You Know Rock Climbing Practice Matters. Here's Why You're Still Stuck.
You know practice matters. Maybe you've read the books (Peak, Atomic Habits, whatever your coach recommended). Maybe you haven't, and you just know from experience that putting in the hours should produce results. Either way, you understand that mindless repetition won't cut it, that you need targeted work on the hard things.
Yet you walk into the gym three months later and find yourself cruiseing through the same routes at current level or below, the same skills, everything comfortable and nothing changing.
The gap isn't knowledge or effort. It's that nobody has given you a concrete structure for what to actually do in your next session.
Why projecting easy routes keeps you stuck
A typical session: climbing same moderate routes, resting on comfortable holds, repeating familiar movement. The whole thing takes 90 minutes, and at the end, you feel like you practiced.
You did. You also learned nothing new.
This is projecting easy routes: repeating what's comfortable and calling it work. The comfort is real. The progress is not. After a season of this, you hit the plateau: stuck on same grade for a season.
The plateau isn't a ceiling. It's a place where practice stops happening and repetition begins.
Why understanding the problem doesn't fix it
There's no shortage of advice about practice. Books explain the science: elite performers isolate weaknesses, push past comfort, use immediate feedback. Your coach tells you to work on the hard things. The internet has a thousand articles about deliberate practice.
None of them tell you what to do when you step up to the wall on a Tuesday night.
That's the gap. You understand why practice matters. You might even understand what deliberate practice is supposed to look like in theory. But you don't know which of your three weak spots to work on first, how to structure the feedback, or what a session of real development work looks like when you're chalking your hands.
So you default to what feels productive: you cruise through the skills you already know. And the plateau stays exactly where it was.
Most climbers stay in projecting easy routes mode because the alternative — real, directed, uncomfortable practice — requires a structure nobody has handed them. Not a principle. Not a theory. An actual operating system for the session.
The practice structure gap a climber and a BJJ practitioner both fall into
A BJJ practitioner who understands deliberate practice still walks into the gym and defaults to roll the same way every session. Bjj practitioners who roll the same way every session understand the principle. They don't have a system for applying it in real time.
A climber stuck on the same skills for a season faces the exact same gap. The principle is clear. The operating system is missing.
This gap exists because understanding a principle and having a system to apply it are two different things. Knowing you should isolate weaknesses doesn't tell you which three hard things to layer into your practice this month, or in what order, or how to set up the feedback that tells you whether you're actually improving.
What Rocco Panzanelli figured out
Rocco Panzanelli is a professional drummer in Italy. He understood everything about deliberate practice in theory. He still hit the same plateaus. When he restructured his sessions using a concrete methodology — one that told him which techniques to work, in what order, with what feedback — the shift was immediate: "10 days and things are already changing."
Knowledge had prepared him intellectually. A methodology made him actually progress.
Moving past the rock climbing deliberate practice gap
The difference between projecting easy routes and deliberate practice isn't effort. It's specificity. It's knowing that small crimp sequences has distinct failure modes, and you're working on the wrong one. It's understanding that dynamic movement at height breaks down in a predictable sequence, and your session structure needs to address that sequence, not just repeat the skills.
The methodology behind The Art of Practice was built by studying what elite performers do without thinking, then making those patterns teachable. It turns the principle of deliberate practice into concrete, session-level actions.
A climber at a plateau has usually solved the easy problems. The hard things remain hard because you're treating them like projecting easy routes: repeat more, push harder, hope it sticks. The plateau isn't saying you need more time. It's saying you need a different structure.
Common questions
How do I know if I'm cruiseing instead of practicing?
Can you describe a specific weakness you eliminated last month? Not skills you learned, but something that was hard that isn't anymore. If you can't point to a concrete technical improvement in the last four to six weeks, you're likely cruiseing. Your session is productive. Your progress is not.
What if I don't have a specific weak point? Everything feels stuck.
This is common at the plateau. When everything feels hard, the instinct is to work on everything, which means working on nothing with real focus. The methodology starts by identifying your top three barriers: small crimp sequences, dynamic movement at height, and endurance on overhanging terrain.
How is The Art of Practice different from other books about practice?
Most books about practice explain why it matters: the science of deliberate practice, the role of feedback, the importance of consistency. The Art of Practice gives you the how: seventeen techniques and session structures that turn those principles into concrete actions in your gym. It's not theory. It's an operating system.
Laido Dittmar — fourth-generation circus performer, Cirque du Soleil Performer, one of four jugglers in the world to flash 10 rings with a balance, Winner of the Cirque du Soleil Prize Best Juggler 2026 — started with no talent and a decade behind his peers. He spent 20 years reverse-engineering how elite performers practice unconsciously, then wrote it down. The Art of Practice is the result: 17 techniques for structuring how you practice any physical skill. Not theory. Not motivation. A concrete operating system for your sessions. 14,000+ copies sold in 30+ countries.
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