If you’ve ever wanted to learn directly from the world’s best pro climbers, now you can. Altitude Climbing, founded by Magnus Midtbø and Till Gross, is launching courses by Adam Ondra, Daniel Woods, Hazel Findlay, Dave MacLeod, and Alex Megos. That’s just to start, Midtbø told Climbing, but they’re hoping to add more to the roster in the coming years.

Midtbø, 35, hardly needs introduction. With his 2.1 millions subscribers, Midtbø is best known these days as a climbing YouTube influencer, but he’s long been in the spotlight. Midtbø has sent up to 5.15b—Dani Andrada’s Ali Hulk Sit Extension, in Rodellar—and he was a regular World Cup finalist before he retired in 2017, when he opened his first climbing gym, Oslo Klatresenter. He has since opened a few more facilities, started an apparel and chalk company, and recently released his own climbing course, Bouldering Blueprint.

“Climbing gets more fun the better you get,” says Midtbø. “So we’re trying to help people get to a higher level and better understand climbing.”

Midtbø started Altitude Climbing after getting approached by Till Gross, a longtime climber and co-founder of Course Concierge, a platform through which bestselling authors, TED speakers, and influencers offer online courses. With a decade of experience in helping creators produce courses, Gross was keen to help Midtbø do the same. Altitude was officially launched earlier this year.

Ondra’s course ($199), which took a year and half to make and is composed of 45 videos across seven modules—totaling about 10 hours of content—released today. Climbing caught up with Midtbø and Gross to learn more about the platform, courses, and what’s to come. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The Interview

Climbing: What made you want to release online courses?

Midtbø: I feel like there’s nothing like this around. There’s really no other courses on climbing, and I saw a demand for it. A lot of people have been asking on my YouTube channel how they can improve when they get into bouldering. And I had nowhere to send them. So that was my main motivation for starting Bouldering Blueprint. And it’s something that I would have liked to have had when I began climbing.

Climbing: Why not send them to platforms like Lattice?

Midtbø: I haven’t tried Lattice myself, so I don’t really know what it’s like. But I get the impression that it’s more for elite climbers, and that you have to be at a certain level to take those courses. There is a lot of beginner stuff that we all take for granted. So I feel that there’s not really an entry-level course out there. And now, as you know, bouldering has exploded, so maybe there wasn’t the demand for it when we started. But I think now huge groups of people climb between V2 and V5, and that didn’t really exist before. So I guess that was the main thing. Also, I never had a coach—I had to mostly teach myself all this stuff. Norway was not the best country to live in when it came to climbing, so I traveled a lot. I went to Innsbruck to train and learn from the best, and I trained with the Austrian team quite a bit. But there was a lot of experimenting when I started, and I didn’t have any answers. I made a lot of mistakes. And I definitely could have benefited from having a good coach.

Climbing: What were some of those early mistakes?

Midtbø: I mean, a lot. First, people told me that it’s all about volume. So you just have to do a lot of laps and mileage and not really try anything hard. They told me that if you don’t get pumped, you’re gonna move your threshold higher and higher. I kind of doubted that, and when I moved to Innsbruck, I quickly figured out that it’s actually not true: You have to do hard moves. And also the same for technique. You were supposed to climb slowly, like statically and in control the whole way, never cutting your feet. People like Chris Sharma did the opposite, and I was told that was the wrong way of climbing. But I think for my body type, it was a more efficient way of climbing. Now you see that everyone climbs like that.

I learned a lot from my training partners, like David Lama, in Innsbruck. Of course, not everyone has access to train with the best climbers in the world. So that’s why I thought it’d be good to share that information. And obviously, this first course, Bouldering Blueprint, was very entry level, but with Adam, and with other creators, we’re going to make more advanced courses. I feel like these other pros have all learned the same lessons as me from working with the best coaches in the world. And I think that can be transferred to all levels of climbing.

Climbing: It’s crazy how much what we know about training has changed. I was training with many of the same principles when I started out, and it just wasn’t that long ago. Did this changing landscape of training knowledge factor into why you wanted to start this now?

Midtbø: I had said no to a lot of people who approached me about making courses over the years. I didn’t just want to do it to make a quick buck. I wanted the course to actually be good. But when Till reached out, I felt like it was the right match, because he promised me that this was going to be something that I would be proud of. So that was the most important thing.

Climbing: What was the reasoning behind only choosing pro climbers to be the instructors rather than well known coaches?

Midtbø: I think the people that we chose for the first round were very deliberate. We chose Adam because, well, Adam is arguably the world’s best climber. And also, we had a feeling that Adam would be a very good coach. We went to the World Championship in Switzerland last year, and that’s when we sat down with Adam to talk to him about this. Initially, we just asked him, can we create a course with you? And would you be excited about this? At that point in time, we weren’t sure how well it was going to work. We were really asking ourselves, How well can we actually create online climbing courses that effectively teach people? But in the end, I think Adam delivered and did a really good job.

I think part of the reason why Adam is especially good is because he’s not stronger than the rest of the field. What makes him good is his technique. With the way he climbs, power comes second. He thinks that a lot of climbers are strong enough to climb way harder than him, but it’s just that they don’t have the right technique and the right tools. So I think there’s a lot to learn from that. With our team, I think we’re able to get the best out of Adam; you know, ask him the right questions and structure it in a way so that it’s easy for people to understand.

Hazel Findlay has of course made a lot of courses on her own. So she has a lot of experience doing that, and she’s an amazing coach. The same thing for Dave MacLeod, who’s also written books, and he has the most scientific approach to the whole thing. He wrote his scripts himself and is very much in charge of his own course.

We chose some of the world’s best climbers, but we also wanted to choose the people we thought were the best coaches among those world’s best climbers. Daniel Woods’s course is very different from the others, and it reflects his approach to projecting boulders. Most people who start bouldering will not fully understand the projecting process. They don’t know how to structure it, work through individual moves, or put them together. I think Woods is very inspiring to watch. So he’s very knowledgeable in many different ways.

Climbing: What has the process of workshopping the courses been like?

Gross: It’s a two-part process. On the one hand, we always ask the climbers, what is something they’re excited about teaching? What is something they want to pass on? Usually they instantly have a couple of things that they’re already excited about and that they feel they have unique knowledge in. So that’s the first part. But we also surveyed over 30,000 climbers to really understand what people struggle with, what people want to learn. Then we married those two parts and crafted them into a course topic.

Climbing: How many videos are in each course, how long are they, and do they come with homework?

Gross: It depends on the subject of the course. Some courses can be very short. Like if it’s on finger strength, you don’t need a long course for that. But then you have something like Adam’s course on lead climbing, and there are a bunch of different nuances that he’s learned over 25 years. It is a much more extensive course. So every course can vary tremendously in length and in depth. And it very much depends on what problem we’re trying to solve or what outcome we’re trying to get.

The supplemental material varies too. For example, in Magnus’s course, one of the big things that beginners often struggle with is that they’d go to the gym on their own and not know what to do. And then they’d bounce around from one boulder to the next, and when the session was done, it wasn’t fulfilling. So we saw that problem, and we said, let’s give them five different sessions that they can choose from so that their session is more structured. For Adam’s course, that’s not really needed, because the audience is more intermediate to advanced climbers. So that’s the reason why we added different things there.

Midtbø: Also, in every course we have volunteers at different levels. There’s men and women who are different sizes to help do all the demonstrations. Adam’s course used 10 volunteers.

Gross: Our teaching philosophy is three-pronged. First, it’s teach. So this is often direct videos of someone explaining something. The second thing is to demonstrate. And it’s like seeing them on the wall or showing them how to clip in, or whatever. The third part is coaching. This is not a perfect process, and we’re still dialing it in, but one thing we recognized is the need for having lots of different volunteers. Hopefully, if you’re watching the course, you have one or two or three people that kind of match your body type, your weight, your strengths and weaknesses. And then you can see the instructor, such as Adam, coaching the people through problems. Hopefully, you’ll identify the things you struggle with and can utilize the solution that Adam finds for the volunteers that you identify with.

Climbing: Will Altitude ever offer customized training plans?

Midtbø: Yeah, I think maybe in the future. That’s definitely something we’ll have in the back of our minds if it’s something people want.

Gross: Also, you brought up Lattice earlier. Lattice obviously is wonderful—they’re in many ways the gold standard, and Magnus just spoke to Tom Randall earlier this week. We’re looking to partner with other people when possible. So whether we do something on our own, or we partner with other people, I think we’re very open.

Climbing: What other things are in the future?

Midtbø: We might make more courses with some of the same people we’re already working with—with Adam, for example. But our main objective is just to lift up to the sport by having all these courses accessible to people. Hopefully, we’re just going to get better and better at the execution.

Gross: We’re also exploring the possibility of making courses for coaches to develop their own coaching skills.

Midtbø: Route setting courses could also be interesting, because there’s a lot of new gyms opening all the time. But there are not a lot of good route setters out there. Educating more route setters could benefit the sport in a massive way. As you know, the route setters are the most important part of any climbing gym. They’re like the chefs at a restaurant. I think it’s kind of strange that there isn’t any formal education when it comes to route setting. I think we could change that in the future, by having some of the greatest route setters teach.

Climbing: How will these courses be rolled out?

Gross: It depends on how fast we produce the courses and also what the appetite for new ones is. But I think the next course after Adam’s will be Hazel’s, then Alex Megos and Patrick, and then Daniel Woods. We’re shooting all those courses over the next couple of months. But we don’t want to rush those courses—we really want to take our time and perfect each one.