Each practice fall should be only a little past comfortable. Hazel Findlay says falls bigger than you're ready for make the fear more entrenched; Lattice compares the right dose to a PG-13 horror film. If you grab the rope, hold your breath or close your eyes, step back down a level. If life is very stressful or you've been injured in a fall, deal with the stress or see a mental health professional first: forcing it can make you more scared.
People who fear failure often stop trying routes they might fail on, which makes the fear stronger. In a meta-analysis of competitive sport, self-confidence was more closely linked to performance than cognitive anxiety was, so build confidence first. Three methods have been tested: 60 Swiss climbers did 5 self-compassion writing tasks over two weeks and their somatic anxiety dropped; novices who did imagery training felt less stress; and for fine motor tasks, telling yourself how to do the move works better than pep talk (sport meta-analysis, not climbing).
Under the January 2026 World Climbing rules, lead semi-finals and finals are onsight, with 6 minutes of collective observation beforehand; binoculars and hand-written notes are allowed, photos are not. In boulder, a top scores 25, a zone 10, and each failed attempt costs 0.1. In a video analysis of 2019 World Cup boulder finals (old scoring), almost nobody topped after the 6th attempt. Nerves themselves aren't the problem; your pre-competition routine and your reset between attempts are what you can train.
A Spanish study had 21 climbers who climb 7b–7c+ try short 6c boulder problems well below their level: 18% sent with no preview, 43% after a video, 61% after watching someone climb live. Watching clearly beat not watching; the gap between live and video was not statistically significant. If you want the send, watch someone first. If you want to train the onsight, follow Neil Gresham's levels: the closer to your limit, the more detail you read. Plan every hand move and only the key feet. On the wall, read three moves ahead; once you've picked a sequence, commit instead of going up and down.
A route you've rehearsed goes faster and smoother than the onsight, with lower heart rate and lactate. Start with difficulty: Eric Hörst suggests somewhere between two letter grades below and one letter grade above your hardest redpoint of the past six months. On how long to siege, there are two camps: Hörst says move on if it hasn't gone after 10 tries over 4 days; the long-term camp treats many sessions as normal. Only coaching experience backs either side; no study settles it. Work it in 3–5 sections, solve the crux first, and link from the top down. Rest longer between goes and keep moving: sitting still for 20 minutes actually lowers performance.
A thin layer of chalk helps; too much, or old chalk built up on holds, makes you slip, so brush holds before you try and chalk little and often. One 11-person lab study (Amca 2012) found no direct effect of temperature or humidity on finger friction, but humid heat makes you sweat and makes cold rock collect condensation. Keelung's monthly mean relative humidity sits around 72–80% all year (CWA 1991–2020 normals). Good days at Longdong usually arrive with a pulse of dry, cold air and last a day or two: watch the forecast, live humidity and swell alerts, and go on the day that is dry and calm.
There is almost no clinical research on climbers' hand skin, so most advice here is coaching consensus. If sweating is severe, see a dermatologist: medical treatment usually starts with aluminium chloride antiperspirant, often with tap water iontophoresis added for sweaty palms. Antihydral (13% methenamine), common among climbers, has one controlled trial behind it, a small 1995 study of 60 people, and it must not be used by anyone allergic to formaldehyde or any of its ingredients. For it and for topical methenamine, no licence record was found in the Taiwan FDA's full drug licence dataset (searched 2026-10-19). On days when skin is short, warm up taped, make fewer, better attempts, and stop when your fingertips turn pink or start to weep.