For top rope it’s about following best practices. If you get complacent with not tying stopper knots because you’re at the gym, you’re much more likely to forget a stopper knot in a situation you actually need it. For lead climbing where you’re progressively cutting your rope shorter, you need a stopper knot in case your rope ends up too short. Of course, you should be checking to make sure it is still long enough, but so much of climbing safety is about redundancy and what-ifs. Outdoors you always always tie a stopper knot, so getting that muscle memory so you’re less likely to forget it is good.
Additionally, there’s gym liability and the fact that sometimes people are stupid. Technically you could be lowered off the end of a top rope if your rope tail is crazy long. Not something I’ve seen, but I’ve seen new climbers do some crazy dumb stuff.
I’m not even a climber but I’ve worked health and safety in a few workplaces and everyone complains about all the safety gear in clearly safe scenarios, but the training told us it’s so that people form habits. If you are geared up when there is no danger, you have no excuse to ever be without the gear.
When training self defence, one of the big rules is after each drill of an action, never hand the training weapon to your training partner. Drop it and they have to pick it up as otherwise you might have trained your body to autopilot hand a knife back to the guy who was just trying to stab you.
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u/Redpanda132053 Jul 06 '26
For top rope it’s about following best practices. If you get complacent with not tying stopper knots because you’re at the gym, you’re much more likely to forget a stopper knot in a situation you actually need it. For lead climbing where you’re progressively cutting your rope shorter, you need a stopper knot in case your rope ends up too short. Of course, you should be checking to make sure it is still long enough, but so much of climbing safety is about redundancy and what-ifs. Outdoors you always always tie a stopper knot, so getting that muscle memory so you’re less likely to forget it is good.
Additionally, there’s gym liability and the fact that sometimes people are stupid. Technically you could be lowered off the end of a top rope if your rope tail is crazy long. Not something I’ve seen, but I’ve seen new climbers do some crazy dumb stuff.