The difficulty of a climbing hold was attempted to be quantified based on fractal dimensions. The difficulty was confined to the change of a single value, namely the inclina- tion of the grip surface, by increasing the overhang of the wall. Sixteen climbers of different experience levels participated in this experiment and had to climb a route equipped with an instrumented hold repeatedly until they failed at a specific degree of overhang. The force- time signals served to calculate the Hausdorff dimension. Subsequently, the Hausdorff dimension was normalised to force and time by a power fit. The normalised Hausdorff dimension increases significantly with the difficulty of a climbing hold, which is – in this study – the inclination of the grip surface. Weaker climbers produced larger normalised Hausdorff dimensions. If the climber fails at the instrumented hold, the force-time signal shows smaller normalised Hausdorff dimensions. Fractal dimensions are a suitable tool to quantify the difficulty of a hold if applied with caution.
CITATION STYLE
Konstantin Fuss, F., & Niegl, G. (2008). Quantification of the Grip Difficulty of a Climbing Hold (P142). In The Engineering of Sport 7 (pp. 19–26). Springer Paris. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-2-287-09413-2_3
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