This summer (2026), I’ll be sitting my arholiad cymraeg, or my first Welsh exam. At 41, it’s been quite some time since I’ve sat an exam like this but – much like almost every other adult in the UK – I can sure remember the stress from my last ones! Whether it’s GCSEs, A-levels or a degree, exam stress is something we all feel and something that can stick in the mind forever.
The good news for us climbers is that our recreational activity actually provides us with a golden opportunity. While climbing doesn’t have to be stressful, it’s certainly easily possible to make it so. And no, I’m not suggesting we start skipping clips or soloing routes [legal disclaimer: do not start skipping clips or soloing routes for these purposes] we can artifically increase pressure in order to be able to develop and hone our skills to handle stressful situations.
In this piece, I’ll investigate a little about stress, exams and some of the other theory that will help us better understand what we’re going through. Then, we’ll get into the meat of it all: how do we possibly use climbing to get better at dealing with it?!
A Quick Note Before We Begin
All of these resources are provided to you completely free of charge. I’m a big believer of helping people however I can. Sadly, they are not free to create, often taking a substantial amount of time and research to create. If you would like to help support me, you can Buy Me A Brew, with whatever donation you wish by clicking the button here.
The Link Between Stress and Performance
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that being overly stressed can have a detrimental effect on our performance; we’ve all had those moments where we’re so anxious, frantic or panicked that we simply can’t remember anything! The good news is that this is normal.
It’s all linked in with something called ‘arousal’ which is intereste in how alert we are. When we’re stressed, our ‘arousal levels’ are said to be very high.
It can work the other way, too. We need a cetain amount of ‘arousal’ in order to get the cogs turning. If I started running through times tables or books along the lines of ‘the cat sat on the mat’ with a GCSE student, chances are they’d be a bit bored and would quickly stop paying attention.
To get that optimum performance, we need to find that optimum. It’s all descibed by two academics from over 100 years ago named Robert Mearns Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson.
Yerkes-Dodson Curve
The Yerkes-Dodson Curve is incredibly well known and has really stood the test of time!
Shaped as a bell curve, it demonstrates how there is an optimum amount of arousal right in between being ‘underwhelmed’ and being ‘overwhelmed’. We could call this whelmed I guess, but I don’t think that’s actually a word. Maybe, maybe not but either which way, that’s what we’re aiming for.
This video describes it very well:
So if we’re looking to find that happy middle ground, the question is how do we do that? Trial and error with exams seems a little risky as we often only have one shot! But how about if we can use our climbing sessions to develop a bit of a plan…
Climbing Can Help With Your Exams
Preparing for a climb can often be remarkably similar to preparing for an exam. Granted, we need to pick the right climbs (you might not develop any strategies from climbing a load of 4a boulder problems for example) but if we can pitch it just right, the climbing wall can become a training ground for our exams later.
There are many ways this can manifest. Below are a list of suggestions. Notice that they’re not ALL applicable, nor do they all work together. It’s up to you to read through and develop your own plan that works for you.
Climbing as an Escape from Stress
Firstly let’s address the obvious one. Exam periods can last for a good few months and can feel relentless. While we want to do the best we can, non stop revision can push us really high up on the Yerkes-Dodson Curve.
We all need an escape every now and again to let the pressure off and let us drift further left on the curve. For us as climbers, that can be heading out for a climb!
The downside is we need to be careful not to go too far and have too much escape (that’s how I failed my first degree) having occasional time away from exam revision might actually increase our productivity!
Exercise is Good for the Brain
There is much data out there that suggests that physical effort and mental effort are very closely linked. Birmingham City University (nothing to do with the football team) have an entire section of their website dedicated to exams and revision and suggest in this piece that “taking time to fit in some movement can have huge benefits”.
Meanwhile, a meta-analysis study (in other words, a study that looked at the results of a load of other studies and collected them all together) by Zhang, Li and Wang (2022) looked at 4,115 articles on the link between exercise and anxiety to conclude that “twenty minutes of aerobic exercise at any intensity performed two to three times a week for at least four weeks can reduce test anxiety levels”.
If climbing is your thing, it might be that a bit of time going climbing might be just the tonic to get the mental juices flowing too. We just need to be careful to remember that it’s the revision that’s the important bit and not get too carried away with the exercise but perhaps climbing might be quite a nice way to combine both…
A Good Example of Work-Rest
Another meta-analysis study by Albulescu et al (2022) found that regular breaks can be much better for both wellbeing and for performance. While it can be quite nuanced at times, it does demonstrate that a little bit of work followed by a little break can be a good way of reducing the arousal levels and allowing us to go again.
If we think about it, this aligns nicely with climbing. Think of a bouldering project for a moment and how does it work: we have a think about the climb; jump on and have a go; fall off; rest for a bit and go again. Often, in climbing, the rest periods are longer than the climbing time!
For those particularly keen (and of course, able to climb independently) combining revision with a session at the climbing wall might be just the tonic. Be warned, though, that this can easily drift into, erm, just having a climbing session. You’ll need to have a lot of self control but it is possible.
Pinching Ideas
Of course, there’s no escaping the fact that we’re going to be putting ourselves through the ringer sooner or later. No matter what we do, if we’re invested in the outcome, that exam is going to be stressful. But then, if we think about it, so are many climbs.
If you think back to the last time you were faced with a stressful climb – whether that’s a lead climb, a comp, a project boulder – ask yourself if there were any tricks you used to calm down? Do you have any tricks and techiques that you use to calm down before you start climbing? (I’m not going to give ideas, I don’t want to affect your thinking)
Many of these strategies might not be transferable but I’m sure several of them could be; possibly needing a little adapting. The good news is that they’re probably things we’re already quite well practised at doing. Shuffling them from the wall to the exam hall might not be that difficult but could really help reduce those stress levels.
Practice in ‘Psychologically Safe Stressful Environments’
That’s a bit of a mouthful but if we break it down, it’s fairly straightforward. Where our exams give us one shot, our climbing sessions allow us to ‘stress test our stress test’.
There are very many techniques that you can use – from breathing techniques to visualisation – that are easily found with a good Google search. The issue is that they can be very individual: some of them will work for one person but not for another.
The climbing wall can be a good place to figure out which ones you like and which ones don’t work for you. If we can find a climb that has some stress to it [Note: make sure it’s safe from physical danger] we can employ our trick and practice it in a similarly stressful environment.
By the time we get to exam time, our techniques should be nicely refined and good to go for real.
Building Confidence Through Success
Confidence can be a major factor in success, etiher for an exam or on a climb. We can also transfer confidence from one to the other: if I succeeded on the challenge there, I can succeed over here too!
One seminal theory in building confidence is called Self Efficacy (Bandura, 1977) and has four parts:
- Personal Experience – “I’ve done this well before, I can do this again”
- Vicarious Experience – “If they can do it, I can do it!”
- Verbal/Social Persuasion – positive self-talk or encouragement from others
- Emotional State – those rituals and routines we discussed to reduce anxiety and arousal
Each of these are easily practiced through your climbing sessions AND are transferable to the exam hall.
Photos from the day I climbed Jerry’s Problem 7c+/V10, Sheep Pen, back in 2016. I felt on top of the world that day, like I could achieve anything!
Summary
It can be so tempting, when it comes to time for school exams, to say ‘right, time to knuckle down, stop playing and get to work!’ but that might not necessarily be the best strategy. Yes, we need to knuckle down but it can be a bit more complicated than that.
Sport, and specifically climbing, can be excellent to either give us a little break from relentless revision, to stimulate the brain chemically or even as practice for standing at the door of the exam hall.
We do need to be careful not to take things too far the other way, and fail a three year Physics degree from spending too much time ‘recovering from stress’ (he says from first hand experience) but with some self discipline – something else learned from climbing – we can potentially use our passion to give ourselves an even better chance of achieving top grades. In every sense.
If You Enjoyed That…
All of these resources are provided to you completely free of charge. I’m a big believer of helping people however I can. Sadly, they are not free to create, often taking a substantial amount of time and research to create. If you would like to help support me, you can Buy Me A Coffee, with whatever donation you wish by clicking the button here.
References/Further Reading
Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., & Tulbure, B. T. (2022). “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PloS one, 17(8), e0272460. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
Birmingham City Univerity (n.d.) Four ways exercise can relieve exam stress. Retrieved from: https://www.bcu.ac.uk/exams-and-revision/wellbeing/exercise-to-destress
Zhang, X., Li, W., & Wang, J. (2022). Effects of Exercise Intervention on Students’ Test Anxiety: A Systematic Review with a Meta-Analysis. International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(11), 6709. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116709