Start Climbing Outdoors: A Video Series

We worked with Mammut UK and UK Climbing to produce this four-part video series helping climbers move from indoors to outdoors.

So you know your way around your local climbing gym. You’ve progressed nicely up the grades and you feel slightly less intimidated asking the grouchy dude on the shoe hire counter a question on technique. But what’s next? How do you progress to getting out there in the fresh air, up on your local crag?

Indoor climbing has undergone a surge in popularity over the last few years. Its inclusion in the 2020 Olympics has certainly helped, producing stars like Shauna Coxsey and Alberto Ginés López. So has the proliferation of nailbiting Netflix docu-series and viral Instagram videos, which do an excellent job of showing off climbing’s flashier side.

But while first getting down to your local wall is one thing, transferring those indoor climbing skills to the real-life, outdoor crag is another. You need more gear, the same grades don’t necessarily apply, and the holds aren’t as convenient or comfortable. For many amateur climbers, this ultimately proves prohibitive and often means they either stop progressing or go off climbing altogether before they’ve had a chance to experience some of the most rewarding aspects of climbing.

As part of their 2023 marketing strategy, Mammut UK wanted to address this. Working with Mammut UK and UK Climbing’s teams, we helped develop the idea for a series of videos aimed at climbers wanting to take that leap from indoor to outdoor climbing. The four-part series would act as a primer for outdoor climbing, explaining fairly fundamental things like gear, crag etiquette, and warming up, hopefully showing that climbing outdoors isn’t as scary as it’s sometimes made out to be.

You can take a look at the first episode below and watch more from the whole series here on UK Climbing’s website.