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Your fat roll is killing you. OK, as a climber, and especially one who is reading an article about training, I’ll bet your body fat percentage is pretty low. On the flip side, though, you are reading an article about weight management.

I’d heard the name Heinrich Holzer. He’s famous in the Alps, with faces, routes, huts, couloirs and trails named after him. But I’d never read that he was once Messner’s favorite partner.

I walk back to my pad, put my shoes on and try once more… it all makes sense again.

The last few weeks have definitely been interesting… I have been focusing solely on power training.

Do you wear a helmet whilst climbing? Many climbers do, some don’t, but it seems obvious that wearing a helmet is, in all but exceptional circumstances, safer than going without.

Climbing efficiently is all about good footwork. Use your feet well by placing them softly and quietly on footholds, make small steps, and use your legs to push and you will get up a lot of hard routes.

The South West peninsula of England sticks out into the Atlantic; a rocky spur on the boot shaped island, hewn by the wind and waves that race in from the ocean. This tiny rural corner of a small country houses a diversity of climbing equal to any in the world.

I was stuck in “The Fridge.” Somewhere 100 or so feet above the pine trees, I groped for a piece of climbing equipment that had dropped into a frigid nook filled with mountain water, halting my journey down one of South Africa’s most spectacular “kloofs,” high above the Western Cape city of Stellenbosch.

I have been sport climbing for about 12yrs with a few gaps in between (only because of work, studies, and family).

The rock is a hard volcanic type, granite–like but with unusual features: flakes, pinches and swaths of smooth holdless rock.