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A climbing wall is an artificially constructed wall with manufactured grips (or "holds") for the hands and feet. Most walls are located indoors, and climbing on such walls is often termed indoor climbing. Some walls are brick or wooden constructions but on modern walls, the material most often used is a thick Plywood with holes drilled into it. Recently, Steelmaking and aluminum have also been used. The wall may have places to attach belay ropes, but may also be used to practice lead climbing or bouldering.
Each hole contains a specially formed t-nut to allow modular to be screwed onto the wall. With manufactured steel or aluminum walls, an engineered industrial fastener is used to secure climbing holds. The face of the Plywood climbing surface is covered with textured products including concrete and paint or polyurethane loaded with sand. In addition to the textured surface and hand holds the wall may contain surface structures such as indentions (in cuts) and protrusions (bulges), or take the form of an overhang, underhang or crack. Some grips or handholds are formed to mimic the conditions of outdoor rock, including some that are oversized and can have other grips bolted onto them.
The first artificial climbing wall in the world seems to be the wall commissioned by the King of Belgium Leopold III in 1937 near his palace. This was documented by Mark Sebille in his book Bel'Wall.
The modern artificial climbing wall began in the UK. The first wall was created in 1964 by Don Robinson, a lecturer in Physical Education at the University of Leeds, by inserting pieces of rock into a corridor wall. The first commercial wall in the UK, The Foundry Climbing Centre, was built in Sheffield in 1991, traditionally England's centre for climbing due to its proximity to the Peak District. The first indoor climbing gym in the United States was established by Vertical World in Seattle in 1987. Terre Neuve in the heart of Brussels (Belgium) was opened in 1987 as well. It is not clear which gym was opened first.
Some other types of walls include slabs of granite, concrete sprayed onto a wire mesh, pre-made fiberglass panels, large trees, manufactured steel and aluminum panels, textured fiberglass walls, and inflatables. A newer innovation is the rotating climbing wall: a mechanical, mobile wall that rotates like a treadmill to match your climbing rate of ascent.
The most common construction method involves bolting resin hand and foot holds onto wooden boards. The boards can be of varying height & steepness (from completely horizontal 'roofs' to near-vertical '') with a mixture of holds attached. These can vary from very small 'crimps', and 'pinches', and slanted-surfaced 'slopers', to 'jugs', which are often large and easy to hold. This variety, coupled with the ability for the climbs to be changed by moving the holds to new positions on the wall, has resulted in indoor climbing becoming a very popular sport.
The first indoor walls tended to be made primarily of brick, which limited the steepness of the wall and variety of the hand holds. More recently, indoor climbing terrain is constructed of plywood over a metal frame, with bolted-on plastic hand and footholds, and sometimes spray-coated with texture to simulate a rock face.
Most climbing competitions are held in climbing gyms, making them a part of indoor climbing.
The grade (difficulty) of the route is usually a consensus decision between the setter of the route and the first few people who climb the route. Many indoor climbing walls have people who are assigned to set these different climbing routes. These people are called or course setters. As indoor climbing walls are often used to check the development of climbers' abilities, climbs are color-coded.
Route-setting is the design of routes by placing climbing holds in a strategic, technical, and fun way that sets how the route will flow. There are many different techniques involved with setting, and up to 5 levels of certifications are awarded to those qualified. Route setting can be defined as the backbone of indoor climbing; without a great set of routes, a gym cannot easily hope to keep a good hoard of climbers.
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