Climbing Motivation: How It Really Affects Your Results

Recently a climber wrote to me:

I kept thinking about this question for a few days.

I started writing the answer and realized that I sometimes skip this topic myself. With people I coach, and in my own training. I think most climbers skip it too. We talk a lot about sets, hangs and grades, and almost never about climbing motivation.

But the reason results don't grow is not always in the training plan, the technique or the number of attempts. Sometimes it goes deeper. Inside the person.

Why motivation matters more than we think

Everyone talks about discipline and consistency. They are important. But from my experience, discipline without motivation doesn't really work.

Motivation gives you dopamine for action. And dopamine is not only about pleasure. It is what makes you want something and be ready to put effort into it. When motivation is low, physically you can still do the same work. But it becomes much harder to make yourself do it. You skip a session, finish earlier, or climb only what feels comfortable.

What happens in training without motivation

When you come to training without motivation, the session turns into just moving. You came, you climbed. But the hard attempts, the ones that actually make you stronger, didn't happen. Or they happened at half effort.

The body adapts to load, not to the fact that you came to the gym. If there is not enough stress, the body has no reason to change. That is why a plateau and low motivation so often come together.

With technique it's even more visible. Learning a movement is work for the brain, and the brain changes when you are really focused on what you are doing. From the outside, climbing on autopilot and climbing with full attention look the same. For your nervous system these are two different trainings. So working on motivation is also part of training.

Internal motivation

For myself, I split motivation into internal and external. Internal is the feeling you get from training itself. External is what makes you go to training even when you don't feel like it.

For me, there is no question whether to go to training or not. I go. Because training gives me energy. When I climb, I feel healthy, my head is clear, I have a good mood and confidence. And I know the opposite very well: as soon as I stop training, energy drops, confidence goes away, and I feel broken.

And this energy affects everything. The quality of my work, how I talk to people, what I can give to others. I don't believe you can do your work well and keep developing without this inner energy. For me it is one of the main conditions for growth. That's why sport is always in my life, whether I'm progressing right now or not.

Everyone has their own sources of energy. For me, one of them is climbing. The question is to find yours.

External motivation

But to be honest, internal motivation is not always enough to really move forward. It is enough not to disappear. To move forward, you need external stimuli. And they are different for everyone: for someone it's results, for someone it's health, for someone a trip. Here are mine.

Competitions. Almost nobody likes to lose. It's kind of built into us. So when you are going to compete somewhere, you want to show your best. And that alone makes you follow the plan, stay disciplined and not skip sessions.

The people you climb with. They strongly define your ceiling. If you are the strongest in your group, motivation often drops. You are already at the top, and your brain says: why work harder if we are already this good? Not for everyone, but it happens a lot. The good thing is that you can change it. Find people who climb harder than you, climb with them, watch how they move.

Trips to the rock. I live far from the rock and don't get there as often as I'd like. So when a trip is coming, I want to show my best there, and the motivation to prepare in training grows by itself. A goal with a date works much better than a goal "someday".

Why does my climbing go up and down?

Now about results going up and down. This is normal. That is why periodization exists in sport: it helps us manage form, because nobody can show maximum results all the time.

And a lot of things affect how you climb on a given day. Slept badly, you are in the minus. Didn't recover, in the minus. Ate badly, no energy. No goals, motivation dropped, no dopamine to show a result.

Sometimes you come to training after a hard day at work, warm up, climb a little, and you feel it. The plan says hard session, but your state is completely different. You can't switch on. If you still try to force the plan, you just push yourself deeper into the minus. In these situations I simply accept it: today is that kind of day. I come to the next session and do the work there.

Don't judge yourself by one bad day. One bad session doesn't mean you are going backwards. Look at how things change over weeks.

I'm losing motivation because I'm not progressing. What do I do?

When progress stops, it is very important to notice small wins. There is point A and there is point B. Often point B is a big goal, like the next grade. If you can't reach it for a long time, it is easy to lose motivation: it feels like nothing changes.

Why progress stops physically, I wrote in a separate article about the bouldering plateau. Here I want to talk about what to do with your head while you work through it.

But if you split the way into steps, it looks different. For example, I want to climb a specific route. For that I need to pull harder, hold my core, do one hard move. Outdoors there can also be fear of height. Each of these things you can work on separately. And you can measure it:

• One more pull-up than last month.
• One second longer on the hang.
• One clip higher before fear kicks in.

It doesn't move you a grade up right away. But these are markers that show you are still moving forward. And when you improve the parts, at some point they come together on the route.

Progress and regress

And always keep in mind: there is progress and there is regress. If we do nothing, we go back. Even to keep what we have, we need to do something. And if we want to move forward, we need to do twice as much.

And you? What gets you to training on the days when you don't want to go?