What to ask climbers before training

The five questions

Question	Answer
Does anything hurt right now? Where?	No, a little, yes. If it does: which finger or joint, and does it hurt more when you crimp or pull?
How did you sleep last night?	1 (terrible) to 5 (great)
How does your body feel today?	1 (very tired or sore) to 5 (fresh)
How's your head today? School, work, stress.	1 (stressed or low) to 5 (good)
How much do you want to climb today?	1 (not at all) to 5 (really)

Keep 1 as the worst answer on every scale, so a low number always means "not great" and nobody has to think about which way round it goes.

How to read the answers

• Pain first. Any pain gets a conversation before warm-up. Pain at a middle finger joint in a growing teenager can be a growth plate injury: no crimping, no hangboard or campus, and a doctor if it lasts. Pain at the same joint twice in two weeks is a pattern, even if it's "a little".
• Against their own usual. One climber always sleeps a 3, another a 5. Look for a drop of two points from what's normal for them, not a low number on its own.
• More than one low at once. Bad sleep, a tired body and no wish to climb on the same day is the day to swap the hard session for an easy one.
• Next to their training. A run of low answers after a heavy week says the load went up too fast.

What not to do

• Don't add the answers up into one readiness score or rank climbers by it.
• Don't read stress or mood answers as a diagnosis of anything.
• Don't ask young climbers about weight or how heavy they feel.
• Don't make it a gate. A climber who skips the questions still trains.

After the session

One question: how hard was it, from 0 (rest) to 10 (as hard as it gets)? Times the minutes, that's their session load, a measure that holds up in research with young athletes too. Watch the weekly total against their own recent weeks; a big jump is worth a word even when the check-ins look fine.