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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

PSA: Most modern gyms have "autobelay" devices that let you climb on your own without a partner. This makes gym climbing a super fun and accessible exercise anyone, even beginners, can do by just showing up to a gym at your convenience.

(If you're a beginner you should still take the 1 hour class first and you will have to pass a belay test. And yes, if you can make the schedule work out with a friend so can belay each other, that's even more fun)

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You still need to be careful. I'm an avid climber. Most autobelay accidents happen because people don't clip in properly. However for me the auto belay cable broke after catching me. Resulted in five minor spinal fractures.

So from my experience I would say at least Google what are the common auto belay manufacturers and only use gyms that have them. True Blue and Perfect Decent are the only auto belays I will touch now.

thanks, I'll investigate my local gym!

update: they use trueblue

That sounds terrible, did you take any legal action?

I did. It's behind me now and more importantly I'm fully recovered mentally and physically.

I don't live in the states so it's not as dramatic legally as you may imagine.

Jesus, what do you mean the cable broke? The rope itself got cut? Even though the device didn't fail?

I'm really averse to the autobelay because I can't feel the "pull" of a human belayer, so this is a nightmare scenario for me.

Then again, I'm sure that the autobelay is safer than the average human, even so, except I really trust my belayer.

My understanding is that our local climbing gym sees most of its non-bouldering accidents from people not clipping into autobelays before they start climbing.

Fyi: autobelay is how most people deck and die in the gym (forgetting to clip)

Other than user error (forgetting to clip) are there any other negatives to auto-belay devices?

Climbing is unique among sports in that you have to trust a random person to keep you alive through the most common action within the sport (falling)

Given its rising popularity, the sport should be safer by default.

Unfortunately, auto belays are also pretty terrible once you’re familiar with climbing - they pull on you and make harder climbing extremely awkward.

They lower the grade by cca 1 level by pulling you up, at least till 6a/6b in french scale. In higher levels I can imagine they also interfere with careful balance and body weight shifting training you away from actual skills, thats why I never saw them on anything harder than maybe 7b and even there it was like 1 or 2 routes in whole gym.

But for easy grades and cca beginners, if you lack a good partner for whatever reason, they are great IMHO.

The pull of an autobelay is negligible, surely. The cable is a bit annoying perhaps but the real problem is that the wall is like near vertical, completely flat. Super uninspiring in my opinion.

Most climbing gyms put auto belays only on flat or slabby ‘beginniner’ areas of the walls because most people using auto belays can’t do much on harder stuff - and also it’s kind of convenient to have your partner ‘take’/hold you on steep stuff sometimes.

Having uncontrolled (but slow) descents onto people’s heads probably also doesn’t help.

Ever seen a spotter help in a struggling bench presser with just a couple fingers?

I mean I can lift my entire bodyweight with just a couple of fingers, but that point aside, this isn't so strange. The bench presser stalls exactly when their muscles are just short overcoming gravity, any extra force--even a couple of fingers--will add upwards momentum. You're not often in this kind of stall condition when climbing, it is much more about leverage and transplanting force through the kinetic chain. Especially since we were discussing balance on typically lightly overhanging flat walls.

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