Learning to relax while you’re hanging onto terrible holds isn’t natural; it’s like walking a cat on a leash. Yet it can be learned, developed, and trained with effort and over time.

You’re entire body is flexed and under tension so you don’t fall, and yet you have to remind yourself constantly, fool yourself even, to relax so that your muscles can recover and you can go on to be successful on the moves that follow.

Your project will not always have amazing rests, the mega-jugs of every boy’s fantasy, with fantastic feet and body positioning in the right spot, just when your arms begin to fail. If that were always (or ever) the case, your projects wouldn’t be challenging, you would always feel rested, and probably would have sent by now.

What is often the case as we push our limits on our projects is that the rests get worse (if you even get one): they are farther apart, there aren’t any feet, the body positioning sucks, and you stop breathing altogether because you’re so stressed that you are going to fall.

Countless times I have disappointed climbers while sharing my beta, as I tell them to shake out and recover on garbage holds. “Okay, great! Now get it all back.” I tell them this, just as my coach had instructed me.

“WHAT?! You want me to rest on this piece of garbage?”

“Yeah! You have to train the rest.”

What does that even mean?

Like most people under tremendous amounts of stress, they can’t think clearly, they can’t understand how they are going to recover on holds when they are pumped out of their minds, let alone learn to rest there and recover enough to do the next section.

But it’s one of the better ways to break through the obstacles on your project. Ask yourself, what’s more likely? That you get strong enough to sprint the whole route or that you learn to rest on crap, get enough back, and finish. It’s like taking a power nap. Sure, it’s not ideal, but it’s the best option available to you, so use it.

You’d be surprised how much you can get back even with a momentary pause, maybe a chalk up, and a couple of shakes.

The key is to use it every time you get there, maybe shaking out a little longer each time, recovering just a little more. We’re trying to increase the time you are able to hang out. After a couple weeks, not only will you not be as tired going into the rest (because you are flowing faster in the beginning, increasing speed and fluidity), but the rest holds will start to feel better and you will begin to leave the rest with a little more energy each time.

Relax your body and arms … hang as loosely as possible … ignore the painful holds … loop music in your head. Do whatever it takes to take your mind off the fact that it’s a terrible rest.

Focusing on the pain, the discomfort, the awkwardness, only makes it worse.

So I focus on my breathing, look up at the next set of moves, play with the chalk in my chalk bag—anything to take my mind off of the crappy rest so that I can relax.

Depending how far you have to go, and how hard the moves are, you may be there for 1-2 minutes … accept it, and start training the rests.