Building A "Woodie" AKA A Climbing Wall

This is basically an indoor training board/ climbing wall. These things sprang up from the cellars of Sheffield in the early 90’s as training for climbing started to really take on a new serious meaning. Routes became increasingly difficult, boulder problems harder and if you wanted to climb them, you had to train. Hard.

Visiting a public climbing wall is one really good way to train to keep fit, its sociable, the routes are regularly changed (hopefully) and you have fellow climber with which to add some motivation. However, visiting them is becoming increasingly expensive and if you live in an area which doesn’t have a suitable venue close by then travelling for an hour each way can be de-motivating. So why not build your own? Well the problem is often space, you can build a small board with enough holds to get some training benefit but often if its only small you must be very, very motivated to retain interest. Also, you must ensure the building can support the weight of the wall and person pulling on the holds, chalk dust can accumulate and if it’s in the house can be a bit of a pain. Putting something in the cellar is great (if you have a cellar) but these places are often damp and it’s not great practice to be hanging all that extra weight off the floor joists.

So why not build a separate, dedicated facility in the garden? A Space Two modular building will enable you to tailor the construction to support the extra weight requirements of the wall, it can have less glazing to increase wall space and therefore usable training space. Because its isolated from the main house the issue of dust and chalk wont annoy the other household members, you can have the motivational tunes turned up as loud as you want and if you wish you could create a private subscription for likeminded people who want to improve, or you might want to just train for the enjoyment of it.  Whatever the motivation, making it into a dedicated, separate part of the house means you are much more likely to use it in a structured way, rather than just lean your bike up against it.

Mutant strong Malcolm Smith on a cosy training facility.