Moving Up: Coaching and Training for Climbing
To get feedback from a professional athlete like Thomo, is worth the time and money. The look of a professional on how you climb is often far more accurate than ours, because of their experience and knowledge. She gave me excellent tips, on my climbing and on my training methods. She also helped me understand that you don’t need to train long session; you need to train efficiently and methodologically” Genevieve, Montreal
Climbing is a movement based sport that demands both mental and physical strength. Moving properly and efficiently is key to mastering the intricacies needed to get up the rock.
With Moving Up: Coaching and Training for Climbing, you can expect personalized guidance to help you climb and train more efficiently, help with strengths and weaknesses, mental tactics, competition and overall body conditioning.
Thomasina has a strong understanding of the varied movement and strength demands of climbing. She is well versed in the many climbing areas found through out, making her capable of designing a training program that is relevant to both the given destination, be in it Bishop or the Red River Gorge, and your climbing goals.
Thomasina understands the need to maximize precious training time.Training programs are made to fit your individual schedule and goals be it a boulder, sport route or a challenging traditional route. Programs are delivered through Google Docs.
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I am benefitting greatly from Thomasina’s tremendous abilities to assess, design, and uniquely support progress toward specific goals I have with bouldering, trad, and sport climbing. Thomasina’s ability to genuinely appreciate my efforts and celebrate my gains has been a welcome, powerfully helpful surprise !! I am climbing trad, sport, and bouldering better and stronger than I ever have, along with experiencing greater patience, relaxation, and joy. Jeff from Squamish
You have to master the basics before you can master the game!!
Thomasina has a wealth of climbing and coaching experience. While working towards her BSc at the University of Victoria, she succumbed to the pull of climbing after her 3rd year, going on to become one Canada’s first female to boulder v10, v11 and v12. She has since climbed multiple v12’s and at the 5.13 level. A boulder’er at heart, she has not yet tried 5.14.
Since 2012 she has been a National Team Member, representing Canada at various Boulder and Difficulty World Cups, and two World Championships. Her wealth of experience has taught her many things from a deep understanding of climbing movements; training principles for various aspects of climbing including sport, bouldering and competition climbing; injury prevention; mental tactics for projecting hard outside and for competition.
Thomasina is a NCCP certified Coach, is a certified ACMG Climbing Gym Instructor and has been coaching sport since the age of 16. She follows the Long Term Athlete Development Framework from Sport for Life.
Thomasina believes everyone can improve through instilling good training habits and embodying principles; as well as through approaching failure as learning and getting out of ones comfort zone.
Coaching qualifications
Throughout the years, i have mentored under some really experienced coaches and trainers including, Andrew Wilson (National team Coach). Andrew taught me a lot about movement and mental strength which really goes a long way. Steve Maisch of SLC has been designing training programs for me since I started competition and has been a great resource to me as per the strength aspect of training. He has a very scientific and measurable approach to training, which shows if improvement is had or if adjustment are needed to the training.
Over the many years and different environments, I have been around many great coaches who i didn’t necessarily work with, but who have had their impact on me and my philosophies, either by randomly coaching me, or the people I was around. They include World Cup National team coaches from Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Slovenia, as well as Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou from Team ABC in the USA.
I am a certified NCCP Coach for gymnastics and have been coaching gymnastics for many years. This has only benefited my approach to coaching climbing. I have taken all the NCCP coaches required by Sport Climbing BC. While there isn’t any set training program for climbing coaches yet, there is a long term athletic development program for climbing being developed through the NCCP. So we are on the way!
Philosophies on training and coaching
I take a long term view to training which is largely influenced from my own personal experience with training where I rushed the process to improve which just led to injury.
I give equal focus to both movement and strength. The reason being that one can be a strong as a bull but it doesn’t mean that they can climb a rock, or at least, climb it efficiently and thus reach their potential. If one has the technical skills and is efficient with movement, there is less need for strength and power to send their projects.
Disclaimer: Thomasina is not a certified ACMG rock guide though she does hold her Climbing Gym Instructor Course Level 1. These courses focus solely on skill acquisition and coaching for climbing to help participants become better overall climbers and athletes.
