Learn About Different Ropes & Knots for Rock Climbing

Video Transcript

"Climbing rope is your basic attachment to the rock. You're gonna want to make sure to take good care of it when you get one. I recommend buying a, somewhere around a ten and a half millimeter rope, it's gonna be your basic rope. This is a dynamic rope so what that means is that if you fall on it, it's gonna stretch to absorb the shock from falling. It's good 'cause otherwise you could really injure yourself with a sudden stop. So your basic knot is gonna be the figure eight. The way you start that, that way I start that is I make a little loop like this, twist it around one more time and then take the end through the top of that loop. And you'll see when you pull that out it makes a figure eight, that's why they call it a figure eight. So then, now that the knot's set up, you take your loose end and you're going to thread it through your harness, through both the leg loops in the top. Some harnesses have only a top so that's fine too. If you have both leg loops and this you're just going to go through both. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna follow the knot around. So that means you're gonna take this, following the rope, it goes in, comes back out, OK, continues to follow it. You see how that 's matching up the whole way around. Come behind again and then one more time through. With this tied this way there's no way that knot's gonna come out. What you can do is what's called dressing a knot to make it look pretty, so it all fits together nicely. You've got two coming in, two coming out, still looks like a figure eight every where. That 's what you want to look for. There's one more when you have your end, you want about five to seven inches here left over. What you're going to do is called a sport back. You're going to see where these two come over these two lines and just tuck it back in there. It doesn't have to be tight it just keeps it out of your way and makes it easier to untie later. You just pull this out later."