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Due to the height of many things human beings climb on, and the potentially disastrous consequences of a fall, climbing historically hasn’t been an activity of playful, relaxed experimentation.
Fast forward to the early years of the new millennium, when a new kind of dedicated bouldering gyms with seamless mats became the birth place for modern, acrobatic climbing. From those gyms, the new style of climbing emerged – first at bouldering contests, but more and more also on rock, where the solutions of many of the hardest routes and boulder problems would not have been possible without safe experimentation and practice beforehand. In this documentary, we look into the elements of modern climbing.

Chapters:

Climbers advancing technique
While advancement in any field is always a collaborative process, these young climbers are highly influential in defining the character of modern climbing. In „Climbing Technique of the 21st Century“ it is Tomoa Narasaki and Janja Garnbret that are responsible for most of the examples of modern climbing technique.

What makes the human animal a good climber?
While climbing on Rock and man-made surfaces is the expression of climbing in contemporary movement culture, our physical capacities to climb developed first to deal with tree trunks and branches.
As our human ancestors spent 60 millions years as arboreal creatures, one of the key adaptions was what is called vertical clinging and jumping in ethnology.

Suspensory behavior
exhibited by our primate ancestors, is a form of arboreal locomotion which involves hanging or suspension of the body below the contact points. Originally, it allows larger species to distribute their weight among smaller branches rather than balancing above these weak supports. Both pitching and tipping become irrelevant, as the only risk of failure would be losing their grip.
Suspensory behavior makes brachiation possible and is essential to all kinds of climbing.
Unlike when moving on the ground, a climber’s options for hand and foot placements are not continuous. Balancing therefore becomes more difficult and climbers have to position their centre of gravity in an ideal angle to the object being climbed on.

Brachiation
or arm swinging, is a form of arboreal locomotion in which primates swing from hold to using only their arms. During brachiation, the body is alternately supported under each forelimb. Often a combination of leaping and brachiation is used.
The epitome of arboreal locomotion, it involves swinging with the arms from one handhold to another. In brachiation, two main gaits are distinguished – continuous contact brachiation and ricochetal brachiation. The different transitions form a continuum rather than distinct types.

Anatomy
Unlike this stick figure, the human body is vastly complex, comprised of several ‘systems’. Our locomotor system is a web-like chain covering the whole body from the feet up to the head. It is made up of the bones of the skeleton, cartilage, tendons, ligaments, joints, muscles. and the all connecting fascial tissue that supports and binds tissues and organs together. In a simplified sense we can think of our bones as managing compression, and our soft tissues as managing tension. Ideally the tensile and compressive forces balance each other out.

Mechanical Interaction
The fundamental mechanical interaction between the climber’s centre of gravity and the supporting environment has spatial and temporal aspects to it.
When we climb well, movements of several limbs or body parts are combined in a manner that is well timed, smooth, and efficient.
While it is rather simple to observe, describe and learn spatial interaction, it’s a lot more difficult when it comes to the temporal features of a locomotor task like, for example, inter- and intralimb timing. A lot of the footage for „Climbing Technique of the 21st Century” therefore was shot in ultra slow motion.

Problem-solving, adaptive thinking and mental control
Climbing is about movement tasks and challenges that require not only good physical attributes but also problem-solving abilities, adaptive thinking and mental control through the management of risk and fear.

Managing Degrees of Freedom (DOF)
Motor control is difficult because of the large number of elements involved.
Climbers have to manage redundant muscles and joints while their muscles may span multiple joints and properties (end of how much Text Vimeo allows, sorry!)