Six Weeks on the Same Grade

September 14, 2026 · 2 min read

Since the start of August every session has looked the same on the whiteboard: four or five problems at the grade I can do, one or two attempts at the next grade up, no sends. Six weeks. The honest version is that I have been doing the same warm-up, the same style of problem on the same 40-degree board, and then wondering why the result is the same.

Looking back through the diary made the pattern obvious. Everything I fail on has one of two features: a sloping hold that I cannot keep my hips close to, or a move where the foot has to go above waist height. Everything I send is crimpy and square. I had been choosing problems that suited me, calling that training, and then being surprised that the problems that do not suit me still do not suit me.

So this week I changed three things. I spent the first twenty minutes of each session on the slab and the vertical wall, where there is nothing to pull on and the only way up is to trust the feet. I picked two problems well below my limit on slopers and did them five times each, trying to feel where the weight sits rather than trying to get to the top. And I started a ten-minute hip mobility routine before bed, mostly deep squats and lying hip rotations, because I genuinely cannot get my knee out to the side as far as the moves need.

Results after one week: nothing dramatic, one new problem sent at the stuck grade, on slopers, which felt like a small vindication. More interesting was that the slab session left me more tired than an hour of overhang, in the calves and the toes rather than the forearms, which tells me how little I had been using them.

I have given myself until the end of October before I judge any of this. Six weeks of plateau is long enough to notice but not long enough to panic, and I would rather spend the next six doing something different than the same thing with more frustration.