The third smaller meeting of this project took place between the 20th and 22nd of May, in Zagreb (Croatia). The aim of this meeting was to discuss and find some ways of increasing the number of children who are able to get acquainted with climbing. In this context, we wanted to find good approaches how to motivate climbers to volunteer in their climbing clubs. We have also implemented the plan we made at the second meeting in the Czech Republic, to make short learning videos.
On Saturday we visited the climbing gym from our Croatian project partner, Penjačka dvorana Fothia. There we filmed videos to help trainers and instructors prepare training sessions for children of different age groups. We did some videos on how to do proper exercises for warm-up, stretching, and injury prevention. We prepared and filmed them for different age groups. It was our intention to make these tutorial videos short and understandable. We tried to find more specific climbing exercises that targeted muscles used in climbing and prevented injuries.
As mentioned, the aim of this meeting was to discuss and find some ways of increasing the number of young climbers. We invited a group of children from another sport to their first climbing experience on the climbing wall Fothia. In the beginning, they had a short lecture about climbing and bouldering. They had 1,5 h of climbing training with different exercises and climbing games. At the end of the training, they had stretching exercises for preventing muscle aches and fatigue. Their first impression of climbing was better than good, and they were quite happy to try something new. This could be a good way for the climbing community to gain new members and evolve since it doesn’t take a lot of (time and money) investment from climbing clubs. We think climbing clubs should be encouraged to do such events regularly.
On Sunday morning we had a longer meeting, where we discussed the upcoming climbing camp in Slovenia. We’ve done almost all of the preparations and prepared all of the necessary documents for the participants of the camp. We also did a review of the project until this point and made a plan for all the outputs that we have to deliver at the end of the project.
In the afternoon we visited the new drytooling setup in Zagreb, where we tried climbing. Drytooling is one of the disciplines that is rapidly growing, and there is room for youth to be involved. Since it’s just gaining popularity there are not a lot of gyms and we agreed that there should and probably will be more in the coming years.
More info about the meeting and results is in the attached report.
