i agree with you, but...
climbs indoors have little tags telling you where the next hold is. when you are outside there isn't anything telling you where to hold on. you gotta figure it out.

so unless the route setters take that into consideration a 5.12 in the gym is going to be easier than one outdoors. i know a few climbers that can climb a grade higher indoor than they can outdoor.

i agree with you, but...
climbs indoors have little tags telling you where the next hold is. when you are outside there isn't anything telling you where to hold on. you gotta figure it out.

so unless the route setters take that into consideration a 5.12 in the gym is going to be easier than one outdoors. i know a few climbers that can climb a grade higher indoor than they can outdoor.

chalk marks are not always there.

i agree with you, but...
climbs indoors have little tags telling you where the next hold is. when you are outside there isn't anything telling you where to hold on. you gotta figure it out.

so unless the route setters take that into consideration a 5.12 in the gym is going to be easier than one outdoors. i know a few climbers that can climb a grade higher indoor than they can outdoor.

Well, per me post earlier, it does not matter. Grades are not given based upon the difficulty of correctly reading a sequence.

The ideal rating is given with the best beta for the route.

Sometimes figuring out the beta is far harder than merely doing the moves. In those cases, the actual difficulty certainly does involve reading the sequence.

The problem is that not everyone uses the "best" beta for the route--whatever that means. A six foot tall climber and a five foot tall climber will likely have quite different sequences that are best for them--and there's absolutely no reason to believe that the difficulty rating should be the same for the two of them. That is actually the best argument against having 16 (or whatever) number of bouldering grades.

Curt

Re Jay: My gut says that it's better to have gym and outside grades use a different scale because the two are just different enough and it symbolizes that only outside climbing is real.

i can't fathom how eliminating the v scale indoors could attract more people to climbing.

Nor do i necessarily want more people attracted to climbing . . .

The main problem is that each category encompasses far too wide a range of difficulty. Each of your gym's bouldering levels subsumes, on average, nearly three V-grades. This makes it difficult to structure a bouldering training session using modern training paradigms, such as continuous intensity repetitions (CIR) or a bouldering pyramid.

Consider CIR. In a CIR session, the climber climbs a number of problems, say 12, which ideally are all the same level of difficulty. With your gym's grading system, this is impossible to do (since the grades encompass such a huge range of difficulty) without wasting considerable time sampling problems, some of which will be way to easy and others way to hard, in order to find 12 problems of appropriate difficulty. In fact, the climber might have to waste an entire session just trying out problems, and have to postpone the actual workout to the next session. A finer-graded scale, such as the V-scale, reduces this problem by providing more information about the actual difficulty of each problem.

Jay

Definitely a valid point, but in practice it's not that bad a problem. I've only done 4x4-s and not familiar with CIR but I assume that you can pick 4 problems and cycle through them 3 times. Very few gyms will have 12 different V2-s anyways.

My opinion as a statistician and a climber is this: Using a 4-category scale to classify boulder problems that range in difficulty from rank beginner to seasoned expert is inadequate.

The main problem is that each category encompasses far too wide a range of difficulty. Each of your gym's bouldering levels subsumes, on average, nearly three V-grades. This makes it difficult to structure a bouldering training session using modern training paradigms, such as continuous intensity repetitions (CIR) or a bouldering pyramid.

Consider CIR. In a CIR session, the climber climbs a number of problems, say 12, which ideally are all the same level of difficulty. With your gym's grading system, this is impossible to do (since the grades encompass such a huge range of difficulty) without wasting considerable time sampling problems, some of which will be way to easy and others way to hard, in order to find 12 problems of appropriate difficulty. In fact, the climber might have to waste an entire session just trying out problems, and have to postpone the actual workout to the next session. A finer-graded scale, such as the V-scale, reduces this problem by providing more information about the actual difficulty of each problem.

Jay

...The bottom line is that the more fine-grained the difficulty scale, the more information you have about the difficulty, and thus the more useful is the grading scale. This applies whether you are climbing inside or out, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons...

That's absolute nonsense.

You have no more real information about the difficulty of the problems, only more disagreement about the ratings.

That's absolute nonsense. You have no more real information about the difficulty of the problems, only more disagreement about the ratings. Even in a place where the "V" scale is extremely well entrenched (Hueco Tanks) I could take you to a dozen V2 problems and you would swear some of them are easier than V2 and that some of them are V4 or V5.

Curt

I agree. I think this is why even outdoor, where conventional V grades are used, there is usually additional "color-coding"-- at least in the newer guidebooks that I have seen-- that compresses the V-scale into, essentially, 4-category scale.

Example: Stone Fort guidebook, and I think, the new HP40 guide, shows problems in V0-V3 range labeled green, V4-V7 yellow, V8-V12 red, and unsent projects in black. I've seen the same approach-- though with different color designations, in other guidebooks.

No, they just use the colors so you can get a quick sense of the difficulty of the area. There is a huge difference in difficulty between 4 V-grades. Huge.

No, they just use the colors so you can get a quick sense of the difficulty of the area. There is a huge difference in difficulty between 4 V-grades. Huge.

Jay

I know that this is the reason why the use color-coding. But it works because as a rough estimate of where I want to go in a new area I start with a window of ~4 grades. And while on average there is, of course, a definite trend of difficulty increase with increased V grade, in practice on a particular problem it is +/- 2 V grades of the grade that was assigned to it.

The only reason I am bringing it up is that in practice in a gym it doesn't make that much of a difference whether the routes are graded V0-V15, or easy/medium/hard.

At the end of the day, if I need to pick 4 problems for 4x4, I will go by how they feel to me-- e.g. I onsighted them, but barely. It doesn't matter if they are called medium, or if they are called V2, V3, V1 and V4.

That is an admission that the easy/medium/hard scale is inadequate, because you shouldn't have to spend time sampling problems to figure out their difficulty.

And what if you want to do a VIR session where you need 8 V1s, 4 V2s, 2 V3s, and 1 V4? You're totally screwed. Good luck actually having the time and energy left to do the planned workout after the time and energy you have to spend just figuring out which problems to do.

Furthermore, if you go by feel, how do you know that the problem you're working is actually the difficulty level you want to work? Does the problem feel hard because it's really that hard, or because you're just missing a trick.

And how do you judge progress over time without a suitable metric? Are you getting better, or are you stuck at the same level? How do you know, if all you're going by is "feel"? How do you goal set? And so on?

Does the problem feel hard because it's really that hard, or because you're just missing a trick.