Learn The Basics Of Home Bouldering Walls

This article originally appeared on Climbing

Want more? Learn how to boulder your best with our three-part online Boulder Harder, with Nina Williams who lays down the techniques and hard-earned wisdom that have made her one of the world's top boulderers.

The first wall I ever climbed was in a Galyans within a mall. It was a towering monolith presiding over the store center like an epic plastic Everest, or so I thought when I was 10. Holds shaped like fish and chickens and numbers and letters floated across the wall. I made it up only because the employee belaying me got bored and probably hungry and then just hoisted me to the top using his heftier weight. Poor guy likely did that for small kids like myself all day.

Two years later, I visited a climbing gym for my friend's birthday party. Again, we summited soaring (read: 27 feet tall) walls, and I was enamored by the physical and mental complexities of the sport. It was at that gym that I later joined the after-school climbing club.

I'll never forget the moment a week later when my instructor pulled a crash pad toward a strangely short section of wall and announced that we wouldn't require harnesses for the day, since we would be bouldering. What is bouldering? And, what's up with that wall?

Depending on the gym(s) or crags in which you first take up climbing, chances are you will have that experience as well. So here are five bouldering wall basics for beginners.

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