Rock climber researches motorized climbing wall

Colin Davis was working for a rafting company a few years ago when he first heard about a motorized climbing wall.

"In my mind, it was a recreational toy or a tool mainly for amusement," he said.

By Evelyn Boswell MSU Research Office

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2003/12/26/news/climbingbzbigs.txt

Davis, an avid rock climber, had a keen interest in weight training and other forms of regimented physical training. Little did he know his life would become entwined with "this crazy idea" he’d heard about from one of his rafters.

As part of his master’s degree in exercise physiology, Davis embarked on a two-year research project to see if rock climbers could benefit from training on such a wall, also called a scrolling or a rotating wall.

"No training programs have been rigorously researched using this tool," Davis reported.

The climbing wall Davis used for his study, which was developed by Ascent Products, Inc. http://www.ascentrock.com/ of Bozeman and is housed in Montana State University’s human performance laboratory, looks like many other climbing walls when it’s standing still.

But once Davis flips the switch, it moves like an upright treadmill using a design similar to a snowmobile track. Davis can set the speed anywhere from 10 to 50 feet a minute and can tilt the treadmill so the angle ranges from 80 to 180 degrees.

Davis recruited 27 climbers, all MSU students between 18 and 37 years old. Then he divided them into two groups that trained for six weeks.

One group came into the lab and climbed continuously for 20 minutes at a time.

The other group climbed three six-minute sets at higher intensities, resting three minutes between each set.

His research showed that training on the motorized wall definitely paid off, but it didn’t matter which regimen the climbers followed, Davis said.

That could be because six weeks wasn’t long enough for the differences between the two regimens to pay off, or because the interval workout wasn’t intense enough, he said.

But Tom Wells, owner of the Bozeman Climbing Center, (1408 Gold Ave #3 Bozeman, Montana 59715 (406) 585-0756) said, "Rotating walls are fantastic for endurance. They are not great for technique, but if you have nothing else, they will work."

The problem is many gyms don’t have rotating walls and therefore climbers have limited access to training on them, Wells said.

Davis said he planned to distribute his findings to trainers and rock climbers and perhaps suggest training programs for climbers who do have access to motorized training walls.

Meanwhile, he wrote in his thesis, "The lack of data related to outdoor rock climbing is remarkable and leaves many topics open to further research, especially those concerning energy expenditure at different grades of difficulty and steepness."