Body puzzles

1. 1. The idea of body puzzles
2. 2. Some borderline cases
3. 3. Volatilizing the concept of bouldering
4. 4. Other body puzzle sports
   1. 4.1. Riverwalk
   2. 4.2. Slipwall
   3. 4.3. Squeeze caving
   4. 4.4. Chimney lift maze
   5. 4.5. Sliding peg maze climbing thing
5. 5. Exploration

1. The idea of body puzzles

A couple years ago I started bouldering. Bouldering is a popular sport where you climb up a rock wall that's not too high, so it's not too dangerous and you don't need a rope. I climb indoors in a climbing gym. Routesetters screw holds (pieces of hard plastic) into wooden panels to make paths up the wall. It looks like this:

I love it because it's an infinite supply of body puzzles. A body puzzle is a puzzle for your body. It's where you have to move your body in a specific way that isn't obvious and that you have to figure out.

Really, any sport is a body puzzle in the vague sense. You have to figure out how to use your body well in order to run fast, throw far, pass the ball, stay balanced, lift hard, and so on. Those are legitimate puzzles.

But I'm thinking of a narrower sense. A proper body puzzle is mainly about the puzzle. The thing that's different between different sessions is the puzzle. (Whereas in running, in any given year, you always have the same set of puzzles around form and nutrition etc.)

You can even do rock climbing in a way that's not really a body puzzle. One format of competitive climbing is called speed climbing. That's where there's a wall with a fixed, standard arrangement of holds, and your goal is climb up that one route as quickly as possible:

Similarly, sports like running, football, swimming, etc., are not mainly about the puzzle. They certainly involve a lot of tuning your motions, problem-solving about your technique and about your diet and training schedule and dealing with injuries, and so on. But the main thing you're working on is pulling hard, pushing hard, getting strong, getting fit, hardwiring the methods deeply into yourself, finding your motivation / determination, fighting the urges to quit, dealing with the opponent's strategies, communicating and coordinating with teammates... The primary activity isn't "figure out some new specific sequence of motions that solves this specific puzzle, which is different from last week".

2. Some borderline cases

• Calisthenics. IDK enough to say, but my guess is that calisthenics is more focused on strength and practice—though it does involve learning new motions. You aren't inventing new motions, though learning motions is similar to inventing them. Similarly for gymnastics, which is focused on practice and balance and precision.
• Skateboarding and similar. I'd say that e.g. ice skating, snowboarding, and skiing aren't really body puzzle sports, but skateboarding and other sports that use a variety of "found" settings are on the border. There's a wide variety of sorts of tricks you might do. Parkour is even more borderline, and maybe just does count as a body puzzle sport.
• Dancing, breakdancing, cheerleading. My guess is that some ways of engaging with dancing could qualify as body puzzle sports, where you're constantly figuring out new things. However, the variety of possibilities seems differently-shaped from bouldering. There's interesting things to do in dancing, but the challenges are aesthetic, artistic, and athletic, rather than puzzley. In other words, you're trying to figure out what is beautiful/expressive, and trying to train up to perform that; but you're probably not solving intricate puzzles where you have to make a specific sequence of motions in order to do something.
• The game Twister. It's somewhat constrained in the variety of puzzles it can present, and also it's too chaotic to really be a puzzle.
• Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. This might count, I don't know enough to say.

3. Volatilizing the concept of bouldering

Bouldering started as an outdoor sport, climbing the faces of natural rocks. Then, people created indoor bouldering. They boiled down the idea of bouldering into atomic parts that can be flexibly modified and recombined—they volatilized bouldering.

This atomization volatilizes the elements of bouldering and leads to a climaxed body puzzle sport. It's still a sport—you're still dealing with minor injuries, hard work, strength, pulling and pushing hard, refining fine motor skills. But the main activity is piecing together an infinite variety of new (to you) methods to match each new arrangement of holds. (It's also a more controlled environment, hence more convenient and safer.)

4. Other body puzzle sports

So what are other sources of body puzzles? Here are some ideas:

4.1. Riverwalk

You can try to walk across a river using the stones without setting foot in the water.

This could be replicated indoors like bouldering. The general idea is basically hands-free bouldering, though that doesn't necessarily have to be a rule. The character of the sport would be, there's holds on the ground, and there's large gaps and not great handholds. The point is balance, accurate foot placement, maybe jumps or flexibility to span gaps. You could throw in wobbly holds maybe.

You could even use bouldering holds and bouldering walls, but laid flat on the floor. Then your goal is to walk from the start hold to the end hold, without touching the wall (floor).

For safety you'd put mats all around, so if you fall you just make sure to fall sideways onto a mat. That still might not be safe enough though, because the hard holds are always under you and behind you. Maybe you could wear pads, IDK.

A variant is "The Floor Is Lava". It's the kid's game, but now you're allowed to play. Just go from one place to another, no touching the floor (or anything else labeled red). This is sort of an interpolation between bouldering and riverwalk; like bouldering, there are many kinds of holds, and like riverwalk, you're not using a wall. For example, sometimes there are two of these snakey bike racks next to each other:

There's a gap between them, and you can try to go across the gap without touching anything with your hands and arms. Not so easy but doable. You can also stand on this bike thingy (on the curved parts near the ground):

And then try to get to the other side of it without touching the ground.

Some "floor is lava" setups can be mazes—where you have to figure out paths of moves that are doable. But this is somewhat too spoilable; boulder problems are better in that you can learn from doing them multiple times (e.g. how to do them more efficiently, quickly, reliably).

4.2. Slipwall

Imagine bouldering. But the wall is ice. Wait ok that's just ice climbing:

Which is itself a legit volatilized body puzzle sport:

What I mean is, imagine bouldering, but no ice picks, just bouldering, and the wall is ice, so it's really hard because it's slippery, but also the wall is only slightly inclined. So it's like a kid climbing up a slippery slide:

There could be a variety of features, like little dips in the ice. You make them dips, not protruding holds. That way it's safe to lose control and slide down. The bottom has a mat so it's safe to slide down. And the wall is only shallowly inclined, so you don't slide down too fast.

I think this could have interesting puzzles. It takes balance and patience and body tension, like some slab bouldering.

4.3. Squeeze caving

There's gaps inside big rocks that aren't really big enough for people but they go there anyway:

Maybe this could be an indoor sport like bouldering. The idea is to use materials to create cramped spaces, where the puzzle is, how you maneuver your body through this narrow passage?

Maybe you could do it with bouldering materials. Imagine taking two bouldering walls. The routesetters put some volumes and some holds on the walls to shape them. Then they bring the walls closer together. Much closer. Then your task is to go across.

This might have a safety problem; you don't want to get stuck. You'd need a way for the person who's in the problem to escape, or to release the walls / widen the gap. Another safety problem is that if you're near-stuck (which is where the interesting puzzles are), you don't have room to catch yourself if you slip.

There's also an efficiency problem. In bouldering you can have many routes overlapping in terms of wall space. But in squeeze caving, it seems like one problem takes up the whole wall. On the other hand, holds are a lot of the expense of bouldering; maybe you can cheaply enough get movable wall sections and big volumes.

Another approach uses the fact that you don't need the whole wall, with all its surface; you just need enough obstacles to be constraining. You could imagine a system of connectable obstacle pieces—bars, spheres, panels, blobs, walls, hoops, and perhaps even stretchy things such as ropes and trampoline-like sheets. You connect them up to each other, maybe in a rigid metal or plastic cage-like frame. Then the goal is to get from one side to another (say, from touching one thing or piece of tape to touching another) by twisting / maneuvering through the thing.

You could also add in moving parts, for a Rush-Hour-like experience:

Another problem is that it might be whatever the opposite of one-size-fits-all is. The point of a puzzle would be that you can just barely squeeze through, given the right maneuvering. But "just barely squeeze through" seems pretty dependent on body shape. Boulder problems are generally fairly flexible; different body types definitely find one easier or harder, but it's still a similarish challenge (ISTM) usually. Maybe this is just fine; there's still a range of narrow / wide squeeze caving problems, so different people pick what's interesting for them.

4.4. Chimney lift maze

Have you seen these balls??

One could imagine a ball inside a large, tall contraption (maybe 6 feet tall, 1 or 2 feet on each side, a square). The goal is to make the ball go up. There are obstacles for the ball. The contraption is fixed to the ground. You can affect the ball directly with your hands, or maybe with levers or other tools. But it's hard because you have to get the right angles and pressures to move the ball (which is not super heavy, but not nothing, like maybe a crystal ball).

4.5. Sliding peg maze climbing thing

There's this thing:

See a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNHW__MwGeg

One imagines lots of generalizations. It could for example be volatilized by using exchangeable panels, where each panel is just, say 1 or 2 feet on a side. Also, if you design it right, you could have bouldering-volume-like elements on the wall, and panels (perhaps triangular panels) that partially tile over the surface, with the peg sliding channel inlets/outlets matching up, giving interesting 3D shapes. OMG this sounds fun.

5. Exploration

Note that there's a separate cool thing besides the puzzleness, which is the exploratoriness. Riverwalk and lava walk and outdoor bouldering are like this in real life. It's fun to wander around and find the puzzles in the wild. That's lost somewhat with volatilizations.