now I'm in the lift for injury prevention category.

Making this poll even longer would have been an even bigger mess, but I think you also had to break it into separate categories by gender, because there is a significant difference in attitudes towards lifting between males and females, and thus the answers would be very different, IMO.

Making this poll even longer would have been an even bigger mess, but I think you also had to break it into separate categories by gender, because there is a significant difference in attitudes towards lifting between males and females, and thus the answers would be very different, IMO.

Some of my college professors would call that sexism.. I call it common sense.

Any way, I don't lift weights and I chose the 11- range. I do pushups and pull ups now and then when I'm bored, other than that not much of a workout guy.

Hmm, I think this thread got bombed. I don't think there are 5 people who climb 5.13 who read this website.

It is not sexism to observe that a difference exsists between two genders in their attitude towards something. I am not suggesting that there is an underlying feature specific to females that makes them incapable of lifting weights. I am simply making observation about group behavior.

I know, when I posted I had just got out of my social issues class, in which my professor has accused me of being sexist for making similar observations. He's a nut.

Making this poll even longer would have been an even bigger mess...

I agree, They need to fess up.

Hmm, I think this thread got bombed. I don't think there are 5 people who climb 5.13 who read this website.

Alright, I admit it! It was me. I climb 5.13 and lift weights. In my defense I only hang around cause I find Sungam and Angry amusing

I suppose I have the option of saying I climb 5.13 but since the last one I climbed was a year ago, I don't claim that grade. Certainly though, I'd feel confident that I could redpoint just about any route 5.12- to 12+ anywhere without too much projecting. 2 days at the most.

If I want to get back into the higher numbers here, I'll have to bolt projects and cross my fingers they're hard. I onsighted one of the harder routes on the island in an effort to put project draws on it the other day.

Angry gets back into it!

I think that for this poll you maybe could have clarified style of climbing, and whether the grades are onsight, easy project (2nd go), or maximum redpoint. As it stands, you could have someone who consistently onsights 12c trad and someone who siege projected a soft 12a all season at the Red River Gorge clicking on the same level.

I will stand by my statement that in order to see what level you're at, take the lowest grade of anything you've fallen on in the last six months, and subtract a number grade. So, I put that I am in the solid 5.10 category.

I am a 5.7 climber then because I lost my balance on a 5.8 slab once.

It's not really a mess. It's just that the limitations of the format imposed by the site make it difficult to see if there is a relationship between climbing level and weight lifting—by the way, people, if rock climbing is your priority, it is "weight lifting," not "lifting". Unless someone else does it first, tomorrow I'll organize the data in a table that hopefully will make it clearer what relationship, if any, there is.

Jay

Of the 5.12 and 5.13 climbers, how many claim this grade over a variety of styles... i.e. face, friction, crack climbing, offwidth, chimney, mantel moves, long routes, mountaineering, etc.

That's an... 'interesting' list.

JT, I think that might be a waste of time a'la garbage in, garbage out. Here's why:

Imagine we're making a regression equation where the dependent variable is climbing grade. What should our independent variables be? If you look at data on athletic performance (eg., field goal percentage of basketball players, improvement of speed of sprinters, etc.) or if you looked at data on learning, both sets of data would suggest that time would be a big predictor. In other words, the longer you climb, the higher the grade*.

So, why is this important in the current thread? Well, if you understand the role of time, the problem is that "weight lifting for injury prevention" versus "weight lifting to improve my climbing" is a false distinction. In other words, if I use supplemental training and it does prevent injury, then that means I'll be able to climb more frequently and push harder while climbing. So, lifting for injury prevention, assuming injuries are prevented, will lead to "improving my climbing" over time.

I currently climb 5.11b but due to weighing about 80kgs i doubt id be able to even do that without some sort of weight training behind me

Results. There was no significant difference between the mean climbing levels of the three weight training groups. See Table 1.

Hmm... if you can believe the data (that's a big if) then it seems as though there is one trend: The ratio of people who either don't weight train or only do it for injury prevention, compared to the other group, gets significantly higher in the mid grades (5.11 and .12) and then lower again at the higher grades.

Or, put another way, the weakest and strongest climbers are most likely to be power training, while the intermediate (5.11 and 5.12) climbers are less likely to do so.

So far it looks like the non- lifters tend to climb harder than either lifter category.

Way to read and comprehend the thread!

Jay

I am wondering if the not lifting = great climbing is just a way to justify being lazy to excersize.

Anybody know of any climbing web sites where the participants actually can think?

Jay

www.jt512.com , but there is only one user.

You are over-interpreting a small dataset. There is no evidence in this dataset for any relationship between climbing level and type of weight training.

Jay

Grade No Yes Ratio of N/Y 
------------------------- 
 10   18  9   2.0 
 11   21  8   2.6 
 12   20  5   4.0 
 13    7   5   1.4

The last few comments from Costa, Kriso9tails, and crack lover all seem to me to have a common theme, this being the importance of individual perception.

I submit that if the crack lovers comment had been limited to Salt Lake City after 1997 his statement would have read:

"Those sending 5.11 - 5.14 have discovered that to send those grades requires no more power than they get from their climbing or other training."

On the other hand if the comment had referred to the Gunks in 1955 he might have written that "5.7 is the limit of human ability and to attempt anything more difficult is physically unlikely and more importantly far too dangerous to merit further consideration regardless of the strength of the climber."

Its been my experience that the perceived necessity or utility of weight lifting depends upon the climbing sub culture in the region where one lives. Two factors strike me as being most important. First, the degree to which climbers see climbing success as an expression of upper body strength. and second, the grade at which climbers believe that climbing gets "hard".

If one wants to discuss weight lifting in the context of climbing, its most likely not a good idea to do so in terms of performance level.

Rather than just dismissing out-of-hand an apparent relationship, would you care to explain why this relationship doesn't count?

Ignoring the 5.9 respondents (since there were only two) here's the relationship between lifting for power and climbing grade:

Code

That certainly looks like a curve. I'd be happy to learn why you consider it "no evidence for any relationship".

On a side note, you seem to like to discourage both thoughtful and thoughtless responses - you just discourage the thoughtless ones with more glee. But you paint all as worthless. This seems counterproductive at best, and a little rude at worst.

The relationship you think you see is not even remotely statistically significant. Like I said, the dataset is too small to support the relationship you think you see.

I'm not sure how you determine how much randomness a given sample will exhibit.

If I follow you correctly, you're saying that the granularity of the data is so large that the effect I'm seeing is too small to be certainly a result of anything more than random fluctuations. In other words, it may be real, or it may not be. I'm not sure how you determine how much randomness a given sample will exhibit. But anyway, not having the statistical background, I'll just take your word for it.

GO

One word: assumption.

Nothing in statistics works if you can't make an assumption (valid or not) about the underlying data distribution. As a frequentist, you can state the data biases toward lifting and climbing harder, and you'd be absolutely correct. However, for a statistician's claim that the bias is insignificant to hold water, his/her assumptions must also be valid, which usually cannot be proven to absolute certainty.

I'm not sure that I would think about it in terms of "granularity." It's that the dataset is a sample from a population, and repeated samples will vary randomly. If you flip a coin ten times, you might end up with 6 heads and 4 tails; if you repeat the experiment, you might end up with 4 heads and 6 tails. Similarly, the present dataset is a sample. Let's focus on the 5.13 climbers. In that dataset, the ratio of strength lifters to others is 1.4. Comparing that ratio to the ratios among the other climbing grades, you hypothesize that there is a U-shaped relationship between climbing level and participation in strength training. But, in fact, the ratio of 1.4 is not statistically significantly different from a ratio of 4.0 (based on the sample size of 12 5.13 climbers). That is, if the true ratio is 4.0 (which would lead you to a completely different conclusion), the probability is still pretty high that we could have observed a ratio of 1.4 among a random sample of just 12 climbers. Due to the small sample size the "stability" of the observed ratio is poor. With larger samples stability improves, in accordance with the Law of Large Numbers. If we observed a ratio of 1.4 among 100 climbers, we could virtually certainly rule out that the true ratio was anywhere near 4.0.

Jay

The "flipping the coin" comparison doesn't work here. You can't compare natural randomness with non-random, non-blind, internet survey data that is open to all sorts of validity issues.

Another non-lifter pulling at 5.11+routes/V6boulder.

Sure I do pullups, core exercises, squats, and other exercises...

...fair enough,


...hang about, doesn't your second statement contradict your first?

Validity issues notwithstanding, the data are still a sample and thus subject to random variation.

Jay

You can't measure anything accurately if the instrument isn't valid.

[B]iased data (eg, data gathered the way it's gathered here) does not have random variation.

You can't measure anything accurately if the instrument isn't valid.

... and neither Gabe nor I are under any illusion that these data have a great deal of external validity.

That statement is patently false. Bias and random variation are separate phenomena, and both exist in every measurement in practice. Certainly neither negates the existence of the other.

Say X is a random variable. And let's say (arbitrarily) that it has a normal distribution, with mean µ and variance s². That is, X ~ N(µ, s²). Let's say that X is measured with bias: an additive bias, a, and a multiplicative bias, b, so that what we actually observe is Y, where Y = a + bX. Then, our observed value Y will still be normally distributed, but with mean a + bµ and variance b²s². The presence of a and b did not remove any random variation from our measurement. Indeed a had no effect on the random variation, while b actually magnified it.

I agree, and neither Gabe nor I are under any illusion that these data have a great deal of external validity. But that does not negate the fact that you can apply statistics to them. Statistics deals with the random variation, which is still there, as illustrated in the above example. That's also why my earlier analogy with the coin toss, which you criticized, is valid. After all, even a biased coin would still have random variation.

Jay

Is there a simple formula to compare, say, the ratio of the divergence to the size of the sample, to determine how large a divergence you must see in order for it to be considered outside of natural variation?

You know - not something that's always exactly right, but if there's a rule of thumb that could be applied, that would be very handy for someone without a statistical background. I imagine there isn't - it's probably more complicated than that. But if there was it would be nice to know.

What I am arguing against is that people are discussing the results as if they mean something. In other words, the stats have provided a false veneer of legitimacy while ignoring all sorts of validity issues. The caveat "validity issues aside" simply means that the data and any conclusions from them should be ignored. Just because you can teach a kid to add two rotten apples doesn't mean eating them will taste any better.

That's why he said "validity issues notwithstanding."

Jay, thanks for the explanation. Let me see if I understand now:

1 - If your data shows significant variation between individuals in a population, then a sampling of that population will by definition include a large degree of random variation between individuals.

2 - In a single small survey, the only way to distinguish between a true trend and this natural random variation is if it is a very very large trend.

Is there a simple formula to compare, say, the ratio of the divergence to the size of the sample, to determine how large a divergence you must see in order for it to be considered outside of natural variation?

No, Lifting is gym membership with bench press, curls, lat pulldown, free weights, machines, spotters, etc.

Doing some pullups, core exercises, and squats is not weight lifting.

This is false.

I don't think that these data are completely useless. Certainly as quantitative estimates they are meaningless, but I think that they are qualitatively informative about the population of climbers whom the data are drawn. For instance, I think we can say that among 5.10–5.12 climbers in this population, there probably is no strong relationship between climbing level and weight lifting behavior.

Jay

The point is, that if you are doing survey research, before even considering whether the statistics were handled appropriately*, researchers consider whether the data was collected appropriately with a valid instrument.

Yeah you're right.

So next time I stay in my apartment and do 100 pullups, 300 situps and do some squats and lunges(without weights) , Im going to call up my buddy and say " hey you want to come over and lift weights?"

I cant wait to see the look on his face when he shows up and sees that I dont own any weights.

Lifting your body weight is lifting weight. Your muscles can't tell the difference between weight from your body vs weight from an outside object, choss. Trust me on this.

Exactly that was done. Earlier in the thread. If you missed it, go back and re-read it. Or maybe you never read that in the first place? Perhaps your whole issue can be explained by taking the end of the thread out of context.

GO

Yeah, but i_h8_choss was talking about lifting w8's, not weights. I think that is something different.

Either we're talking past each other, you think I'm just wrong, or you think the issue of instrument validity is not important.

Lifting your body weight is lifting weight. Your muscles can't tell the difference between weight from your body vs weight from an outside object, choss. Trust me on this.

I find it funny that no one has questioned your conversion of the grades. I'm not saying that to rile you up, or say I disagree with it or that a different conversion would change the results. But do grades really differentiate a linear rate? It's an interesting question.