PhysWall inverts a closed, non-linear physical law at a single measurement point — and refuses when the inverse is not unique.
Fifteen metres, five degrees overhanging, twenty handholds and eleven footholds. Designed in 2007 and not altered since, which means a time from Bali in 2025 and a time from a World Cup in 2011 are measurements of the same thing. Almost nothing else in sport works like that.
The wall is a known height. A climber of known mass raising themselves up it does a known amount of work against gravity. Divide by the time and you have power per kilogram — a figure that can be compared directly against cycling, sprinting and stair-running, where it is the standard measure.
⚠ Worked out in your browser. This tool is not an inversion of a physical law, so there is no server answer to sign — it is a speed and power calculation, and it says so rather than implying otherwise.
⚠ worked out in your browser
⚠ This is a floor, not an estimate. Gravity is the only thing counted. Horizontal movement, holding on, the false-start reaction and every inefficiency in between are not, and each costs energy this number does not see.
Move a control and the answer below updates. There is nothing to press.
The holds are bolted where they are bolted. A 155 cm climber and a 190 cm climber make the same twenty moves, over the same 13.1 metres, to the same holds. What differs is how far each one has to extend to do it.
| Height | Vertical reach | Each move, as a share of it |
|---|
A climber at 155 cm extends to roughly four-fifths of their reach on every one of the twenty moves. A climber at 190 cm extends to around two-thirds. Neither is stronger. The wall is simply a different route for each of them.
The men's record is 4.64 s and the women's is 6.10 s — a 31% gap in time, against 9.5% in the 100 metres and 11.4% in 100 m freestyle. Those are all time gaps, which is the fair comparison; on this wall a time gap and a power gap happen to be the same number, because power here is just height over time. But the progression does not hold still:
2017 5.48 / 7.38 34.7% 2021 5.20 / 6.84 31.5% 2023 4.98 / 6.24 25.3% 2025 4.64 / 6.10 31.5%
A 9.4-point spread on a route that has not changed since 2007. A fixed wall against a moving gap means the gap is coming from who is climbing, not only from what they climb. And four records is four records — the tail of a distribution, not its middle.
Height is part of it and cannot be most of it: elite women in this discipline are around 7% shorter than the men, not 31% weaker. Reach, move count and hold spacing all point the same way, and none of them is measured here. This page can tell you what a time implies about power. It cannot tell you what share of the gap is physiology and what share is a wall built to one set of proportions.
None of that affects the number at the top of this page. The wall is a known height, a time is a time, and the power that follows needs nothing from any of this. What is open is one claim — whether the wall suits some builds better than others — and it is marked open rather than answered.
Anthropometric studies of elite male climbers report heights by discipline, and they point the way you would guess:
lead 173.3 ± 6.3 cm boulder 176.1 ± 7.6 cm speed 177.6 ± 6.4 cm
Speed climbers are about 1.5 cm taller than boulderers and 4.3 cm taller than lead climbers. So the wall does appear to sort by height, and the effect is real and small.
And two things stop that being the answer. Speed climbers are also 3.5 kg heavier, with a higher BMI and broader shoulders — so the sorting could be on power and build rather than reach, and these figures cannot tell the two apart. And within speed climbing itself, height does not separate international from national athletes at all. What does is body fat: 6.5% against 9.4%.
That last one is worth sitting with. Once you are inside the elite group, height stops predicting anything — which is exactly what you would see if the sorting had already happened on the way in.
A 2025 morphology study compared international speed climbers against national-level ones. What separated them was lower fat mass, greater lean mass, and greater skeletal breadth — across the shoulders, the upper arm and the thigh. Height was not among the differences.
And the same study puts it plainly: traits considered important in other climbing disciplines were not found to be relevant in speed climbing. Between disciplines, speed climbers are taller. Inside the discipline, taller does not mean faster.
Which is what you would see if the sorting on height had already happened before anyone reached this level — and it means the 1.5 cm difference is a fact about who takes up speed climbing, not about who wins it.
The figures above are men, and for women the published work does not agree with itself. One review concludes that stature may have less influence on performance in female speed climbers. A study of five elite women found the opposite — height correlating with race time at R² = 0.89. And a World Cup anthropometric survey found female finalists were significantly shorter and lighter than the semi-finalists they beat, while men showed no difference at all.
Five athletes. Seven athletes. Three conclusions. That is not a contested result; it is a sample size problem, and only about a third of participants in climbing research are women.
If reach were the advantage, that is backwards. And if the effect is sex-dependent, then explaining a gap between the sexes through height gets weaker rather than stronger.
There is also a plain data problem underneath it: only about a third of participants in climbing research are women, and the one height figure available for elite female boulderers rests on seven athletes with a spread of ±11.6 cm. That is not a small sample. It is barely a sample.
⚠ So the honest position is narrower than it was an hour ago. The male figures point one way, the female figures point the other, and neither set is large enough to carry the 31% record gap on its own. And half of what would settle it is already public: the IFSC records athlete height and arm span with every result, back to 1991. That analysis has not been run here. The other half — move-by-move splits, which would separate a climber who is slower everywhere from one who loses time only on the moves that are furthest for them — does not leave the finish button.
Maturity: validated. one closed law, and the only constant is CODATA gravity.
A checking tool, not professional advice. It tells you what a measurement does and does not support; what to do about that is your decision.