What is Sport Climbing?

Sport climbing means that there are permanent bolts/hardware in the rock, which has the advantage that a minimum of gear is required to safely climb on them (you don’t need to buy as much gear to start climbing in the outdoors, yay!). Since the fixed hardware is specially designed for this purpose, the techniques to learn are much simpler than traditional – “trad” – climbing, and can be comprehensively covered in just one day.

What will we learn?

On this course you will learn to:

Apply indoor lead-belay and lead-climbing techniques to outdoor rock
Return at the end of your session without leaving any of your equipment behind
Inspect fixed sport climbing hardware and anchors before you use them
Recognise the most common sport climbing mistakes and easy methods to mitigate them
Make intelligent decisions in the outdoors.

BONUS – as part of this course you will learn about the humble prusik loop – a very simple, extremely useful piece of climbing equipment that not many sport climbers carry or even own. You will learn just how useful it can be in all sorts of situations, and as a special thank-you for signing up to this course – we’ll give you one to keep!

Where is it held?

This session is held on an outdoor location on real sport climbing routes. The area we climb at and the grade of the routes will be tailored to the group participant’s skill levels.

Is it an all-day course?

The session will take approximately 6 hours of learning time.

Prerequisites

The participants start this session with knowledge of indoor “lead” climbing, and will have a lead-pass from any indoor climbing gym.

Aims of this course

The goal of the session is to first introduce environmental concerns when climbing in the outdoors and how to mitigate these. Every participant will then climb two outdoor sport climbs, each practicing a different skill set (practiced at ground level before leading up). The climbs, in order, are:

thread-and-lower - passing the rope through the fixed hardware and being lowered to the ground
thread-and-abseil - starting the same as the first exercise, but the goal is to abseil down using an ATC+prusik combo instead.
(if time allows) safely bailing from a sport route, without leaving a leaver-biner behind – and when it is appropriate to do this.

Finally, if time allows, participants will learn some additional skills, including belaying from the top of a route (and safely lowering a partner), how to how to prusik up a rope, e.g. to regain a roof after falling off, and how to clip a bolt that is out of reach.

What do we need to own/bring?

The only piece of equipment you need to own before this course is a standard climbing harness suitable for lead-climbing indoors. All other climbing safety equipment is provided by Melbourne Climbing School, however if you own any of the following equipment please bring it along with you – learning with your own equipment is far better and will provide a great start to your outdoor climbing experience!

Helmet *
One locking biner suitable for belaying
One belay device
If you own a chalk bag, rope, quickdraws, slings and any other sport-climbing equipment please let us know prior to the course, and we can plan to teach you using your own gear instead.

* Helmets are worn on all outdoor Melbourne Climbing School courses – but as with all of the other climbing safety equipment, we have these if you don’t own one, and we will not charge any extra for their use on the course.

Closed footwear such as tennis shoes are fine for learning on if you do not own climbing shoes.

Non-climbing gear: You will need to bring suitable clothing and footwear for light hiking, and your own lunch and water for the day (and a camera!).

[C2C April 2026 Cohort] Sport Climbing 1-day Conversion