Setting a woody with Yossi
Yossi Sundakov-Krumins, owner and manager of Skywood Climbing is a wiz at setting a woody/spray walls/whatever you want to call them these days. Essentially he knows how to put random holds on a wall better than most. It may sound easy to do, however there’s a few mistakes you can make and some easy ways to navigate around them. This episode isn’t meant to be a complete guide to or a high level breakdown of how awesome these walls are. It’s more a quick tips and tricks chat about how you may want to go about setting yours.
Yossi’s process for setting a woody/spray wall:
Lay out the holds on the ground into hold type
Set features – you trend towards these so right in the middle can be tricky and limit movement possibilities. Set them on the sides. Small or low profile features work best.
Cool holds next. The big crowd pleasers
Jugs
Then find the next biggest holds and put them on next. You don’t want to have no room to put some of these on because you’ve put all the small holds on first. The smaller holds will more easily fit around the bigger ones.
Then the smaller holds and feet
Setting tips:
Get an even spread of all holds types across the whole wall. Pick a square on your board and make sure there’s one of each hold in that square and a hold in each direction of pull.
Make note of the way a hold will be used and where it sits on your board
Be aware of the biases you have in your movement and try to not stick to these types of movements if you want to round out your climbing ability. Try to give yourself options with other hold types, styles of movement etc.
Features add a great amount of diversity to your wall. Lower profile work best, big ones can dominate a wall and reduce possibilities
Screwing holds on rather than fully tnuting and bolting everything will make it cheaper. The holds you use will need to be able to be screwed on for this to work. Many holds these days do have the ability to be screwed on, though many aren’t. Check!
If you don’t have a lot of holds, frequent resetting will make your board feel fresh .
Follow Skywood Climbing on Instagram @skywood_climbing and @yossiclimbs