Cardiorespiratory demands of competitive rock climbing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rock climbing has become a mainstream sport, contested on the Olympic stage. The work/rest pattern of bouldering is unique among disciplines, and little is known about its physiological demands. This study characterised the cardiorespiratory responses to simulated competition. Eleven elite boulderers (7 male) volunteered to participate (age = 23.3 ± 4.5 years; mass = 68.2 ± 9.7 kg; stature = 1.73 ± 0.06 m; body fat = 10.4% ± 5%). Subjects completed incremental treadmill running to determine maximal capacities. On a separate day, they undertook a simulated Olympic-style climbing competition comprising 5 boulder problems, each separated by 5 min of rest. Pulmonary ventilation, gas exchange, and heart rate were assessed throughout. Total climbing time was 18.9 ± 2.7 min. Bouldering elicited a peak oxygen uptake of 35.8 ± 7.3 mL·kg−1·min−1 (∼75% of treadmill maximum) and a peak heart rate of 162 ± 14 beats·min−1 (∼88% of maximum). Subjects spent 22.9% ± 8.6% of climbing time above the gas exchange threshold. At exercise cessation, there was an abrupt and significant increase in tidal volume (1.4 ± 0.4 vs. 1.8 ± 0.4 L; p = 0.006, d = 0.83) despite unchanged minute ventilation. Cardiorespiratory parameters returned to baseline within 4 min of the rest period. In conclusion, competitive bouldering elicits substantial cardiorespiratory demand and evidence of tidal volume constraint. Further studies are warranted to explore the effect of cardiorespiratory training on climbing performance. Novelty: Competitive bouldering evokes a high fraction of maximal oxygen uptake and prolonged periods above the gas exchange threshold. Climbing appears to impose a constraint on tidal volume expansion. Cardiorespiratory indices in elite climbers return to baseline within 2–4 min.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".