Benchmarks, and why they matter

Anyone who has spent time on a Moonboard or a Kilter has run into the word benchmark, usually attached to a little star or badge next to certain problems. They look the same as any other problem on the board, but climbers treat them with a strange reverence. Send a benchmark and people nod. Spray your own problem and grade it hard and people raise an eyebrow. The reason is simple once you understand it, and benchmarks are one of the most useful tools a board has for telling you whether you are actually getting better.

What a benchmark actually is

On a board, anyone can set a problem and put a grade on it. That is the joy and the curse of board climbing. The joy is endless fresh problems. The curse is that the grades are wildly inconsistent, because every setter has a different idea of what a given grade should feel like, and people tend to grade their own problems generously.

A benchmark is a problem that has been climbed by a large number of people and broadly agreed to be the grade it claims. The community effectively votes with their attempts, and the problems that hold up as fair, classic and well-set get marked as benchmarks. They are the problems you can trust. When a benchmark says it is a certain grade, that grade means something, because thousands of climbers have weighed in rather than one optimistic setter.

A normal board problem is one person's opinion of a grade. A benchmark is a crowd's. That is the whole difference, and it is everything.

Why the grades on boards drift

It helps to understand why board grades are so slippery in the first place. A few reasons:

• Setters grade their own work. It is human nature to think your own problem is harder than it is, and soft-grade your sends or stiff-grade your projects.
• Style bias. A problem that suits the setter feels easy to them, so they grade it down, when to everyone else it is desperate.
• No moderation on most problems. Anyone can publish anything, with any grade, and most problems are climbed by very few people.
• Board grades are not crag grades. A board grade and the same number outside often feel quite different, which our piece on how board grades compare to the gym and outside gets into.

Against all that noise, benchmarks are the signal. They cut through the inconsistency by being the problems enough people have climbed to agree on.

How to use them for real

The reason benchmarks matter to you, beyond trusting the number, is that they make a brilliant yardstick. Because they are stable and trustworthy, they let you measure yourself honestly over time in a way that random problems never could.

The simple way to use them is this. Pick a few benchmarks at a grade just above your current level and treat them as your projects. Come back to them across a training block. As you start ticking benchmarks you previously could not touch, you have proper evidence you are getting stronger, not just the warm feeling of sending soft problems you set yourself. They are an honest mirror.

You can also use them to compare across time and even across boards, because a benchmark at a given angle is roughly the same challenge today as it was last year. That stability is gold for anyone trying to track progress, and it pairs well with the habit of why logging your board sessions pays off.

A sensible way to work them

• Warm up properly first, because benchmarks at your limit are hard on cold fingers.
• Pick two or three benchmarks at the grade you are chasing, not ten.
• Work them across sessions rather than burning out on them in one go.
• Log your sends so you can see the trend over weeks, not just days.
• Resist the urge to abandon a benchmark for a softer self-set problem when it gets hard. The honest grade is the point.

Do not let them become a stick to beat yourself with

A word of caution. Benchmarks are an honest measure, and honest measures can sting. Because the grades are trustworthy and often a touch stiff, a benchmark can feel harder than the same grade elsewhere, and it is easy to feel like you have gone backwards when really you have just met a fair grade for once.

Use them as a tool, not a verdict. Progress on a board is rarely a smooth line, and a benchmark that shuts you down for weeks then suddenly goes is completely normal. The board is a demanding environment by design, and the angle alone makes everything feel harder. Keep some perspective, mix benchmarks in with fun problems and other training, and treat the cold honesty of the grade as useful information rather than a judgement.

Trust the crowd, track the truth

Benchmarks exist because board grades are noisy and climbers wanted a way to cut through it. They are the problems the community has agreed to trust, which makes them the best honest yardstick you have for measuring real progress on a board. Use them to project, to track yourself over a season, and to keep your own grading honest. Send a benchmark at a new grade and you have earned it, because the whole crowd vouched for that number. That is worth a lot more than a star next to a problem you set yourself.