All About Drytooling with Kevin Lindlau

At the Michigan Ice Fest we were fortunate to have a long conversation with professional and competition climber Kevin Lindlau about all things ice, mixed, and drytooling.  Kevin is very well spoken. We realized that many people would love to see that conversation to learn more about these specialized niches of the climbing world.  We talked about gear, movement, drytooling holds, and training, among other things. It’s a mountain of information and we’re grateful to be able to present most of it here.

Convo 1 - Gear, Gear Mods, Rope and Gear Damage

Convo 2 - Movement, Hand Positions, The Most Difficult Thing About Drytooling

Convo 3 - Training, Drytooling HOlds, and Comp Route Setting

These conversations have been heavily edited for clarity and brevity.  They are presented in no particular order. Use the topic headings to jump around the conversation.

drytooling hold Selection

I think there's a few different categories that need to be considered when you're looking for a good dry tooling hold. What makes a good hold also depends on what kind of training you want to do.

Material
If you have the budget, you want something that's going to be resilient and last a long time. Furnace Industries is making a lot of steel holds. Using steel is important because it lasts a very long time under heavy use from picks. Some holds are also made out of aluminum. Aluminum holds can great but can blow out. If you're a more advanced drytooler and you have an understanding of how your tools work on holds and the limits of holds and when they pop, aluminum is a good material to use as it's cheaper and easier to mill out.  Stone holds from Smart Stones are also a great option since they teach pick feedback on granite.

Shape
The next thing to consider is the shape of the hold and how it's going to be used. You want a hold or a hold set that is going to offer you a variety of training applications.  You want a hold that can serve more than one purpose. Let's say we just had a hold that had a hole in it used as a pocket. That's great. However, it's not super applicable for training a lot of different styles or techniques. It’s like rock climbing at the gym with only big jug handholds set like climbing a ladder. That's not going to be very effective for your training down the road. You need something that's going to push your limits. 

Variety
You want variety in your holds.  Variety is going to allow you to focus on different techniques, different grip styles, having to link different movements together that you might see outside.

Preparing for Hard Drytooling

Training is something that's very specific to the type of terrain or route you want to climb and what your goal of climbing is. Depending on which style of climbing that you want to excel in, that’s going to dictate how you should train for it.

Mental
The head game is probably the most important thing to train for especially for ice and mixed climbing. The more relaxed you can stay, the more confident you’ll be and the less likely your brain is to send panic signals that cause your heart rate to go up, that make you over grip, and will ultimately make you fall off earlier. Working on a positive headspace is one thing many climbers overlook. It’s becoming as necessary as any physical training for high level climbers to focus on a positive head space as part of their preparation for climbing. More information on Head Games and Mental Training

Physical
The one thing that it seems everyone needs to work on is endurance. The common complaint is ‘I always pump out.’ ‘I always fall off, or I can't climb a route because I get too tired too quick.’ Physical training is extremely important. To train for drytooling we’ll pull a lot of things from the rock climbing world.

Example: If you're trying to do long vertical slab routes, you just need to be able to hang on for a long time and find active rest. Learn how to do Tabata style training on a wall is important. Learn how to rest on uncomfortable holds and positions. When you do encounter those rests outside you're able to relax and rest in those spots.

Another example: If you're looking to do competition style climbing, power endurance training is very important because we usually don't have to climb for very long, but you need to maintain body tension and dynamic movement for an extended period of time, more than normal. You have to be able to do the hardest style movement you can ever do for 4-6 minutes straight. This requires more sport specific training to build more power endurance.

Yet another example: If you're looking to do roof climbing, you need to build grip strength to increase your endurance. That means more hang boarding and tool hangs.

Last example: if you're looking to ice climb, endurance is something that you need to consider. Improving grip strength is known to increase endurance because you're using a smaller percent of muscle to hang on your tool, which ultimately allows you to hang on for longer. Even in the off season, grip training, whether it's rock climbing and hang boarding or doing tool hangs, is going to improve your endurance. Endurance takes time to build. Start in the beginning of summer and work up to it in the fall. People will be pleasantly surprised at how a little training increases their endurance for the real season.

DNA of a Good Competition Route

This could be a huge answer.  There are so many factors and so many different styles of setting for comps. I’ll break it down to three major factors 

1. Separate the Field

So what makes a good competition route is something that breaks up the competitors at different points on the route.  What you don’t want is a stopper move or a lot of tops. It’s considered bad setting when a large number of the climbers top the route, because that doesn't split the field up, and that's going to create a lot of ties that makes it difficult to rank competitors. A stopper move is when there's a specific crux on the route that the majority of the competitors cannot get past, which also causes a big tie. And this is bad for that same reason. It's hard to rank climbers or split them up for later rounds of the climbing. A good route is a route that splits climbers up throughout the route at different points. That will create very distinct ranking positions for the judges.

What that requires from a route setter's point of view is understanding the field that's coming there.

2. Know the field

Route setters will set a route, but then they'll alter it when they see who's registered for the competition. They do their research to understand where those climbers are coming from, where they're at in their climbing level, and the types of climbing that they're familiar with.  Using that information, they’ll alter the route. So that's factor two is knowing who's coming.

3 Ramp up difficulty

Try to ramp up route difficulty as it goes up. That means you'll have intermediate cruxes throughout the route. That's how you split up the field. in general the routes will start easier, allowing everyone to get started on the route. Next how you make intermediate cruxes is up to the route setter’s discretion. Some route setters prefer to add very technical movement. That kind of crux requires competitors to have a higher knowledge of tool movement and body positioning. This is often where the field can be split up because people that are a lower level with the sport aren't going to be able to accomplish more technical move since they likely lack the skill set.  More experienced climbers should have gained that knowledge over their years of climbing.

A physical crux is something requiring high body tension or power to complete the movement.

A technical crux would be something requiring finesse that doesn't require a lot of strength but requires perfect precision body movement to complete the movement similar to what we would see in bouldering competitions on a slab boulder problem.

It’s becoming more common to mix technical cruxes with physical cruxes. For example, you might start out by having a little easy climbing. Then a technical crux that might split up some of the less experienced part of the field. Now let's see how strong they are. Setters are going to set up physically demanding crux that the climbers that train hard and are at that upper level with their training might be able to get through. Climbers that have the technical skills but maybe not the physical skills might pop off there. 

As the field gets whittled, setters might alternate between a technical crux, a physical crux, and slowly make those cruxes more difficult as it goes up. Then, a technical sequence. Not just one technical move but a section of three of them, requiring specific grip changes, specific body positioning, and then eventually having technical cruxes and physical cruxes meld together.