Hi, I’m Mat.

I’m a professional climber and performance coach based in Scotland. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to understand climbing - not only how to get stronger, but why we perform well sometimes and badly at others, why something can feel impossible one day and manageable the next, and why simply trying harder so often fails to solve the problem.

That curiosity has taken me a long way in my own climbing. I’ve climbed at a high level across sport, bouldering and trad, including Hubble 9a, Serenata 8C and Rhapsody E11. I’m proud of those ascents, but I don’t think the grades are the most interesting part of the story.

Climbing has also exposed a lot of my weaknesses.

I can be obsessive. I put pressure on myself. I’ve struggled with fear, failure, confidence, motivation and becoming too emotionally attached to the outcome of a project. I’ve had periods where climbing has been incredibly fulfilling and others where the thing I cared about most became a source of stress.

Working through those experiences has probably taught me more about performance than the successful periods ever could.

It is also a large part of why I coach the way I do.

I don’t believe that every climbing problem should be answered with more training. Strength matters, and physical training is an important part of my coaching, but performance is affected by far more than finger strength. Movement, tactics, decision-making, confidence, recovery, work, relationships, stress, motivation and the environment around somebody all interact.

My job is to understand enough of that picture to work out what actually deserves our attention.

But coaching is more personal to me than solving performance problems.

I’m quite an emotionally sensitive person, and I care deeply about the people I work with. Over time, I tend to build close relationships with my clients. We obviously talk about climbing, training and projects, but conversations often extend into work, confidence, pressure, motivation or whatever else is affecting the person trying to perform.

I value that.

I’d much rather have an honest conversation about what is really going on than pretend that somebody’s life stops mattering when they walk into the climbing wall.

That doesn’t mean I think a coach should try to fix somebody’s life, and I don’t want clients to become dependent on me. My role is to listen, ask good questions, offer an outside perspective and help somebody make increasingly good decisions for themselves.

Sometimes that means pushing someone harder. Sometimes it means telling them they are capable of considerably more than they think. Sometimes it means reducing their training, changing the goal or accepting that climbing should take a back seat for a while.

I also don’t expect myself to have the right answer immediately. I’d rather form a hypothesis, observe what happens and change my mind when the evidence changes than force somebody into a system because it happens to be the one I know.

That is probably the simplest description of my coaching:

understand the person, understand the problem, and then decide what to do.

I’m still applying the same process to my own climbing. I still get things wrong, change my mind, become frustrated, find better beta and learn things that alter how I coach.

I hope that never stops.

If you work with me, you won’t just receive a training plan. You’ll have someone genuinely invested in understanding your climbing, who will be honest with you, challenge you when I think it is useful, and support you through the less straightforward parts of trying to become a better climber.

If that sounds like the sort of coaching relationship you’re looking for, I’d be happy to hear from you.