I'm here with Mina today for a reflections episode.

I've got a couple of questions for you, Mina.

The first one.

What is an area of your climbing that you still struggle with,

and how do you hope to or plan to work on this moving forward?

Okay, so for me actually, it's a reasonably kind of broad thing.

It's actually basic strength and conditioning.

And that sounds like a really kind of non-specific answer, but I think I'm one of those people that got into climbing as a kid and was climbing for many, many years, but was never

really that good at any other sports, not that I didn't try, but I wasn't particularly kind of

talented in any other sports. And so I think I missed that kind of general body strength development

that you might get through doing other sports and then finding climbing.

So I feel like I've always gotten away with having relatively strong fingers,

good hip flexibility, good movement skills because I've climbed for a long time,

good tactics, you know, that kind of stuff. But actually my like raw body strength, like my core, my shoulders, my leg strength are pretty appalling for how like well I can get up things sometimes. So that's something

that I'm I still struggle with, but I'm making a really concerted effort at the moment to tackle it.

I've tried before in like fits and starts and some reasonably concerted efforts before.

But at the moment, because I'm postpartum, my son is seven months old, it's almost like an opportunity, or I'm trying to frame it as an opportunity

to start from scratch and build a more solid foundation. Because I think when you're climbing at your

best and you're always trying to find that like top one, two percent, you'd think, oh, well,

you know, go back to basic strength. But I don't know, I tended not to because I was always trying to like eke out these top bits of other areas of my performance,

maybe improving things that I was already good at and ignoring this kind of gaping hole of, oh, well, I could actually just have some better kind of core strength and basic body conditioning. But in a way,

like pregnancy and birth and all the rest of it knocks you back so much that you have this

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