It's been a long time since I bought some new holds for the board. It was time for some fresh circuits and I go through my process for setting and designing the layout of the board ..read more

Trad grades - they are inexact, hard to pin down and cause folk lots of confusion. In this video I discuss how I grade trad routes and how I insulate myself from the controversies that often accompany them. I also offer a grade for Echo Wall on Ben Nevis ..read more

A few weeks ago I picked up a mild A2 pulley injury in my finger. As many of you know, I wrote a whole chapter in Make or Break about finger injuries, but I thought I would make an episode showing you how I work around it to keep training despite the finger injury. Obviously, copying exactly what I do here is not the objective - every injury is different. It's about the general principle of working around injuries and how you might go about that. I hope it comes across in the episode that finding workarounds allows you to stay in better shape and remove a lot of the psychological pain of gett ..read more

A film I made over on the Fort William Mountain Festival channel about Caitlin Connor - an ice comp and dry tooling specialist. It was pretty tough to film this and not join in with the training! Caitlin received the Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture this year. If you would like to nominate a young person making an important contribution in the mountains for this award, you can do so here ..read more

The 'quality' of recovery from training will determine the size of your gains. But this is a tricky thing to pin down. In this video I explain what makes a good rest day activity and why rest quantity is always a moving target ..read more

I thought it was about time I made some videos related to your questions about climbing/training. I asked my supporters on Patreon for their questions and picked a few related ones to tackle first: What would I change or revise in my book 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes? How I organise and keep track of research? How I deal with moderation and fuelling on high and low carb diets and the highs and lows of diet experiments? Some controversial territory as expected. I’ve tried my best to tackle it head on in this episode. There were more questions of course, and I’ll put together som ..read more

Back when you started climbing, finding motivation wasn’t really a big deal for a lot of folk. Yet for some, it becomes a real issue later on. In this episode I explore this and offer a simple (not not always easy) solution ..read more

In June I had my fourth ankle surgery. I managed to get back to climbing E10 in a few months with a few key strategies and tactics I describe in this video ..read more

In this discussion with Joe French, we explore what Joe did to recover from post traumatic stress and mental health issues. In my mind, the simple activities he describes, which can be practiced in many different forms, are a big missing piece of many athlete’s training programs and also of mental health therapy. We cover why the ‘barefoot’ part of barefoot running is only half the picture, cold water, the two disasters he suffered on Everest which killed many of his colleagues, the ethics of film making and social media and epics while new routing on Ben Nevis. Joe’s excellent book Out of ..read more

Here is the first of several videos I’d like to make on supplements I don’t take and why. First up is collagen. I’ve seen sports nutritionists say that every climber should be taking it. In this video I take a look at the research and explain why I don’t. Below are the references from the video: 1.         Thompson, J.C., et al., Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins. Current Anthropology, 2019. 60(1): p. 1-23. 2.         Blasco, R., et al., Bone ma ..read more