Climbing grades

It won't be long and you will be faced with a discussion about the difficulty of a route - indoor or outdoor, bouldering or sport climbing. Even though most climbers climb for the fun of it, it seems to be human nature to measure your own progress and compare yourself to your peers using a more or less suitable system. In the climbing world - with all its variety - the rating or grading of a climb is done using so called difficulty grading systems. As you can imagine, there are many different grading systems, some by discipline but most by crag (e.g. different systems in different countries). The basic principle of all difficulty grading systems is, that the harder a climb, the higher the number. This means that in French scale a 6a is harder than a 5b or in HUECO-scale a V8 is harder than a V6 and so on.

How difficult a climb actually is is determined by many factors such as steepness of the route, size and quality of holds, the distance between holds, the difficulty of the movements to reach the next hold, how sustained a route is and so on. Obviously, grades have a subjective component and what feels hard to one person might feel less so to another.