changing when I got the "common" suggestions though, so I'm happy I included it.
I think it would be really interesting to see these graphs sub-divided into votes from those who have completed the exercise and those who have not. Might see a trend in sandbagging/airbagging from each side and the mean vote diverging, or maybe the average is the same which would be almost more interesting!
Congrats on 70K! I still don't understand how you don't have more subs due to the incredible quality of videos!!
Thanks a ton my homie! Psyched about another milestone :-)
0:35 Gotta love that Adams, Calculus: a complete course 8th edition.
Super interesting little experiment, and very well presented! 🙌
Thank you very much good sir!
Meanwhile reality in all gyms worldwide: Nearly no one can do a one armer. Nearly no one can one arm hang 20mm.
I think most of the grades were really close to the level of climbing. And that's why I thought it was weird for Emil to grade them so low. At the end he says yeah this is my max (for 2.2x body weight) so I put it at V12. But then Emil actually climbs 8B/8B+ so all the way to V14. That alone should tell that 2.2x body weight is probably closer to V14 than to V12.
Also I realized I'm really weak at core wow. 5 sec L-sit 6A+?? I can barely do it and I topped a few V8, general level V7..
Try to L-sit with knees slightly bent (like 5 degrees). For some people the limitating factor isn't the posterior chain but either hamstring flexibility or quads strength, and that's not really a problem for climbing.
@@Ptitviaud1337 that's interesting cause as soon as I bend my legs just a little bit I can do L-sit considerably longer. Like I might just get to 5 sec or below with straight legs but if it's just about holding the legs up and not the form I can probably do twice as long. I'm gonna try it in training soon thx
@@precursor4263 Ah ! Thought so. You can try to isolate if it's hamstring flexibility by streching them (like 2 or 3 times, 20sec each with some rest), and then try a max L-sit after that. If there's any significal improvement, there you are. Anyhow, dont bother too much with it, L-sit is not highly correlated to climbing. However, it's surprising to see that you're "only" able to L sit for 10 sec, that's low in comparison to bouldering 7B! You should try to front lever with bent legs, or even tuck-front lever (look it up). My guess is that you would score pretty well on those. L-sit might just be no very useful for you.
One arm pull up? V6? are you crazy
One arm pullup V6 😭That is just straight up rude
Thanks for making the effort of collecting and presenting this data! I never knew that I wanted to know this. To me It's genius Coming up with this idea that would have never even occurred to me in the first place. Well done!
What I’m getting from this is Emil (and maybe strong climbers on average) lack the comprehension their strength relative to those grades 6 to 8 below their max. Emil was so massively sandbagging in that range. Not surprising, this is why sandbagging becomes such a thing.
Also, there is a big difference between strength required to climb a grade and the grade of a hypothetical boulder that contained that one move.
Actually a fun analysis, I wonder how many others that is the case for.
Next question: Can a V10 climber grade a V1? If not, can strong routesetters really grade climbs indoors?
@@EmilAbrahamsson My guess is when it comes to grading actually climbs, you can more easily standardise by thinking about the history of climbs you did in the past. This is maybe gets warped by time and as you get stronger but will still help. We don’t grade exercises, and they’re very different, so in doing so we’re almost inventing a new scale without the past experience to help. Therefore people start to grade around what they find hard, what they can do, and what grade they climb. Probably exaggerates strength biases.
Regarding grading below your limit, and from personal experience, for several years 7b was my max. It felt really tough and so I gave 7b to any really tough boulders that I could only just do. For the last few years I’ve been training more, now I climb 8a+ projecting 8b. However, my gut response still is to give boulders 7b when I get first ascent and I found it tough. I have to try and imagine other climbers I know who do max out at those grades to recalibrate the scale. Applying this to exercises, my partner climbs v4/5 and was furious at pull up + 25% being v3.
Anyway, i should say, nice video and thanks for putting the effort into doing the research!
This is very interesting. I have climbed two 7b benchmarked problems (one of which felt kind of easy once I did it) on the Moonboard and one that we graded 7b+ in our gym, however I can only do a pull up with 70% body weight, and can only do a one arm pull up on my left arm (which is a little weird since I'm right handed) which I did two weeks ago one single time, and I also can't hold the front lever or even straddle front lever (can pull up into it easily though). For sure an interesting subject.
I feel like genetics in terms of our fysiology definitely play a big role too. For instance I notice that I have a very tough time at the top/end range of pull ups (one arm included) where it feels like I am almost fighting against myself - if I bend my arm I also can't touch my shoulder with my fingers because (I think) my forearm is pressing against my bicep, or perhaps it has something to do with the shape of my elbow joint? My climbing partner however finds the last 10% to be the most easy, like he is almost resting at the top locked in. This is makes reaching lock offs very hard for me. Interesting.....
I'm the same I find initiating a one arm pullup is easy but it's very hard to lock off the last 10-20% at the top. Maybe it has something to do with upper to lower arm lengh/ratio.
@@babsds0 Yes that is a possibility too which I have thought about but forgot to mention. Kind of annoying 😂
For me it gets hard at around 90 degrees, then easy for the next 30% or so and then very hard the last 10-20% yeah. Just super weird whenever I compare to the guy I climb with, because whether it is one arms or weighted pull ups, he always seem to do the last 20% so easy and can almost rest at the top. Weird.
I think height is a huge factor in this. Are you fairly tall? I’ve been noticing that all my less tall climbing friends are super strong at one armers, front levers etc., while not being better at climbing than me or other taller climbers. For instance one of my shorter mates barely maxes at V5 yet can rep out 5 one armers per arm. I think with shorter arms and less body weight all these exercises become way easier.
I max at 7B but can’t do one armers, front levers or any other common benchmarks.
@@TheBanana202 I'm 183 cm. He is 180 cm or so. Around there. However I weigh 74 kg whereas he only weighs 63 kg. This obviously plays a role, however for weighted pull ups and hangs we can pull/hang around the same percentages.
@@TheBanana202 Actually being tall probably makes it harder for those exercices. Look at olympic gymnasts, they're usually pretty short ! Being short reduces the leverage, hence making it easier. However, equally important might be your physiology between lower body part and upper body part : having long legs in comparison to your torso will probably result in a harder front lever, for example.
This is immediately one of my favourite videos on CZcams! Combining the best genres for my tastes in one!
This was an amazing video especially with the data following normal distributions and giving a solid V number for each. Really helps a V5 guy like me to see where I could benefit from training.
I got really excited when saw this video pop up.
Great video!!
this is why I love this channel, the crazy ideas!
Having one arm pull up and front lever both at V7 was off imho. Personally I climb around v8 indoor and out and nowhere near the one arm even tough maybe physically in the optimal body group in mass, size etc. Front lever however has been ok since climbing around v5. Update, same applies to some of the finger strength grades by Emil. Ita like you said, you seem to sandbag your own strengths =)
What would muscle up be
Video quality is gettin 🔥 dude, keep it up!
It's very interesting to see what you and most people would grade a training exercise, and also the disparity between the two is quite telling. Us mere mortals cannot comprehend how hard a 1-5-9 can be. Though, if there is something that would definitely complement the dataset you have, is to know the climbing level of all the responders and whether they can do the exercises or not. From that, a bit of statistics magic (my hunch is sigmoid curves will pop up), and we can have an objective (though not perfect, careful) way of grading an exercise. Heck I'd be happy to have a go at that if I got the data. Your videos are awesome, and I love the data-driven approach that you put in it :) Thanks !
I really enjoyed this concept! Presented in such a way that the viewer still can see the range of people's opinions 👍 Really cool insight as well into weaknesses/strengths based on personal opinion of grading. Awesome Video Emil
Really enjoyed the video! Thanks Emil! Though I was waiting so much for your grade to a MUSCLE UP :D ...V5/V6 maybe? :)
Pull ups are pretty interesting here.
My wife can do 6Bs easily, but can't do a single pull up.
So definitely not necessary in those lower grades.
I know Yves Gravelle and Simon Hibbeler have both done 1-7.5 with both arms
Maybe also an interesting thing to consider in the Campus-category is ape-index. Just like %bodyweight is a good relative measurement for pulling power, your span also determines the relative difficulty of pulling a certain campus-distance (i.e. 1-4-7). And as a climber with a negative ape-index I feel this is often overlooked, but it probably is an important factor in people's opinion on the difficulty.
Would love to see what John Sherman thinks of the V-Scale being used like this. Great video.
love ur vids emil
keep killing it!❤
Thanks my homie! Appreciate the support :-)
no prob!
Yes, this was a very well done video and has a fair amount of useful information.
Love the idea of this video and quantifying grades for different training techniques or benchmarks. It would be more useful to have data of climbers who can send higher grades record what level they were climbing when a benchmark was reached for them rather than suggest a grade, however this would be much more difficult to get a sample for.
Just a thought - keep up the great work Emil!
Awesome Emil, also loved the introduction to this video haha!
Wehoo thank you! I'm happy to hear that :-)
0:45 "G r a d e s"
Love it
And god damn 1 5 9 ! Congrats man !
climb v10/11 and can't do any of these. feelsbadman
I should have said I don't really train these things. I weigh average 155 lbs, the only training I usually do are 1 arm pulls with a 20mm block but my max is about 35 lbs under my body weight. I do weighted Pullups but only use 70 lbs for reps. If I were to train these things "exercises" I would perform them better.
who are you asking that actually knows v11,12,13,14 well enough to meaningle distinguish? that feels like the biggest problem
Nice vid, good work Emil
One arm chin being v6 really humbles my v4 ass
This is all very interesting.Thanks you for this video.
What a sandbagger rolf
Very specific measurements were given for campus rungs but angle of board was not. What is the standard angle of a campus board? And is there a standard design for campus rungs that every manufacturer adheres to?
Should've given yves some credit. He's done a 1-7-11 campus. Totally insane
In retrospect totally yeah. I thought he had much different spacing but apparently it's 21cm instead of 22, which is no big difference
actually a super useful benchmark for my strengths and weaknesses, now pretty sure I have very low pulling strength compared to everything else, thanks
Love training related content!!
Joker (a boulder in the Peak District in England) gets V11 and is basically just a single campus (like the 1-5 in your video for example) on two slopey 8mm crimps so I guess that's a pretty good benchmark for this type of exercise...
Great video! Seems pretty spot on with how hard id imagine most of these to be. Would have been great to see some more smaller edge 2 hand hang like 8mm, 6mm, 4mm (for 5 seconds). Id put those at around V4, V7 and v10.
Really interesting! Bdw, could you publish the raw survey responses (maybe after anonymizing)? I’d be curious to see what other trends can be extracted from the data.
Sure thing! Shouldn’t be an issue.
Really good to see campus board, been trying 1-5-9 but my wingspan is short. Able to do 1-5-8 with a lil bit of struggle on metolius rungs 12 inches apart. Always seen campus boards 12 inches apart
Oh wow, interesting! All the gyms I’ve been to do the 22cm (like 9 inch ish?), but it could certainly be different around the world
Funny thing is I could do a one arm pull-up when my climbing grade was V1 (never climbed), but then you also see people climbing V6 who can't even do a strict pull-up.
Great video as always, but I wanted to point out one thing. You've said that oap on 23 mm edge is easier than 23 mm hang and you gave it V9, but at the end of the video you say that 23 mm edge hang is in your opinion around V8. Is it incosistency or I've missed something ?
Love these types of videos! I think what made you sandbag most exercises is because you might undervalue the impact of strenght training. You are one of those athletes who spends quite a good amout of time on structured training. Most climbers (especially non-professional climbers) do not do that because of multiple reasons. Being able to train (also without injuring yourself) is a skill itself and has a good basis of genetic and environmental predisposition as well (how used you are to strenght training, from what age, how much volume you can sustain, how much intensity without injury or burnout etc).
Let me know what you think!
Not sure if you asked this in you survey, but would be interesting to know what grade the respondents climb regularly / how many are professional athletes such as yourself, and if people who answered the survey are able to do the exercises (in the same way that when a new boulder is established, really the only people who comment on its grade are the ones who've climbed it, until a grade that is "confirmed" by enough people sticks). Just seeing that most people in comments consider your grades sandbagged, but as a professional athlete you probably find most of these relatively easy, while some people watching your channel /people who did the survey maybe aren't able to do the half of these excersizes at all and therefore the data gets a bit skewed, because people who can't do an exercise are then trying to grade it? Anyways, if you have that data it would be cool to hear about! Great video, entertaining and informative. Really original content that no other climbing channel has really dug into yet. Cheers!
lol at Emil not realising the people grading 1 arm pull ups v0 and normal pull ups v15 are just trolling
Also, I think the aspect missing here is when you propose a grade. You can really only accurately do so if you are there or there about. I can only say that I know grades lower then 8a. From there on I would have no way to judge what’s a 8c or a 9a move. Most of us will not be able to grade 1-5-9. Does our perspective of the consensus really matter? All I know is I’m nowhere close to doing it.
such a great video!
Doesn't being able to hang 1-arm from a 23mm edge require that you can support your entire bodyweight with one hand? That would imply you could perform 200% bodyweight two-arm hangs on 23mm which is probably upwards of what you would see out of V12+ climbers and then including the pull-up actually applies more force onto your fingers because you're exceeding the force created by your body weight allowing you to move in an upward direction. I think V9 is way sandbagged for that exercise.
You can’t compare the 2 handed version of an exercise directly to its 1 handed „brother“. You use slightly different muscles and different coordination (intramuscular and intermuscular) when performing something 1 handed. Because of that you usually need 170-180% bw 2 handed to perform the same exercise 1 handed, like Emil said.
Hanging from an edge and pulling yourself up are different grades because you need to have way better shoulder stability while hanging from the extended arm than you need while pulling and therefore engaging your forearm flexors, elbow flexors and shoulder extensors. All of this pulls you into a easier to stabilize shoulder position and simultaneously already stabilizes the shoulder.
So I think Emil was right when grading the hang higher, not saying that the actual grades are 100% correct. He is correct about the 170% for 1 armers tho.
This will sound weird but if you've ever tested it you aren't twice as strong pulling or hanging with 2 arms than you are with just one, likely because you're apart from the single arm you're eliminating you're otherwise using all the same muscles just hanging with the one arm. Lattice released some data a while back and hanging from the beastmaker 22mm edge translates to around v10 on average.
Heyyy!! Its been a while since i havent left a comment, just to let you know I still very much enjoy your content and hope you keep going!!
Wiiiiiiild Bazook appears! Thanks for letting me know homie, nice to know you’re still watching
Super cool video! I’m not sure I agree with the consensus, but finger strength and campusing are particular weaknesses compared to the grade I climb, so maybe just something to work at.
I've had this thought of grading climbing related exercises before, glad I'm not the only one :D. Also it's fun to grade every day tasks like doing the dishes, v3
Great video! Can you by chance follow up with some training videos so we can start knocking out these benchmarks?
Would love a view to follow up from the “shoulders failing when hangboarding” what pro tips do you have to get these shoulders strong?
Good think to remember about campusing is the height of the climber, specificly the arm length. So 1-5-7 for 5'7 climber is completely different from 1-5-7 for 6' climber. And for 6' its quite easy, but for 5'7 it requires a lot of training
Certainly! Also brings the question, can we grade the same for somebody whose 5' as 6' at all? Especially outlier boulders like dynos or wide compression
@@EmilAbrahamsson and the answer is easy - we can't. But we all have passion to compete, compare and progress. Thats why you video is something that almost any motivated climber think about. Thanks for the amazing video!
I would be curious if you asked strong female climbers who climbs v10+/5.13d+ what BW percentage they classify as needed to climb certain grades in regard to pulling and campusing. For example, how many women have you seen do 1-6-9, which you thought of as v10/11 and what grade are they climbing. And I know all of this is all very arbitrary and doesn’t matter. Was just curious.
To be honest, I think this might be the way to standardize grading of actual boulders. As in: taking all relevent exercises, let a huge number of climbers at different levels do all these exercises, see how they fare and use this database to define grades. Then let the same boulderers do a number of boulders, e.g. defined ones as on the kilter board (Moon board starts too high) and use the previous data to now grade the defined boulder. They then could become a new benchmark. WIth a large enough sample size this could create a much better consensus that takes different strengths, sizes etc. into account.
Seriously though, I doubt this would ever happen. Not because it would be impossible to do (could be an amazing collab, e.g. with Lattice doing the scientific part and a great number of youtubers organizing small to large events where people come to do these tests). Nope... I just think there would be strong opposition to do grading that way... Grading so far is a very subjective thing and there are enough people who really want it to be that way...
The only way you are going to standardize grades is if you standardize humans first.
Just getting into a front lever V6??? Y’all never do deadlifts and this is the proof!!!!
This is really fun and shows me just how bad i am at climbing :)
Having climbed for 4 years, i have still not improved(probably because i get injured all the time) but my grade is around 6B+, never climbed harder, and got injured every time i tried to climb something more difficult(but i also never really felt like i was trying hard..)
The exercises i can do as a 6B+ climber:
1 Arm Pull Up, bw+100% pull up(probably even more), campus 1:4:7(flashed it first time campusing) and front lever(always was able to do it, last year i was holding it for around 15 seconds).
Coming from a 6 week flu, i want to concentrate solely on conditioning, wrist, finger, shoulder stability and core strength as well as toe/heel hooking. Not getting injured and still climbing regularly is the main goal..
As i definitely don‘t have to do anything for upper body strength, i hope that this approach will finally allow me to try hard and climb more without getting injured..
I have also a feeling that i‘m particularly injury prone because i have „too much upper body strength“ if that makes sense..
Haha it does sound like maybe you have an abundance of upper body power yes.
I’d be surprised if I could help guide you up atleast 7As if you can do 1 armers and 1-4-7.
Injuries suck though, I definitely think they’re connected for you.
That's very interesting. I have climbed two 7b benchmarked problems on the Moonboard and one problem grade 7b+ in our gym, however I can only do a pull up with 70% body weight, and can only do a one arm pull up on my left arm (which is a little weird since I'm right handed) which I did two weeks ago one single time, and I also can't hold the front lever or even straddle front lever (can pull up into it easily though). For sure an interesting subject.
@@imagzz4942 I forgot the reason why but most right handed climbers do their first one arm pull up with their left hand
Very interesting that it can be so diffrent from person to person, I have climbed 5 outdoor v8 but comparing to this results i am weak af!
Here is the exercises I can do as a v8 outdoor climber:
No one arms, no frontlever, campus 1:3:4 and 1:5, pull up +30% bw, 20 mm edge +25% bw
Just get a good coach/climber looking over your training, mental approach and technique. You could climb a whole numbergrade higher than u are currently with these strength stats (if you’re not lacking a significant amount of fingerstrength)
Great video!
Do sandbagging people sandbag evenly? Or is it all over the place?
Love the video
It's interesting that I climb V9 and all the hardest variations I can perform are consensus V8-10 skills
obviously the data are very biased. I would guess, people have their (max.) grade in mind and compare it to their level on the given exercise. So if i boulder V9 but can't do a one armer, i might rate the one armer higher then my max grade, and vice versa, if I climb V9 but can do a clean one armer i might rate it lower
Hey Emil, how come you have a calculus 5th edition? Did you do some sort of university education? All the best!
Yupp! I’ve studied for a masters in computer engineer. Still have some courses left though, might be back one day to finish it off :-) climbing took precedence somewhere along the ride.. 😅
@@EmilAbrahamsson Cool man! I'm on my last year of my masters now, my climbing career never took off beyond a hobby. Best of luck in your upcoming competitions and keep crushing with the videos you produce!
Very cool idea and video! Another angle to get a grade would be to find out, how many climbers can do exersise X and compare this percentage to the percentage of people who climb a certain grade. If for example 1% of climbers can do 1-5-9 and 1% of climbers climb 8a+, then this could be the grade. Obviously, this would not work at all with non-climbing related exercises.
Would also be an interesting metric, but hard to find causation and not just correlation. The amount of people who can do one arm pull up is incredibly much larger than people who can do V13 for instance. The same goes for 1-4-7, both in the sense who can do 1-4-7 but can't do V7 and people who can do V7 but can't do 1-4-7 :P Numbers would get messy. Would be fun to try though!
Funny how the consensus for 147 was about the same, maybe even a little lower than a one arm pull up, but I feel like you kinda need to be able to at least partially one arm a 20mm edge to do 147
A video with graphs and grades? 10/10
Hahah yeah I’ve peaked now, won’t get better than this. Although I had some pie charts as well that I didn’t include..
The consensus range is pretty good i think, although definitely agreed with Emil on some of the sandbagging. Also i have a friend who is a super strong crusher that got 1-7 on the campus board. It took him almost a month of training and at the time he was flashing V10.
Interesting, I've wanted there to be a consensus grade for these exercises for so long. Thanks for nerding out!
However, shouldn't the grade be based on what percentage of climbers that climb a certain grade do a certain exercise? A one arm pull up at v6 seems very sand banged, since not very many limit v6 climbers (I'd guess less than 1%) can do a one arm.
Anyway, glad the discussion is going!
I think a pull up is harder than v1 and the ranking should be equal to how many people (in %) or rather climbers can do it. I bet more people will be able to actually do a V2 than a pull-up even tho a pull up feels, for those who are able too, way easier.
Emil's grades for the strength stuff are super sandbagged lol. I can flash v4 but I couldn't even get horizontal with 40kg on a pullup
I know a calc 1 (or 3 & 4) book when i see one.
Lovely video! It will definitely create some controversy. I personally don't agree with the consensus that hanging bodyweight from a 20mm edge is v2,v3. I'm quite tall and heavy so for me hanging at 20mm edge bodyweight for 5 seconds is close to possible but not there yet. I've done a fair bit of v3s (in different gyms as to benchmark better) and I really think if you can find something that suits your style (let's say slopers or big moves on slightly better holds) then you can be a v3 climber, but will probably fail at climbing up a crimpie v3/4
i guess thats the reason why rainbow rocket is graded so high... for smaller lighter guys its harder to do. weight is always key.
Simon Hibbeler has actually done 1-7.5, I think Yves Gravelle also has
for me the survey was quite accurate. most stuff i could do a few years ago matched with the 6C+/7A grad.
Sorry does your system does it correlate to what grade it in theory enable you to climb or is it just a rating for difficulty/usefulness?
Either way very interesting.
I've moved away from straight weighted hangs (I may go back when I plateau) but found finger tip pull ups (2 handed) way more useful. I'm currently adding small weight increments to sets of 5 reps.
Your point about shoulders and max hangs though, I need to go back and check, coz that could be/has been a weakness.
Thanks
Did you do any kind of correction for whether people submitting answers for whether they had actually done the exercise? For instance, it seems like V11 was a pretty common answer, and I wonder if that's just because that's the go-to grade for "hard grade that I haven't done".
I wouldve liked to see what people grade longer timed hangs as boulders often take a while to complete. My finger strength is awful, but with my background in calisthenics I can do a 60 sec 1 arm hang. Also i feel like people are putting grades they cannot climb..so they cant really say. I rarely ever seen v11^ in the gym
Cool idea, and love some stats even if this doesn't really translate to climbing. But that said it would be interesting to see how the consensus lines up with what those people can actually climb. Some of these seem fine but some are outrageously sandbagged. Like a one arm pull up V8!? Or 1-5-9 as V11 - that's a world class skill reserved for professional climbers so has to be like V14-15 at least, especially on 'medium' size rungs not the big ones, and certainly harder still if you're not tall
There is a vid of yves gravelle doing 1-7-11. campus board monster.