You will probably be less scared when you’ve climbed more, so maybe it would be more helpful to simulate a climber who has already fallen a bunch of times and knows she won’t fall this time.
However, given that climbing involves a degree of physical memory, it might be even more useful to actually fall a bunch of times, until you are confident that you can recover successfully.
Yeah. I’ve already more or less accomplished this step with indoor climbing, where most of the time I’m pretty happy to chuck myself off from the top without clipping the chains. I can’t seem to make it transfer outside though. In trad climbing it doesn’t seem like good practice to purposefully fall onto your gear (I’ve taken exactly one lead trad fall ever; it was completely unproblematic but I don’t want to make a habit of it), so I guess maybe the answer is do more sport climbing and fall off loads. The bolts are always soooo far apart though, and the kind of grades I climb tend to have big holds and ledges and slabby sections which makes for really offputting falling prospects. I wish I was good enough to climb more fun steep stuff outside. (Indoors I am much better at steeply overhanging stuff than vertical walls and slabs, but outside it seems hard to find the kind of route that has big enough holds to be accessible at my grade on overhanging terrain.)
You will probably be less scared when you’ve climbed more, so maybe it would be more helpful to simulate a climber who has already fallen a bunch of times and knows she won’t fall this time.
However, given that climbing involves a degree of physical memory, it might be even more useful to actually fall a bunch of times, until you are confident that you can recover successfully.
Yeah. I’ve already more or less accomplished this step with indoor climbing, where most of the time I’m pretty happy to chuck myself off from the top without clipping the chains. I can’t seem to make it transfer outside though. In trad climbing it doesn’t seem like good practice to purposefully fall onto your gear (I’ve taken exactly one lead trad fall ever; it was completely unproblematic but I don’t want to make a habit of it), so I guess maybe the answer is do more sport climbing and fall off loads. The bolts are always soooo far apart though, and the kind of grades I climb tend to have big holds and ledges and slabby sections which makes for really offputting falling prospects. I wish I was good enough to climb more fun steep stuff outside. (Indoors I am much better at steeply overhanging stuff than vertical walls and slabs, but outside it seems hard to find the kind of route that has big enough holds to be accessible at my grade on overhanging terrain.)