caver.adam wrote:If you end up teaching yourself please be cognizant of the rookie mistakes. Once you build a bad habit into your technique it becomes hard to unlearn. It's always frustrating when I watch people who have learned a bad habit.
One thing to consider is, "What would happen if something went wrong or I got scared? What would my natural reaction be?" My example of this is that I see people holding on to the standing end of the rope above their rack instead of holding onto their rack. If you get scared or lose control your reaction is to clamp down and be unable to let go. Wouldn't it be better to clamp down on the bars of your rack than on the rope above it? Another example is when people let go of the braking end of the rope even for just a second.
These are good points. Many built-in reflexes, such as grabbing the rope above the rack, are hard to overcome without good practice.
One reaction I finally figured out with frogs causes a common mistake during changeovers and the like. Our brain is used to gravity and using our feet to push against it.
So often I see folks trying to do stuff on a frog (and I presume other systems) like a change-over and they start to put weight into the footloop(s). (from what I can best determine it's a feedback loop, the brain feels pressure under the foot from the loop so encourages the body to brace against it).
So, for example, they'll be trying to raise their upper ascender and meet resistance (the weight of their feet in the footloop) so will try to brace against the footloop to get more force to work with. Of course this makes it even harder to bring up the upper ascender, so they'll brace/stand even more in their footloop and so on.
Once I saw how common this mistake was and what was apparently causing it, it became far easier to teach others how to avoid it.