CWA Blog Archive-(Route)Setting Good Standards Create More Empathy In Your Routesetting

(Route)Setting Good Standards Create More Empathy In Your Routesetting

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This article champions empathy as a core routesetting skill, opening with the author's admission that anyone who has set with them knows they talk a lot about feelings. Their process starts by expressing how a route feels to them, then deliberately imagining how it feels for someone much taller, then shorter, then heavier, then a first-timer who's super psyched, then a 15-year veteran having a bad day. Beyond being fun to imagine climbing in a different body than your own, this practice genuinely makes you a better routesetter. In competitive setting, empathy can be the superpower you bring to the crew, and in commercial setting, it's essential to remember that the people climbing your routes won't share your body type or abilities. The article offers five resources and ideas for ensuring sets cater to diverse populations and celebrate all types of climbers in a gym community. It details the first: Athletic Empathy, drawn from a KAYA discussion featuring Tonde Katiyo released during the shutdown, which gave many setters an opportunity to reframe what they wanted to bring to routesetting once gyms reopened. Katiyo emphasizes that learning a new skill isn't just about the physical act or the mental capacity to remember it, but about deeper understanding, a holistic view of skill acquisition that informs more empathetic setting. The throughline is that great routesetting requires deliberately setting aside your own body and abilities to imagine the full diversity of climbers who'll use your routes. Because setters naturally set to their own physical reality, height, reach, strength, they risk creating routes that only work for people like them. By cultivating athletic empathy, systematically imagining taller, shorter, heavier, newer, and struggling climbers, setters create routes that serve and celebrate their whole community rather than a narrow slice of it. The article frames empathy not as a soft add-on but as a concrete, learnable professional skill, drawing on resources like Katiyo's Athletic Empathy talk, that makes setting better and more inclusive. For setters, the message is that good standards and genuine empathy go hand in hand, producing routes that welcome the full range of bodies and abilities in the gym.

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This piece champions empathy as a core routesetting skill. The author deliberately imagines each route as climbers taller, shorter, heavier, newer, or struggling would experience it, since setters naturally set to their own bodies. Drawing on Tonde Katiyo's Athletic Empathy talk, it frames empathy as a learnable professional skill that makes sets more inclusive.