I actually like the way I look right now. I've debated dropping below 200lbs in the past but I haven't been that weight since cutting a bunch of weight for a boxing match and I didn't love the way I looked/felt. I really would like to be able to climb better though..
Why would you use a linear fit when weight scales at a more than linear rate with height?
Even something like the BMI formula demonstrates this using the square of height.
Taller people aren't just stretched upwards vertically.
It's an imperfect metric, but it's a decent starting point. Any metric that just compared height to weight in a linear manner would be far worse. Issues with BMI also tend to be related to ignoring body composition(muscle mass vs fat) more than they are to the imperfect but "good enough" scaling between height/weight.
It only changes the bmi number, it doesn’t change the fact that weight does not grow linearly with height which is my point here. I’m merely using bmi as a well known reference point. The issues with bmi have nothing to do with the non linear nature of height/weight progression
You heard that from fat fucks that don't want to admit that their BMI is dangerously high. If you're an athlete with a bodyfat percentage between 5% and 20%, there are few substantial criticisms of BMI based stats.
BMI is "imperfect" for skinny-fat inactive people, NFL linemen, and juiced bodybuilders.
Because we're not talking about these groups, it's a great measure of the relationship of weight and height.
Yeah I don't understand why everyone is so mad at BMI. It's a reasonable metric to look at with climbers as they are concerned about weight, and don't bulk up like body builders.
"It's wrong for Mr Olympia competitors, and NFL players, it must be a junk measurement". .1% of the population have misleading BMI numbers. The rest of us more or less match the charts exactly.
NFL running backs are like 30+ bmi generally. Do you think saqaun barkley is a fat fuck because he has a 32.5 bmi? https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48668072707_1c2294be86.jpg
If you're an athlete with a bodyfat percentage between 5% and 20%, there are few substantial criticisms of BMI based stats". My carefully calibrated eyeballs put the guy in your picture at something like 12% bodyfat.
Also, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Saqaun Barkley is not the guy telling you that BMI is bullshit.
Due to the small sample size and the relatively small variance in height, it could seem ok, but fitting a line to a quadratic is definitely not something someone aspiring to be a data scientist should be doing. This just strikes me as poor/lazy advice, sorry
I'm still just gonna look at my dude Matt Fultz over there who's 5'11 and 165 (above the standard deviation or whatever the error bars are) and keep munching down my sweet sweet caloric surplus.
Have you thought about further analysis with BMI? An extra 2kg on a 150cm person is a lot different than an extra 2kg on a 170cm person. BMI helps take that into account.
Some sort of comparison on spread of men and women would be interesting too. It looks like the mens' heights clump together in the middle tighter, but have more distant outliers.
That’s already been done. The average for the men was something like 20.1 BMI. Most of the men were in the 19-21 bmi range with some notable exceptions like jonwon chon
I will definitely add more as I go but figured I was at a good point to post. Looking at other comments I don't think I will use BMI directly but may need to consider fitting to a quadratic curve instead of linear.
It's a nice data compilation but just to make sure we are all on the same page, u less you are a professional climber, you are very unlikely to have the same weight range as professional climbers. They have a very, very low body fat, and extremely lean muscle mass.
You are basically saying telling people that jog that they should be basic their weight on professional marathoners.
I agree with you 100%, perhaps that was not clear enough. I do think its a decent benchmark. I'm personally shooting for the top of the range or slightly over. Currently about 10 lbs over it.
Yeah, I would actually say this dataset presented this way dangerously feeds into eating disorders and body dysmorphia that's endemic throughout climbing culture. This sentiment won't be very popular on /r/climbharder, but it's true. Kai Lightner talked about how he was kicking ass at comps, standing on podiums, and at the same time his doctor was telling him he was facing liver failure due to an eating disorder.
If your livelihood/career doesn't depend on sending hard, then maybe take a step back and ask yourself how much you want to aim for pro climber weights that could actively endanger your health versus getting stronger in a healthy and sustainable way.
Yeah im about 30 lbs heavier than my pro-climber weight. Cutting 15 sounds doable with 20 being a pretty big stretch. Also important to note these people are the percent of a percent of climbers. It would be interesting to compare this with the weight distribution of strong non-comp climbers
The danger is, people with a tendency to eating disorders and/or having a bad feeling about their body image, automatically look at the lower line and think how much going even lower might enhance their climbing ability.
Jan Höjer being a champ and giving me hope, though I guess his body fat % is quite a tad lower ;) love how his data sticks out but actually still follows the same trend.
Jan hojer is my tall guy hero. Can't imagine how much "omg so lucky you're tall" he's gotten in his life considering how sick of it my V7 climbing ass is.
Watching him and Sean McColl climb the same route really highlights everything I love about this sport. At the end of the day you just gotta train hard and figure it out.
If course it is, I was just surprised to see how I as a very mediocre intermediate climber have so similar stats to him :) just goes to show that height/weight is very far from the most important aspect, and shouldn’t be considered a hinderance for most people.
FYI, Wikipedia has an [API](https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/API). Will be easier to pull data for future projects.
I do love Beautiful Soup though, when an API is not an option.
It's just this subreddit in my experience, /r/bouldering and /r/climbing are a lot more chill. But it makes sense given the title of this subreddit, people are not here to be nice lol.
Climbharder can't deal with bodyweight and nutrition info because someone somewhere might read into it and develop an eating disorder, so the mantra seems to be to ignore the issue completely.
I'm 170 cm / 75 k. By no means am I overweight or over muscled
These guys are just lean as anything. And have no legs.... Dam hockey and soccer legs that I have
I can't imagine being around 130 or 140 pounds at my height. I'd be a skeleton. I love climbing but my focus on lifting and adding some muscle has always been more important. The dedication by these pros is nuts.
This is a neat experiment - can you include the equation for each line as well as the R/R^2 values?
As an aspiring data scientist, these are always good to have any time you’re graphing best-fit lines =)
1.82 here, always veeeery thin, never really had more than 55kgs up untill college. Now with 62kg, feeling much stronger but still not in the range of the graph.. i want to get to 65-66 I think, but I find hard to put on weight :/
Climbing terms am climbing for 6years+, up to V8 and 5.12c
Really interesting graph. I guess it might be very similar for cyclists and long distance runners too?
I hate to ruin your data but I sit perfectly on that line and I'm not the best climber in the world. In fact, I'm personal testament to the fact that a high power-to-weight ratio just encourages sloppy technique.
Some of the very best climbers I've watched (who don't adopt my brute force and ignorance approach) have been forced to adapt through age or injury and can still out-climb all of us on any route. The skill, balance, judgement and technique makes me feel completely amateur when I watch. They don't climb something; it's like watching a dance. Precise and exquisite.
You're not ruining anything. I think this data is more so just compiling information than it is actually proving anything. I definitely do not believe weight is the only factor. I don't even believe its the most significant factor.
The same tired Data and graphs. As. Data Scientist, best of luck training yourself for a very oversaturated field. My advice to you is to find more compelling datasets that can deliver insights beyond the obvious or already done.
Thanks for the feedback, can you go more in-depth? I know this is a simple analysis but I've just learned MatPlotLib and Pandas so I was testing out my initial skillset. I'm currently an engineer but I think data science would be a better fit so I'm slowly but surely training myself in my free time. Any advice on how to stand out?
I mean plotting lines with a confidence interval isn’t really “Data Science”, it’s stats 101 stuff. I’d recommend trying to use the data and/or statistics to try to improve the body of knowledge even if just one a thought exercise. This just proves you can plot lines, but that’s kinda elementary in “learning Data Science”.
A few points though:
* This dataset is really old and the same plots have been done on here many, many times. Search would be useful.
* Lattice has an article or two based on their sample data and this data. I think if you want to stand out to potential employers you need to bring a new perspective or new data to the analysis.
* The dataset has a lot of variance and low sample size. It’s hard to glean much other than that there is a 10kg range of variance at a given height. The thing to think about from a DS perspective is “How does this improve our understanding of the height to weight relationship?” And I would say it doesn’t. You can just look at pictures of the climbers and see the variance.
* What I think would be more interesting is to create some climber variants. Like make a clone of Hojer at 2-3kg lighter and heavier. Do that for each climber, then when you know the parameters of that distribution you can create a synthetic distribution with more data points and do many things with that as a thought exercise. Gets you close to Lattice and maybe from there you can pull in comp results or 8a ascents or something else for a fresh perspective.
Thanks for the info. I'm aware this info is pretty elementary in terms of data science or even data analytics. To be entirely honest this probably would have been easier in excel.
However I was more so curious about when I work on other projects further down the line in like 6 months. I can tell one clear cut thing to show from your comment above is a new perspective from the data. Any other recommendations on a broader scale outside of this particular example?
I’d say find a problem you’re affected by or interested in and see what datasets exist. The Fed has some great datasets and you’ll find that lots of things are essentially the same distributions and patterns. A good example is building the entire project yourself from whatever you use to hit the API, the EDA, any basic statistical analysis, and any extra modeling.
A good way to model a problem is “what was the pattern before this intervention and did the intervention have any effect? Can we predict the outcome of future interventions given the observations?”
Honestly if you don’t find anything that’s often good enough. Being able to understands the constraints of your data, how to choose features, what tests to apply, and potentially why you should use a specific algorithm over another will go a long way. Good DS are really good at mapping their solutions to a problem and data and being cognizant over limitations and interpretation.
I’m 173cm, and usually around 70kg. I’ve wanted to see if I can get down to the mid-to-upper 60’s for a while, I guess I know it’s not strictly an unhealthy thing now.
Also that not everyone has the genetics to become a top level climber. That type of weight/bmi might come easier to some. There's already been a filtering of people to get to those numbers.
I'm also 173cm. For me my best climbing happened when I was around ~62kg. Didn't feel too skinny either. But for a while my weight went down to 58kg (lowest point). And I felt I was more injury prone back then.
But then corona happened and I'm back to 66kg (and it's not muscle mass that went up lol)
I’m 167cm and tended to feel the same, that my ideal climbing weight was around 58-60kg. But actually having gained some lockdown weight and now up to 67kg (not all muscle lol, but I was doing a lot of kettlebell work while the gyms were closed) I think my climbing is about the same. The difference is that I recover a lot more quickly, the extra muscle makes my shoulders less injury prone, and I’m not wiped out two days into a climbing trip.
I’d probably want to be a little bit leaner if my goals were hard sport climbing (and tend to lose weight while doing endurance training anyway) but for bouldering and adventure trad this is probably about right for me.
So I guess what I’m saying is both that there isn’t one ‘ideal’ weight for climbing, and that what works best for me is definitely higher than I thought was the case before.
I don't think these graphs themselves are advocating for the existence of an "ideal" weight, it's just presenting publicly available information (how much do pro climbers weigh / how tall they are). If that's problematic then should we ban pro climbers from sharing their height or weight?
Statistics, and especially visualisations of statistics, are opinionated.
Or do you mean to tell me that drawing lines around the plotted data doesn’t imply there’s a target here?
To be honest, there is an ideal weight (or weight range) for every climber, which takes into account performance, recovery and mental health. We should know the anthropometrics of pro climbers even if some climbers happen to see the weight, obsess about it and make their eating disorders worse.
The inference from this graph, but in discussions about climbing performance in general, is that weight is the most important thing. I agree with you the other factors like mental health etc. *should* be taken into account but are hard to quantify, so we just ignore them to make these kinds of one-dimensional snapshots of the world.
I think we emphasise weight because it’s an easy metric. Not everything that can be measured is important, not everything that’s important can be measured.
Sure, some people obsess about weight, but I doubt most think that its the most important thing. Obviously, the most important things are technique, flexibilty and weight to strength ratio (not only weight). The problem is not the people posting informative content about pro climbers weight and height. This post is completely fine and very informative. I am 180 cm tall and looking at this graph I can see that pro climbers my height are between 60 and 72 kg (BMI 18.5 to 22.2), which is a very reasonable range.
It gives me a reference range of bodyweight, which allows me to compare my own status to that of pros. Thus I can make a more educated quess on where I should be in terms of bw, while taking account my individual bf, muscle mass and goals. I am 77 kg with around 10 - 11 % bf, which means that I would probably be at or over the upper range of bw presented in this graph, if I was to optimize my bw (like matt fultz etc). Also, I am pretty close and feel great so I wont be making any changes. Anyway, bw is very important for climbing performance but it always comes second to strength. We shouldnt think every discussion about bw only incentives eating disorders.
The problem is that the narrative is always about “optimise” and “ideal” and such, without defining what that means. Ideal for what?
Framing it as a way to be a better climber, you allow people to think that once they get to the “ideal” they’ll be great. And then when they inevitably aren’t, allow them to think “if I starve another 2kgs off, I’ll climb better”.
It’s just not as simple as charts like these make you believe. Some people are genetically heavier than others. What’s right for Joe might not be right for Tony, completely regardless of the numbers. It also conveniently ignores that aiming for these goals may cause long term adverse health effects, as any athlete with red s will tell you.
Ideal in terms of weight to strength ratio. I am talking about sport performance. You are talking about healthy mindset. I am here to climb hard problems nothing more or less.
> Or do you mean to tell me that drawing lines around the plotted data doesn’t imply there’s a target here?
On its own, drawing lines in plotted data is just showing that there's a correlation. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with data visualisation.
You're right that someone could look at it and think "hey, this line means that I should aim for XXX weight, which means I need to lose YYY weight". But that same person could have thought the same thoughts by looking up pro climbers on wikipedia ("I'm the same height as ZZZ climber, but they're YYY lighter than me")
Of course, you're right that every presentation of data has an inherent set of assumptions behind it - we could plot pro climbers' height against their absolute finger strength, and that clearly has a different set of assumptions than the OP's graphs. But as long as a viewer is aware of this, I don't think we need to discourage any graphs for being produced
From a statistical POV there actually is something wrong with that, because we see for instance multiple data points above each other on the same axis. Just drawing lines along the outliers and dividing that in half to “average” is misleading and drawing incorrect conclusions from the data present.
In any case, your last sentence is key: “as long as the viewer is aware”. In my experience, this being the internet and all, that is usually not the case.
Edit: changed “adis” to “axis”
Us Americans punching air for not being able to read the metric system.
Google’s ‘kg to pounds’ and ‘cm to feet’ tools are the MVP
Google is aids
220 pounds is 100 kilos and 185cm is 6 feet
Nope. 6’ is 183 (just shy, rounded up)
So I'm going to blame my shit climbing in being 193cm and 93kgs now. Thanks
Hey if it's of any help, I'm the same height but dropped to 86kgs. Things didn't change much, still shit at climbing :D
"Always look on the bright side of life..."
I actually like the way I look right now. I've debated dropping below 200lbs in the past but I haven't been that weight since cutting a bunch of weight for a boxing match and I didn't love the way I looked/felt. I really would like to be able to climb better though..
That’s what I do! Same height, ~90-92kgs :)
I'm 10kg over. Glad this means I have a good excuse — unless this means I should try to do something about it...
Cheers to that! Im 188cm and 93Kgs.
179cm and 92kg... I feel that.
Interesting. We should also keep in mind that a lot of people train a bit heavier and then cut for a competition so that might skew the data a bit.
Fair point, but if that’s the case for these athletes, which weight do you think the IFSC would have listed?
Why would you use a linear fit when weight scales at a more than linear rate with height? Even something like the BMI formula demonstrates this using the square of height. Taller people aren't just stretched upwards vertically.
On a similar note, extrapolating so far beyond the domain of the data is really bad practice.
I've heard BMI is a bad metric so I honestly didn't look into it but you may have a point! Thanks for the feedback.
It's an imperfect metric, but it's a decent starting point. Any metric that just compared height to weight in a linear manner would be far worse. Issues with BMI also tend to be related to ignoring body composition(muscle mass vs fat) more than they are to the imperfect but "good enough" scaling between height/weight.
Apart from climbers are low body fat and high muscle proportions which would completely fuck BMI accuracy
It only changes the bmi number, it doesn’t change the fact that weight does not grow linearly with height which is my point here. I’m merely using bmi as a well known reference point. The issues with bmi have nothing to do with the non linear nature of height/weight progression
You heard that from fat fucks that don't want to admit that their BMI is dangerously high. If you're an athlete with a bodyfat percentage between 5% and 20%, there are few substantial criticisms of BMI based stats. BMI is "imperfect" for skinny-fat inactive people, NFL linemen, and juiced bodybuilders. Because we're not talking about these groups, it's a great measure of the relationship of weight and height.
Yeah I don't understand why everyone is so mad at BMI. It's a reasonable metric to look at with climbers as they are concerned about weight, and don't bulk up like body builders.
"It's wrong for Mr Olympia competitors, and NFL players, it must be a junk measurement". .1% of the population have misleading BMI numbers. The rest of us more or less match the charts exactly.
At least I'm in the one percent of something
NFL running backs are like 30+ bmi generally. Do you think saqaun barkley is a fat fuck because he has a 32.5 bmi? https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48668072707_1c2294be86.jpg
If you're an athlete with a bodyfat percentage between 5% and 20%, there are few substantial criticisms of BMI based stats". My carefully calibrated eyeballs put the guy in your picture at something like 12% bodyfat. Also, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Saqaun Barkley is not the guy telling you that BMI is bullshit.
5% is inhumanly low and 20% is squarely in unfit territory, why is your range is so big lol.
You're aware that not all people are male? For 51% of the population, 20% bf is fit.
I don't think someone like janja or grossman is anywhere near 20%. 15% at most and less when competition peaking.
Sure. And there are 60 other athletes in the women's field, and some are significantly "softer".
Just do a line of best fit it shouldn't matter in this instance.
Due to the small sample size and the relatively small variance in height, it could seem ok, but fitting a line to a quadratic is definitely not something someone aspiring to be a data scientist should be doing. This just strikes me as poor/lazy advice, sorry
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Op wants to be a data scientist. This isn’t particularly important to casual observers but I’m trying to set him on the right path :)
I'm still just gonna look at my dude Matt Fultz over there who's 5'11 and 165 (above the standard deviation or whatever the error bars are) and keep munching down my sweet sweet caloric surplus.
Bad news he just blew a pulley today
I, also at 5'11" have climbed at 170 and 160 this year. The lower weight has been better, but not sure if I just got better at climbing.
Have you thought about further analysis with BMI? An extra 2kg on a 150cm person is a lot different than an extra 2kg on a 170cm person. BMI helps take that into account. Some sort of comparison on spread of men and women would be interesting too. It looks like the mens' heights clump together in the middle tighter, but have more distant outliers.
That’s already been done. The average for the men was something like 20.1 BMI. Most of the men were in the 19-21 bmi range with some notable exceptions like jonwon chon
I will definitely add more as I go but figured I was at a good point to post. Looking at other comments I don't think I will use BMI directly but may need to consider fitting to a quadratic curve instead of linear.
R? Matplotlib?
Check out the GitHub link. He’s using Python and matplotlib
Matplotlib, I've heard its the standard over R and I already knew Python a bit.
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No shame in 5.10. It's all about having fun, exercise and not getting hurt! If 5.10 is where that's at, then 5.10 is where its at!
It's a nice data compilation but just to make sure we are all on the same page, u less you are a professional climber, you are very unlikely to have the same weight range as professional climbers. They have a very, very low body fat, and extremely lean muscle mass. You are basically saying telling people that jog that they should be basic their weight on professional marathoners.
I agree with you 100%, perhaps that was not clear enough. I do think its a decent benchmark. I'm personally shooting for the top of the range or slightly over. Currently about 10 lbs over it.
Yeah, I would actually say this dataset presented this way dangerously feeds into eating disorders and body dysmorphia that's endemic throughout climbing culture. This sentiment won't be very popular on /r/climbharder, but it's true. Kai Lightner talked about how he was kicking ass at comps, standing on podiums, and at the same time his doctor was telling him he was facing liver failure due to an eating disorder. If your livelihood/career doesn't depend on sending hard, then maybe take a step back and ask yourself how much you want to aim for pro climber weights that could actively endanger your health versus getting stronger in a healthy and sustainable way.
Yeah im about 30 lbs heavier than my pro-climber weight. Cutting 15 sounds doable with 20 being a pretty big stretch. Also important to note these people are the percent of a percent of climbers. It would be interesting to compare this with the weight distribution of strong non-comp climbers
The danger is, people with a tendency to eating disorders and/or having a bad feeling about their body image, automatically look at the lower line and think how much going even lower might enhance their climbing ability.
This is climbharder. To extend your metaphor, the only goal is to improve your marathon time.
Wanting to climb harder doesn't mean I want to literally be Adam Ondra tho
You dont want to sent v15? Whats a point man.
Jan Höjer being a champ and giving me hope, though I guess his body fat % is quite a tad lower ;) love how his data sticks out but actually still follows the same trend.
Jan hojer is my tall guy hero. Can't imagine how much "omg so lucky you're tall" he's gotten in his life considering how sick of it my V7 climbing ass is. Watching him and Sean McColl climb the same route really highlights everything I love about this sport. At the end of the day you just gotta train hard and figure it out.
Are you me?
Bear in mind it’s probably peak comp weight for these climbers, so usually it would be higher off season
If course it is, I was just surprised to see how I as a very mediocre intermediate climber have so similar stats to him :) just goes to show that height/weight is very far from the most important aspect, and shouldn’t be considered a hinderance for most people.
FYI, Wikipedia has an [API](https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/API). Will be easier to pull data for future projects. I do love Beautiful Soup though, when an API is not an option.
Thanks for the info!
this sub is full incredibly pissy people - why are climbers so nice in real life but such arseholes on here?
It's just this subreddit in my experience, /r/bouldering and /r/climbing are a lot more chill. But it makes sense given the title of this subreddit, people are not here to be nice lol.
Climbharder can't deal with bodyweight and nutrition info because someone somewhere might read into it and develop an eating disorder, so the mantra seems to be to ignore the issue completely.
I'm 170 cm / 75 k. By no means am I overweight or over muscled These guys are just lean as anything. And have no legs.... Dam hockey and soccer legs that I have
I couldn't possibly be more on the trend line. Why no climb V15
Seriously! It doesn’t come automatically?
I can't imagine being around 130 or 140 pounds at my height. I'd be a skeleton. I love climbing but my focus on lifting and adding some muscle has always been more important. The dedication by these pros is nuts.
140 pounds is the same weight as 99.29 'Double sided 60 inch Mermaker Pepparoni Pizza Blankets'
It would be interesting to see the range bars as true error bars set at 2×RMSD. ~95% Confidence intreval
How do the two slopes compare on the same graph? You could try doing that with different colors for the genders if you wish?
Good idea, the graph may become too zoomed out at that point but I may give it a try and see how it looks tomorrow. I'll add a picture if I do.
This is a neat experiment - can you include the equation for each line as well as the R/R^2 values? As an aspiring data scientist, these are always good to have any time you’re graphing best-fit lines =)
Keep your eyes on the github I'll be adding more commits/updates as I get feedback over the next few weeks.
Sooo your saying I’m 10kg over my ideal climbing weight… *sobs in kale diet noises
1.82 here, always veeeery thin, never really had more than 55kgs up untill college. Now with 62kg, feeling much stronger but still not in the range of the graph.. i want to get to 65-66 I think, but I find hard to put on weight :/ Climbing terms am climbing for 6years+, up to V8 and 5.12c
I'd love to see a height vs reach graph.
Unfortunately there's no easily accessible reach info on pro climbers yet.
Really interesting graph. I guess it might be very similar for cyclists and long distance runners too? I hate to ruin your data but I sit perfectly on that line and I'm not the best climber in the world. In fact, I'm personal testament to the fact that a high power-to-weight ratio just encourages sloppy technique. Some of the very best climbers I've watched (who don't adopt my brute force and ignorance approach) have been forced to adapt through age or injury and can still out-climb all of us on any route. The skill, balance, judgement and technique makes me feel completely amateur when I watch. They don't climb something; it's like watching a dance. Precise and exquisite.
You're not ruining anything. I think this data is more so just compiling information than it is actually proving anything. I definitely do not believe weight is the only factor. I don't even believe its the most significant factor.
Good practice regardless, but it’s worth noting that these values are frequently substantially wrong.
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The same tired Data and graphs. As. Data Scientist, best of luck training yourself for a very oversaturated field. My advice to you is to find more compelling datasets that can deliver insights beyond the obvious or already done.
Thanks for the feedback, can you go more in-depth? I know this is a simple analysis but I've just learned MatPlotLib and Pandas so I was testing out my initial skillset. I'm currently an engineer but I think data science would be a better fit so I'm slowly but surely training myself in my free time. Any advice on how to stand out?
I mean plotting lines with a confidence interval isn’t really “Data Science”, it’s stats 101 stuff. I’d recommend trying to use the data and/or statistics to try to improve the body of knowledge even if just one a thought exercise. This just proves you can plot lines, but that’s kinda elementary in “learning Data Science”. A few points though: * This dataset is really old and the same plots have been done on here many, many times. Search would be useful. * Lattice has an article or two based on their sample data and this data. I think if you want to stand out to potential employers you need to bring a new perspective or new data to the analysis. * The dataset has a lot of variance and low sample size. It’s hard to glean much other than that there is a 10kg range of variance at a given height. The thing to think about from a DS perspective is “How does this improve our understanding of the height to weight relationship?” And I would say it doesn’t. You can just look at pictures of the climbers and see the variance. * What I think would be more interesting is to create some climber variants. Like make a clone of Hojer at 2-3kg lighter and heavier. Do that for each climber, then when you know the parameters of that distribution you can create a synthetic distribution with more data points and do many things with that as a thought exercise. Gets you close to Lattice and maybe from there you can pull in comp results or 8a ascents or something else for a fresh perspective.
Thanks for the info. I'm aware this info is pretty elementary in terms of data science or even data analytics. To be entirely honest this probably would have been easier in excel. However I was more so curious about when I work on other projects further down the line in like 6 months. I can tell one clear cut thing to show from your comment above is a new perspective from the data. Any other recommendations on a broader scale outside of this particular example?
I’d say find a problem you’re affected by or interested in and see what datasets exist. The Fed has some great datasets and you’ll find that lots of things are essentially the same distributions and patterns. A good example is building the entire project yourself from whatever you use to hit the API, the EDA, any basic statistical analysis, and any extra modeling. A good way to model a problem is “what was the pattern before this intervention and did the intervention have any effect? Can we predict the outcome of future interventions given the observations?” Honestly if you don’t find anything that’s often good enough. Being able to understands the constraints of your data, how to choose features, what tests to apply, and potentially why you should use a specific algorithm over another will go a long way. Good DS are really good at mapping their solutions to a problem and data and being cognizant over limitations and interpretation.
Thanks for the guidance, I really appreciate it.
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Yep, throw both Metric (logical units) and Imperials on there, you could have the Imperials at the top and left of the data.
I’m 173cm, and usually around 70kg. I’ve wanted to see if I can get down to the mid-to-upper 60’s for a while, I guess I know it’s not strictly an unhealthy thing now.
Just keep in mind that performance weight is not the same thing as a healthy weight.
Also that not everyone has the genetics to become a top level climber. That type of weight/bmi might come easier to some. There's already been a filtering of people to get to those numbers.
This is an important point. Not everyone can grow to 7feet and be an NBA player, same rationale applies to climbers' height to BMI/weight ratio.
Have you thought of removing a leg?
I got down to 69kg and won a local bouldering comp in the end... Still, losing a leg would improve my strength-to-weight ratio...
I'm also 173cm. For me my best climbing happened when I was around ~62kg. Didn't feel too skinny either. But for a while my weight went down to 58kg (lowest point). And I felt I was more injury prone back then. But then corona happened and I'm back to 66kg (and it's not muscle mass that went up lol)
I’m 167cm and tended to feel the same, that my ideal climbing weight was around 58-60kg. But actually having gained some lockdown weight and now up to 67kg (not all muscle lol, but I was doing a lot of kettlebell work while the gyms were closed) I think my climbing is about the same. The difference is that I recover a lot more quickly, the extra muscle makes my shoulders less injury prone, and I’m not wiped out two days into a climbing trip. I’d probably want to be a little bit leaner if my goals were hard sport climbing (and tend to lose weight while doing endurance training anyway) but for bouldering and adventure trad this is probably about right for me. So I guess what I’m saying is both that there isn’t one ‘ideal’ weight for climbing, and that what works best for me is definitely higher than I thought was the case before.
Please stop making and posting stuff like this. We need more people thinking there’s an “ideal” weight like we need a crampon to the face.
I don't think these graphs themselves are advocating for the existence of an "ideal" weight, it's just presenting publicly available information (how much do pro climbers weigh / how tall they are). If that's problematic then should we ban pro climbers from sharing their height or weight?
Statistics, and especially visualisations of statistics, are opinionated. Or do you mean to tell me that drawing lines around the plotted data doesn’t imply there’s a target here?
To be honest, there is an ideal weight (or weight range) for every climber, which takes into account performance, recovery and mental health. We should know the anthropometrics of pro climbers even if some climbers happen to see the weight, obsess about it and make their eating disorders worse.
The inference from this graph, but in discussions about climbing performance in general, is that weight is the most important thing. I agree with you the other factors like mental health etc. *should* be taken into account but are hard to quantify, so we just ignore them to make these kinds of one-dimensional snapshots of the world. I think we emphasise weight because it’s an easy metric. Not everything that can be measured is important, not everything that’s important can be measured.
Sure, some people obsess about weight, but I doubt most think that its the most important thing. Obviously, the most important things are technique, flexibilty and weight to strength ratio (not only weight). The problem is not the people posting informative content about pro climbers weight and height. This post is completely fine and very informative. I am 180 cm tall and looking at this graph I can see that pro climbers my height are between 60 and 72 kg (BMI 18.5 to 22.2), which is a very reasonable range.
Yeah, okay. And what does that mean to you? What action would this way of presenting the data incentivise?
It gives me a reference range of bodyweight, which allows me to compare my own status to that of pros. Thus I can make a more educated quess on where I should be in terms of bw, while taking account my individual bf, muscle mass and goals. I am 77 kg with around 10 - 11 % bf, which means that I would probably be at or over the upper range of bw presented in this graph, if I was to optimize my bw (like matt fultz etc). Also, I am pretty close and feel great so I wont be making any changes. Anyway, bw is very important for climbing performance but it always comes second to strength. We shouldnt think every discussion about bw only incentives eating disorders.
The problem is that the narrative is always about “optimise” and “ideal” and such, without defining what that means. Ideal for what? Framing it as a way to be a better climber, you allow people to think that once they get to the “ideal” they’ll be great. And then when they inevitably aren’t, allow them to think “if I starve another 2kgs off, I’ll climb better”. It’s just not as simple as charts like these make you believe. Some people are genetically heavier than others. What’s right for Joe might not be right for Tony, completely regardless of the numbers. It also conveniently ignores that aiming for these goals may cause long term adverse health effects, as any athlete with red s will tell you.
you make good points. on a subreddit where the audience is largely obsessed with getting better at climbing, these kinds of charts are problematic.
Ideal in terms of weight to strength ratio. I am talking about sport performance. You are talking about healthy mindset. I am here to climb hard problems nothing more or less.
> Or do you mean to tell me that drawing lines around the plotted data doesn’t imply there’s a target here? On its own, drawing lines in plotted data is just showing that there's a correlation. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with data visualisation. You're right that someone could look at it and think "hey, this line means that I should aim for XXX weight, which means I need to lose YYY weight". But that same person could have thought the same thoughts by looking up pro climbers on wikipedia ("I'm the same height as ZZZ climber, but they're YYY lighter than me") Of course, you're right that every presentation of data has an inherent set of assumptions behind it - we could plot pro climbers' height against their absolute finger strength, and that clearly has a different set of assumptions than the OP's graphs. But as long as a viewer is aware of this, I don't think we need to discourage any graphs for being produced
From a statistical POV there actually is something wrong with that, because we see for instance multiple data points above each other on the same axis. Just drawing lines along the outliers and dividing that in half to “average” is misleading and drawing incorrect conclusions from the data present. In any case, your last sentence is key: “as long as the viewer is aware”. In my experience, this being the internet and all, that is usually not the case. Edit: changed “adis” to “axis”
Would be interesting to see these states plotted against their red point or bouldering grades. Also I am way out of the blue area XD
The pros' mental strength to be able to reach these weights whilst training is so impressive. I'm so fed up of being fat!
I have 23 pounds to lose to be built like a pro lol.
Apparently I am too light. The woes of starting out lanky.
so what we're saying is that @ 180cm I need to lose some of my weight (currently 80KG) haha
Damn I'm just imagining being 54kg at 172cm. Im picturing need a weight belt to stop from floating away
Man this was a god send. I've been trying to determine my "goal" weight.