What is Velocity and how is it calculated?

Velocity refers to the rate at which you send climbs. This is measured by the average number of attempts or sessions to a send at a given grade level. An increase in Velocity means you’re sending climbs in fewer attempts or sessions than before, which indicates an increase in total climbing ability. In the short-term, sending faster or slower is not always a sign of success or failure, however. Changes in Velocity can indicate coming breakthroughs, performance peaks, or overloading and fatigue.

Why track Velocity?

Tracking Velocity across a season for a given grade or grade band allows us to quantify progression. For instance, progressing from 3 sessions needed to send at a particular grade to 1 session means you’re able to send climbs at that grade 3 times faster, and therefore can also accumulate experience and fitness 3 times faster than before.

Climbers who are about to break through to a new grade usually show an increase in session velocity at the grade immediately below the new grade.

It is important to track Workload and Velocity together because an increase in both Workload (your capacity) and Velocity (your speed to a send) indicates peaks and performance progression. Decreases in Velocity either means fitness is dropping off from not training with enough intensity or volume, or overload and fatigue are accumulating from a lack of adequate rest.

Due to the variation in the complexity between individual climbs and variation in how recovered an athlete may be day-to-day, we recommend tracking velocity across weeks or even months and not reading too much into session-to-session changes.