National Bouldering Academy - Bloc Climbing Bristol

I woke up early on Saturday and my family and I went across the Severn bridge to Bristol to Bloc Climbing for the National Bouldering Academy day.

We had breakfast in McDonalds on the way and the journey only took 40 min.

When we arrived my brothers and I put our shoes on and went straight to the roof because you can climb on top of it and jump off. This was one of the things we really enjoyed on our last visit to Bloc.

At ten all the climbers sat on the sofas and Ben, Lucinda, Tom and Hamish (who coach the

national bouldering academy) took us through a power point giving us lots of useful information.

After this we went bouldering and rated each other on some different topics (some of which I didn't quite understand). This was my favourite part of the session. We did this for an hour and a half, climbing different blocs to demonstrate the techniques.

Next we listened to some more ideas that the GB team had for training that we could use. We also watched a video showing the difference between first place and second place in the World Cup.

The second place climber used strength and wasn't very efficient but the winner was efficient and balanced this was why she won.

Following that we had a half an hour break for lunch. Lunch was over quickly so we all sat down and Tom told us about massaging our muscles with a tennis ball. We went upstairs to the training room to try out the massaging technique. This was fun.

We went down stairs after this and Tom took us into the bouldering area so that we could try and make up a bloc that we would find more often in comps. I was in a group with Izzy, Fin and Oscar. We made a bloc where you run jump off a foot hold and catch a volume, you then push out to the side wall and grab a pretty bad hold before getting a high foot on the volume and pushing up to reach the top hold. It took us a few goes but we managed to do it eventually.

Once all of the groups made there bloc everyone went around trying each others blocs I managed to do them all first go accept one which was really hard. By this time it was 16:30 so we finished with a group photo.