Climbing Safety - How to Back-up Belay

Hi! My name is Jason Montecalvo with Sportrock Climbing Centers and today were learning how to climb safely in an indoor climbing gym. Remember, climbing is inherently a dangerous activity and you want to seek professional help by certified instructors prior to engaging in this activity.

Now, Id like to discuss using a back-up belayer. When we start to belay, its always a good idea as a beginner to have three people on the system: a climber, a belayer, and a back-up belayer, in order to ensure our safety when were first learning how to belay. The idea of a back-up belayer is to be the second brake in case, I make a mistake as the main belayer with my brake hand, if my brake hand comes off and my climber were to take a fall, my back-up belayer is going to do the braking for me. Now, to properly get a stance in back-up belaying what we need is to have this person be down or one or two knees with the brake end of the rope in both hands. At that point, Im going to belay the way that I have been taught and what my back-up belayer is going to do is feed the break out as I am feeding it as well maintaining a little bit of slack in my break line here. So, I can belay myself safe safely. If I were to make a mistake at any point and take a break hand off and my climber were to fall, the first thing that my back-up belayer wants to do is, take those two hands that are on the rope and bring them directly to the floor if they are not already there. That is going to create an extremely big bend, a brake bend on our belay device and catch our climber for us.

Something our back-up belayer is going to want to do when we are lowering the climber is, feed the rope back in the opposite direction, again, maintaining a little bit of slack here in the break line so I can lower my climber on my own but again if I have a problem and I make a mistake my back-up belayer will again have those two hands that never leave the rope and go directly down to the floor again making once again a very big emergency break. That can ensure our safety as well the climber, a belayer, and back-up belayer, utilizing this system properly. Next, wed like to see this full system in action.