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Mental Training for Climbing: 5 Lessons

Mental Training for Climbing: 5 Lessons

Updated 6 min read Mind and goals Sabrina Thayer-Head

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Mental training for climbing comes down to five habits: keep your ultimate goal in view, climb for yourself, focus on the task rather than the result, understand what causes your stress, and change your thinking in the moment. Sports-psychology trials show moderate performance gains from such work; climbing-specific evidence is still thin.

Sabrina at the Backbone

photo Benjamin Bouchard

Coming back from an injury, Sabrina Thayer-Head had no expectations for her 2019–2020 season on the Coupe Québec circuit. She surprised herself with a season full of finals, podiums and lessons. Here is what was behind it.

After a disappointing first year of competition and an injury, I joined the Bloc Shop team for my second season. My fitness and technique improved quickly, but one piece was still missing: my head. It had been my biggest weakness, so I devoted the season to it. Here’s what I took from it.

1. Why focus on your ultimate goal?

This is probably the biggest change I made. By establishing what I actually wanted to accomplish, in training and in competition, I shrank the importance I gave to outside factors like what other people thought.

A good way to do this is to understand why you climb. Long term, I have an ultimate goal, and my main route to it is becoming better: learning and practising movements, challenging myself, having no weaknesses. In competition, I concentrate on what I can understand from each attempt and what I can improve. In training, I use those observations to get better. With your ultimate goal in mind, you can slowly eliminate the outside factors that limit you: the image others have of you, embarrassment, fear of failure. How to set climbing goals covers the planning side.

What the research says: a 2025 systematic review of 83 studies found that climbers tend to be intrinsically motivated and task-oriented, and that confidence and anxiety management are linked to climbing ability, though the optimal levels are not yet clear (Mangan et al.). A meta-analysis of randomised trials found that psychological interventions improve sport performance by a moderate amount (Brown and Fletcher, 2017). Neither tested Sabrina’s specific method.

2. How do you climb for yourself, not for others?

Ask whether your satisfaction comes from your successes, however you define them, or from other people’s recognition of them. When you genuinely climb for yourself, that’s where you see the best progression and the strongest motivation. I use two things.

Personal objectives. I aim at things I can work on that aren’t connected to other people. Technical objectives: specific movements, grips, physical strengths. Behaviour objectives: around fear, a more positive attitude, my intensity level, having more fun, comparing myself to others less. Objectives centred on my own capabilities always push me more than objectives tied to a result, a grade or a ranking.

Visualising your behaviour. Instead of imagining yourself doing something nobody else has done, imagine yourself succeeding after giving everything you had. Picture the movements as if you were on the wall, not the view from the crowd. How you build those scenarios shows what actually satisfies you.

What the research says: the evidence on how to picture a climb is mixed. A 1999 study that included expert climbers on hard boulder problems found the outside view, as an observer, worked best for form-dominated tasks; a later study found the inside view better for slalom tasks (Hardy and Callow, 1999; Callow et al., 2013). If Sabrina’s inside view doesn’t work for you, try the other.

3. Why orient toward the task, not the result?

In front of a boulder, I stay focused on what I have to do: how I’ll do the moves, how I’ll use my time, what skills I need to reach for. The result only counts at the end, because you have essentially no control over it. Wondering how others are doing, or how many zones or tops I’ll get, only distracts.

To manage that, I lean heavily on preparation. Most of my energy goes on the process, not the outcome. If you put the weight into preparation, mental and physical, all that’s left is to let go on the wall. Your body knows what it has to do.

What the research says: specific goals help performance in general, and the sport literature is more equivocal about which type works best (Locke and Latham, 2002; Weinberg, 1994). No climbing trial comparing task-focused and result-focused attempts has been found.

4. How do you understand your stress?

In competition, in the gym or on rock, we all go soft in front of the thing that scares us. This year I asked myself often: what’s the worst that can happen? Understanding the cause of your stress helps neutralise it.

It can even become fun: take a whole session to climb in discomfort, try things that are too hard, fail and not be at your best. Put yourself in the situation that stresses you, in a more controlled setting: deliberate falls to practise landing, or falling in front of people if that’s what stresses you.

Stay alert to those feelings: sometimes they reveal a lack of confidence or something to work on. Use the stressful moment to practise breathing, calming down and climbing without pressure. It’s difficult, continuous work, but it’s powerful.

What the research says: no trial of deliberate fall practice for performance anxiety in climbers has been found; it rests on experience and on the general idea of gradual exposure. Start with small falls on a safe set-up with an experienced belayer, and increase slowly. How to start trad without a ground fall explains why a physical margin helps you stay calm.

5. How do you change your thinking in the moment?

Changing your attitude when you’re getting frustrated, or challenging your fear, is hard and not much fun. But if you don’t do it in the moment, you rarely do it at all.

Now I sometimes spend whole sessions focused only on my attitude. I try boulders I like less, ones where I struggle not to complain, and practise breathing, smiling and seeing the positive. In competitions too, I stopped to take a sip of water and gather myself when I caught my attitude turning negative. It was the perfect moment to learn to control that part of my head.

I try to remember what kind of athlete, and person, I want to be. It’s fine to have emotions, but this work makes me better at climbing and better as a person. It’s cheesy, but it’s really worth doing.

I’m convinced our stress, our fears and our ego weigh more in our climbing than we realise. I hope these tips help you break through your own mental limits.

What the research says: a meta-analysis of 32 studies found that self-talk improves sport performance, with a moderate effect (ES = 0.48), more for fine than gross motor tasks and for new than well-learned tasks (Hatzigeorgiadis et al., 2011).

Editor’s note (Félix Bourassa-Moreau): the “What the research says” notes are mine, not Sabrina’s. Where they say no climbing trial has been found, that is the result of my literature search in October 2026.

Sources

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