A structured course that teaches you to read routes the way expert climbers do — from perceptual scanning and sequence prediction through mental rehearsal, real-time adaptation, and on-sight performance.
$39 one-time. No subscription.
of climbers plateau below 5.10d. The bottleneck isn't strength — it's perception.
Expert climbers look at a route and see movement possibilities — sequences, rests, cruxes, body positions. Novices see shapes and colors. Research shows this is a perceptual skill, not talent. It's trainable.
Climbing gyms teach technique on the wall, but the skill of reading a route from the ground — before you touch it — is almost never formally trained. There's no curriculum for the most impactful skill in climbing.
Poor route reading means solving the problem mid-climb instead of before it. On on-sight attempts, your first reading is the only reading you get. Most climbers aren't training for that.
Most training plans focus on fingers, power, and endurance. Route reading is the one skill that makes all the others more effective — and almost nobody trains it deliberately.
The self-paced course covers the foundational skills that make the biggest difference — how experts see routes, how to predict sequences from the ground, and how to use visualization to multiply your practice.
Learn to see routes the way experts do — not as individual holds, but as functional clusters that connect into movement sequences. Build a systematic three-phase framework for reading any route from multiple vantage points.
Learn to predict specific hand, foot, and body position sequences from the ground using the Plan–Climb–Review cycle. Manage complexity on longer routes through chunking and highlights.
Extend your reading into mental rehearsal — using visualization to encode sequences deeply and multiply effective practice without physical cost. Stress-test your plan before you leave the ground.
Each session pairs a short video lesson with structured exercises you do at the gym on real routes. The learning happens on the wall, not on a screen.
Short video lessons introduce the concept and the research behind it. No fluff — just what you need to know before you practice.
Apply the session's technique to a real route at your gym. Each session includes specific protocols — what to look for, what to write down, how long to spend.
Climb the route you just read. Sometimes following your plan, sometimes deliberately ignoring it. The climbing generates data your review needs.
Compare what you predicted to what happened. The structured comparison is where the learning crystallizes — and where your reading improves fastest.
This isn't a collection of tips. It's a structured learning progression grounded in published research on expert perception and motor cognition in climbing.
"You can try twenty times in real life and two hundred times in your mind and get the same results as if you had tried it fifty times for real."
— Adam Ondra, on visualization as a substitute for physical attempts
"Expert climbers recall more information and recall it in functional clusters — how holds connect and how to move between them — rather than structural features."
— Expert vs. novice perception research (Memory & Cognition)
"Holds looked at during pre-planning were used twice as much during execution than those not looked at."
— Gaze behavior research on route reading and climbing performance
Cognitive scientist specializing in perception-based learning. Mellon Fellow, UPenn.
Builds universities around the world founded on the science of learning. Featured on NPR/WHYY.
Falls off MoonBoards regularly with his 8-year-old.
Want the full 10-session curriculum with instructor feedback, group debriefs, and guided practice? The live course covers everything in the self-paced course plus real-time reorganization, pace and rhythm, on-sight protocol, and indoor-to-outdoor transfer.
Shift your perception from structural to functional. See holds as movement possibilities — sequences, rests, cruxes, body positions — and build a systematic three-phase framework for reading any route.
Predict specific sequences from the ground using the Plan–Climb–Review cycle. Manage complexity through chunking and highlights. Extend your reading into mental rehearsal to multiply effective practice without physical cost.
Reorganize sequences mid-climb, make the downclimb decision under pressure, and manage pace — accelerating through hard sections, decelerating through easy ones. Develop the decisional fluency that limits climbing speed for most people.
Build the long-term memory systems that make route reading cumulative, then apply the full skill set to on-sight climbing — the ultimate test. No prior knowledge. No beta. Just your reading, your visualization, and your ability to adapt.