The University of Texas at Austin’s climbing team, Texas Rock Climbing, is a competitive climbing team that one must try out for in order to join. We’re for the most part typical casual climbers, however (don’t be fooled by our previous national champion status). Most us started climbing in college, having done it for 1-4 years, and climb/compete more as a casual hobby than anything else. Most of us climb 2-3 times a week and are in it mostly recreationally. Thus, especially with the new climbing craze sweeping America, we should be somewhat representative of somewhat average dedicated climbing hobbyists.

There’s much controversy on what factors exactly make one a better climber. Muscularity? Height? Armspan? Starting age? Body fat? “Climbing IQ”? The length of your neck? How do each of these things influence your average climbing grade? But the climbing community, while having much love for obsessing over these things, has a surprising dearth of actual objective data on climbers’ metrics and climbing grades. Sure, there’s the full user ascent data on hardcore outdoor climbers’ website 8a.nu, but said data consists mostly of extremely experienced dirtbag climbers far above the average abilities of most. I’m pretty sure no one I wanted to get a better picture of a typical group of casual plastic-pulling indoor-achieving competition-crushing hobbyists.

Inspired by this blog from a few years back, I figured I’d survey my own climbing team as well. I sent out an anonymous survey, and 33 answered.

Here are the maximum redpoint climbing grades for bouldering and sport climbing (both top-rope and lead) for the team members surveyed. Keep in mind, the data were self-reported, so what constitutes as one’s “maximum” grade is highly subjective. But grading is subjective in general anyways.

n = 33; mean = 5.8; sd = 1.911

n = 31; mean = ~5.11a; sd = 0.8 letter grades



Note: To calculate numerical values in the YDS system I added .0025 to every letter grade higher than ‘a’. So 5.11a = 5.1100, 5.11b = 5.1125, 5.11c = 5.115, 5.11d = 5.1175, and so on.

The local climbing gym we practice at is bouldering-only, so every person sampled answered with bouldering grade. Ceiling height restrictions in the city of Austin have resulted in no decent rope gyms being in the area as of early 2020; consequently, the more avid sport climbers must journey further or to one of the local crags. Some of us hardly sport climb at all, and thus may have reported inaccurate or largely speculative numbers for our sport grades.

With bouldering being the team’s primary area of training/practice, it seems to be relatively normally distributed, and nicely represents an average redpoint grade of about V5.

Males on the team climbed an average bouldering grade of V6.477. Females bouldered an average grade V4.455 . Unsurprisingly, males climbed significantly higher grades in both bouldering and sport.

I wanted to see if bouldering and sport grades were correlated, and unsurprisingly they were. Strongly (r = .816). Looks like if you’re strong then you are strong. True of guys and girls.

Pearson’s test of Bouldering vs. Sport Grade: p = .00000002; r = .816

We also practice speed climbing a decent amount, and most of us are willing to have the several-hour journey to one of several gyms with an IFSC-standardized speed wall (Summit Plano, inSpire Cypress, Momentum Katy) at least once several few months. Some people on the team are too pretentious or insecure to practice speed, but most of us are self-confident enough to climb fast. Well, turns out speed times were not significantly correlating with climbing grade in either bouldering or sport. So strength looks like it isn’t necessarily speed in climbing.

n = 15; mean = 17.07 s; sd = 1.936 s

One member of our team is a former youth competitor whose best speed time is 8.00 seconds on the 15m wall (5.09 seconds on the 10m wall at CCS Nationals in 2019), but he didn’t answer the survey; I’d wager our average speed time would be even lower had my survey reached everyone on the team. Plus he’s an outlier anyway.

What I was really interested in was the correlation of climbing grades with other factors: height, ape index, BMI, how often we climb, and the length of time we’ve been climbing in general.

The first variable here is height. Of course, it makes sense that being taller would make you a better climber, and height was significantly moderately correlated with both bouldering and sport grade.

Bouldering Grade vs Height: p = .023; r = .393

Sport Grade vs Height: p = .022; r = .409

Another factor often talked about in climbing is the importance of one’s Ape Index, defined as your armspan (distance between the fingertips of your outstretched arms) minus your height. For instance, an ape index of +2 inches means your armspan is 2 inches longer than your height. Ape index is usually thought of as being extremely important to climbing ability; the longer one’s armspan is compared to their height, supposedly the better they are at climbing. But, surprisingly, and contrary to my own beliefs about the significance of ape index, I couldn’t find any significant correlation between ape index and bouldering/sport grade on our climbing team.

p = .708

p = .94

Something else I wondered about was the correlation of BMI with climbing grade. After all, it makes sense that the lighter you are, the easier you can haul yourself up by your arms, the harder you can climb. BMI had a significant moderate negative correlation with bouldering grade but, curiously, NO significant correlation with sport grade! Possibly this was due to us not being super experienced sport climbers as a team resulting in less accurate self-assessments of our sport climbing abilities, but this was an interesting result indeed. Being skinny seemed to help with bouldering, but slimming down won’t necessarily help you with sport. I’ve always thought the opposite, but these are the numbers. Also the data are probably not super accurate for the sport grades anyway.

p = .014; r = -.429



p = .07

Next, I looked at the effect of how long one has been climbing. Length of time climbing was significantly and positively correlated with both bouldering and sport climbing abilities, for both genders.

Years Climbing vs. Bouldering: p = .00007; r = .634

Years Climbing vs. Sport: p = .0006; r = .579

So, if you want to climbing harder, then climb for longer.

But should you necessarily climb more ?

One of the questions on the survey asked about how many times one climbs per week, on average. This was highly subjective as there is no strict definition about a climbing session- a single session could be an hour long or three hours, recreational climbing or hard training, at the gym or at crag. So this wasn’t necessarily that accurate. And, the average number of times one climbs per week was NOT significantly correlated with ANY other variable! Not bouldering or sport grade, not speed time, not BMI, not gender.

So, I guess you shouldn’t just blindly climb more frequently to get better (within certain limits, at least). Climb smart and rest well.

One other random observation: Climbing for longer had a small but significant negative relationship with BMI.

p = .023; r = -.400

Also, I do wonder how much our climbing abilities will have declined by the time the COVID-19 quarantines end. Some of us are training at home and/or have home climbing walls, but those are just a minority. I might do another such survey in the future.

So, in a quarantined world lacking objective data on mere mortal climbers who don’t climb V12 and 5.14a, hopefully this article provides some insight on average climbing grades of a group of climbers. Or at least some relief from boredom.

All data were collected by myself and all graphics were created by myself in R. This article does not reflect the opinions nor views of Texas Rock Climbing or its members (other than myself). For more information about the team, please visit the official team website and follow on Instagram and Facebook.