Climbing Style: What Science Reveals About Fluid Movement
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
In climbing, fluidity often gets lumped under “style,” as if it were mostly an aesthetic bonus. But a 2025 study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology offers a much sturdier way to think about that intuition. In more experienced climbers, the next move starts leaving its mark on the move already in progress. What we call style may have less to do with some vague notion of grace than with a deeper kind of motor organization, where the body is already setting up what comes next before it fully appears.
At the base of a boulder, the comments come fast: “That looked a little forced.” “You sent it—the successful ascent—but it wasn’t super clean.” “That went up with plenty in reserve.” The language can sound fuzzy, but it is often pointing to something real: the difference between climbing that treats each hold like a separate problem and climbing that already seems to contain the next sequence in the way the climber settles, pivots, or loads a foothold. The study published by Antonella Maselli and her colleagues takes that intuition seriously. In the most experienced climbers, the next move shows up earlier inside the current one.
The right word
The key term in the study is coarticulation. It sounds a little dry, but the idea is easy enough to grasp. In a sequence of movements, the move you are making in the present does not stand alone; it already carries the imprint of the one coming next. The future does not simply follow the present. It starts shaping it.
Applied to climbing, that becomes immediately legible. A hip position is not just about staying close to the wall; it is already preparing a transfer. A hand is not just gripping the current hold; it is also positioning itself for what it will need to allow a second later. A shoulder opens, a foot takes load differently, the torso turns slightly, and suddenly it becomes easier to understand why some ascents do not feel built hold by hold.
That is a good reminder that in climbing, movement starts a little earlier—in route reading, in visualization, in the way the body begins organizing what comes next before the climber even leaves the ground.
That is where this becomes genuinely interesting for climbing. Style stops looking like a decorative layer added on top of performance once everything else is already in place. It starts to look like the visible effect of a different way of preparing movement—earlier, more distributed across the body, and almost certainly more economical.
To test that idea, the authors built a controlled protocol that still stayed close enough to the real logic of climbing for the question to matter. The sample included 21 participants, six of them women. The researchers divided them into three groups in pragmatic fashion: non-climbers, beginners, and experts. They also acknowledge that this classification is imperfect, since real experience sits more on a continuum than in neat boxes.
Participants had to complete 80 trials on an experimental wall, with 10 repetitions for each of the eight routes in the protocol. The task was intentionally simple. The first two foot moves stayed the same, while the next two hand moves varied across several configurations. The goal was to create a sequence stable enough to observe how the body prepares what is about to happen.
One detail in the protocol matters a lot: before each trial, participants had to rehearse the upcoming sequence without actually doing it. That is a good reminder that in climbing, movement starts a little earlier—in route reading, in visualization, in the way the body begins organizing what comes next before the climber even leaves the ground.
To capture the movements, the researchers used 10 cameras and 25 markers placed on the main joints. They then reduced the trajectories using spatiotemporal component analysis, and used LDA classifiers to measure how much the body was already revealing the upcoming movement—especially which hand would move next or what final target would be reached.
The body gets there early
The study’s answer is fairly consistent. Coarticulation shows up in most participants, but it does not appear at the same moment or in the same way across levels of experience. In non-climbers, that preparation tends to emerge closer to the onset of the next move. In experts, anticipation appears earlier and involves more joints. So the difference is not just whether the move succeeds in the end. It is also about when the next step starts existing in the body.
Another result points the same way. Information related to the target often showed up more clearly than information tied only to hand choice. That confirms a very concrete intuition: the next move rarely announces itself in the hand alone. It shows up in a broader set of signals—a pelvis that gets into place, a chest that turns, a foot that takes load, a center of mass already starting to go.
The figures in the paper also tell a story about timing. They show distinct temporal profiles, with beginners moving more slowly through certain events. That points less to raw speed than to continuity. In other words, what sets more experienced climbers apart is not simply moving faster or succeeding more often. It is that the next move gets written into the current one earlier.
Maselli’s study does not arrive out of nowhere. It resonates with several earlier pieces of research on expert coordination in climbing. A 2016 systematic review by Dominic Orth, Keith Davids, and Ludovic Seifert had already described climbing expertise through very concrete signs: fewer prolonged pauses, relatively simple movement paths on the route, and smoother transitions between moves. From that angle, style stops looking like an ineffable extra and starts looking like a more efficient way of organizing continuity.
Seifert’s work on ice climbing adds an equally useful nuance. It suggests that expertise is not about rigidly repeating an ideal pattern, but about using variability more functionally—with less unnecessary exploration and better calibration to the environment. That matters because it helps avoid a common misunderstanding: a strong climber is not necessarily the one who varies the least, but often the one who varies better.
On the perceptual side, research by Vicente Luis-del Campo and colleagues on eye-tracking during route reading rounds out the picture. Holds fixated during pre-planning are more likely to be used later, and experience is associated with more relevant fixations as well as faster climbing. Once again, research lines up with a very ordinary scene from everyday climbing. Reading a route is not a ritual that sits outside movement. It is already part of the movement.
What Maselli and her colleagues add is a clearer link between that preparation and the material reality of the move itself. It is no longer just a matter of saying experienced climbers look better. It is a matter of showing that this organization of the future gets written earlier into the body—even into segments still occupied with the previous move.
What that changes
As with most good studies, part of the value lies in what it does not let us conclude too quickly. The authors list several important limitations: short and relatively simple routes, a small sample, and an imperfect distinction between beginners and experts. Those caveats do not undo the result, but they do keep it from turning into some final truth about style.
The study does not prove that training “style” would automatically produce these coarticulation signatures. It also does not say there is one correct way to climb—a smooth, continuous, canonical form every body should resemble. What it shows is narrower, and probably more useful: expertise changes the way the body distributes anticipation through time.
That is already a lot. It gives us a new way to read a very familiar climbing moment: the point when a sequence finally starts to flow after several burns—attempts—because it has stopped feeling like a string of separate problems. The body is no longer treating the route as a series of local negotiations. It has already started organizing the whole thing.
In climbing, style often gets trapped between two thin meanings. Sometimes it means looking good, as if it were just an aesthetic bonus. Other times it gets reduced to a kind of flourish, tolerated as long as it does not get in the way of performance. The value of the work published by Maselli and her colleagues is that it nudges us out of that trap.
The study does not take anything away from the felt dimension of a beautiful ascent, and it does not reduce fluidity to a number. It simply shows that behind that impression of continuity, there is a deeper bodily organization at work. An expert climber is not just someone who can hold on or pick the right beta—the sequence solution. It is also someone for whom the next hold has already begun.
At that point, the word style starts to shift. It no longer refers only to what the eye admires. It also refers to what the body has already understood.
