You'll Love This to the Moon and Back
- mfitzger9
- Oct 1, 2018
- 2 min read
The idea for a universal piece of training equipment came to be in 2004 when the U.K. climber, Ben Moon, grew tired of the lack of training equipment for climbers word-wide and took it upon himself to fix the issue by building something for climbers all over.
The MoonBoard is a training board in which all of the holds stay in the same place constantly, making it able to be replicated. With a MoonBoard, people from all over can work on the same problems. This equipment allows people to try new things and share their training problems with others worldwide.
"Technology has played a big part in the evolution of the MoonBoard over the past few years" says Ben Moon.
The MoonBoard company has a smart phone app for users all over. From the app, one is able to share a problem they have created, try problems that other people have uploaded, or use a problem from a benchmark list. The MoonBoard app is always updating and adding new features so that users get the best out of their training session with the board. The app has allowed climbers to form a closer community through their problems. App users can log the grades their working on and their ascents, search problems, and rate others problems along with many other options. This has formed a worldwide climbing community.
"I called it MoonBoard."
The board sits eight feet wide and twelve feet high. It lays at a 40 degree angle. The holds have particular numbers and indicators that allow people worldwide to mimic the original MoonBoard. When climbing, each hold on your problem is shown by a small LED light. Typically, the MoonBoards are a yellow color and jut out from a regular gym wall. The problems on the MoonBoard are constant, unlike routes and problems that are stripped and re-set in a typical gym. This allows users to add new problems and always have the opportunity to train on an old problem.
Ben Moon tells Gym Climber Magazine that he still regularly uses the MoonBoard for training. "The board is a big part of my training...but above all it's great fun."
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