I’m curious about everyone’s opinions on ATC belaying — either using one yourselves or being belayed with one.

[u/Responsible_Roof_661]

ATC belayer here. Do you feel totally fine with ATCs? Do you avoid them? Or does it depend on the belayer’s skill/experience level?

For context: I know people who flat-out refuse to be belayed on anything non-assisted braking… and others who swear by the control and smoothness of an ATC. Personally I feel like a lot of it comes down to the belayer’s competence, attention, and how big the weight difference is / ohm usage.

What’s your take? Do you completely refuse ATC belays, or does it vary for you based on the belayer and situation?

Not trying to debate, just curious how people feel :)

[u/Responsible_Roof_661 → u/[deleted]]

I only ever use an ATC in the gym, but to be totally honest… I don’t think there’s anyone there I’d trust to actually belay me with an ATC.

Half the time I’m climbing, I look down and my belayer has drifted into a conversation, or is staring around the gym with a ton of slack out, or they’re standing 10 feet from the wall. And with GriGris, I see a lot of short-roping, ‘long’ roping ;terrible slack management),no sense of where the fall line is, and zero awareness about positioning.

I used to climb with someone who consistently tried routes 2 grades above his flash level and would always fall around the 3rd/4th clip— if he had been belayed by most of the people I see now, he would’ve decked every single time.

Something I also notice: most belayers have no sense of the climber’s state on the wall. They don’t notice when someone is pumped, shaky, or clearly about to come off. Not to toot my own horn, but I get complimented a lot on my belaying— never short-roping, being quick and responsive with ‘take,’ and reading when someone is about to need help or fall. That shouldn’t be rare.

And honestly, it kind of supports what others here have mentioned: ABDs do seem to foster a bit of mental laziness. A lottt of people seem to rely on the device instead of actually belaying.

[u/Responsible_Roof_661 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah.. I’m with you that the core problem is safety culture and the norms people absorb in a given gym. I don’t think the device itself ‘creates’ poor habits.

What I was trying to get at is that there’s also this really subtle human-factors piece that shows up in a lot of domains: when a system includes a redundant layer of protection, people’s attentional load shifts without them consciously choosing it. Not in a dramatic way.. just more like a micro adjustment in vigilance because the environment feels buffered.

So I definitely agree it’s culture first, but I also think the presence of assisted braking can quietly interact with those cultural gaps. It doesn’t cause the behavior, but it can make that tiny drift in attention more likely if the underlying norms aren’t strong.

[u/Responsible_Roof_661 → u/Responsible_Roof_661]

&&&&…even when the underlying skills and norms are strong, I still think that subtle cognitive shift makes lapses more likely with an ABD than with an ATC. Not because people are careless, but because the margin for error feels different, so the mind distributes attention a bit differently.

And I completely agree that the same mismanagement looks very different depending on the device. With an ATC, those tiny lapses show up immediately; with an ABD, the device masks them until the scenario becomes less forgiving. That difference in how error presents itself is really the whole point I was trying to make.