WORKSHOPS
Improve Your Technique
My approach to teaching climbing technique is very simple, based upon What, How and When to move. Whatever climbing is to you I am confident it will help you improve. By moving with less energy, making grip when needed and knowing when to move, climbing becomes a curious rather than baffling activity. Climbing is an exhilarating all body challenge that can take you to some great places, but when you start off, even if you’ve climbed before, it can be quite confusing.
Have you ever been baffled as to what to do next on a climb?
Even then when you have worked out what to do – do you still find you can’t do it, can’t work out how to do it?… even though you might feel strong?
The uncompromising experience of pioneering dangerous climbs, sometimes with no prior knowledge, has taught me about confidence and coordination but you can learn from that in a safe environment. Using low power drills, carefully devised for you to understand what I have learnt about mental coordination of movement, a tried and tested method can unlock this for you. I can teach you to recognize when a move will work.
I enjoy sharing my knowledge with people, especially when they learn vertically – in a moment – the expression of surprise a move has worked dawning on their faces mid way through a move they never thought they would do. It is not a once in awhile occurrence. Tongue in cheek, I call it Declumsification.
If you wish to book any of my classes, indoors or out, please get in touch.
LECTURES
What some people have said about Johnny…
“Johnny Dawes is already a legend in British climbing. In 1986, he was responsible for perhaps the most inspired new route in the sport’s recent history, a climb called Indian Face on the Welsh crag Clogwyn d’ur Arddu. A fall from its hardest move would most likely be fatal. But Dawes is much more than a risk-taker; his rich imagination for climbing has left outstanding new routes all over the country, not least on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire where his bold and fluid style pushed the barriers of the possible beyond the imagination of almost all his contemporaries. He is an artist really, with a warrior spirit”
Ed Douglas, Writer and journalist
“Each generation produces a handful of visionaries, people who can see beyond the possible. Whether he likes it or not, Johnny is climbing’s visionary. William Blake with sticky boots.”
Simon Beaufoy, Academy Award winning screenwriter of 127 Hours, The Full Monty, and Slumdog Millionaire
“I’ve been fortunate to climb with some of the best climbers of the last 30 years, Fawcett, Moon, Moffat, McClure, but only when climbing with Johnny have I been baffled and bemused. To watch him climb in his prime was something special, so special that some dismissed it as an oddity, don’t be fooled, the term great is rarely bestowed on anyone in climbing but Johnny is one of the greats.”
Zippy