Today, Tom from Bouldering Bobat will be teaching us about the basics about MoonBoard.
Glad to have you, Tom.
Great to be here.
What grade do I need to reach before even attempting to train on the MoonBoard?
Well, I think you probably need to have been climbing maybe a couple of months already, but you can at
least do one or two moves on the MoonBoard, but you are not really going to get the most
out of it until I would say you are climbing V3/V4.
Can you teach us how to use the MoonBoard?
Uh, yeah!
Every MoonBoard will have like a restart button on the side, and then you just fire up the
app on your phone, so you are going to get the MoonBoard app. You also have to sign in.
So yeah, it's quite useful. You can exclude things that you've already done before, can
search by different grade ranges.
Also, when you switch it on,it does this cool thing. So what does the different light mean,
like red, blue?
Green is the start hold, red is the finish hold, and blue is just the hold in between.
So let's get up one of the easy problems. So this is 6a+ so that's about V3/V4-ish,
and hit the light bulb button, and then it would want to connect to the MoonBoard, and
gotta make sure the bluetooth is turned on, and there you go.
Oh, there you go.
So yeah, we start down here on this green hold.
It's the light directly below the hold, not above, so some people get confused.
Yea, always look for the light and then go above to find the handhold, and then for the
start move. You can use any of these footholds, so on every single climb, you can always use
all of the footholds, and then yeah just follow the blue hold up and then finish on the red
dot.
Now also these additional footholds on some MoonBoards, most of the problems are set without
using them, so they will tell you in the app. If it says you can use the footholds or it's
just feet follow hands, and feet follow hands means you can only put your feet where your
hands will be.
What's the main benefit of training on MoonBoard?
Why not just… climb?
I think the great thing on MoonBoard is that you can try hundreds of different climbs in
one place, and they are all set by different people, right?
So everybody has different strengths and weaknesses, so I think that's good training because I
am being forced to do moves that I am not used to doing, and that's different to climbing
on a traditional wooden training board, because when you are doing that, you will more often
make up your own moves, and then you have more of a bias to try things that you are
good at.
So I think it's really good to force you to try things that you are not so good at, and also
because it is steep, I think in the low grade, it's good for teaching you how to keep your
feet on, and I think as the climb get harder into like the V6 range, and you end up doing
these really big jumps and powerful moves.
After Tom's explanation, I tried out the V3 Walk Before Run, but … alright now a
little push, this one is quite good.
I am shocked.
Haha.
OK, how's that possible?
OK, let me uh, give me some beta.
My excuse is that I haven't, you know, like fully warmed up.
Haha.
Tom decided to help me out by showing his beta and I have to say this was not the kind
of V3 I was expecting.
The moves were big and wall was very steep.
On top of that, the holds weren't very juggy.
After a proper warm-up and a few practices, eventually I was able to climb it.
My first impression on the MoonBoard was it kind of exposed my weak pinch strength and
my not-so-good footwork on small footholds on steep overhangs.
I would need to make an extra effort to work on these.
If you are an intermediate climber, I highly suggest you give it a try, too.
Come on.
Yes!
Finally!
Man, it's a hard V3.
Good job.
Yes, happy ending.
Thanks for watching.
I did another video with the Bouldering Bobat in their channel, so be sure to check it out
somewhere here.
The link down below, I presume.
Yes, make sure to subscribe to this guy as well if you are not already.
See you in the next video.