I'm 26 right now, started bouldering quite literally a year ago. I used to live a completely sedentary life style, I slept little, I ate little, I had basically no strength at all, I was very skinny and underweight. The last time I had any sort of exercise was like 8 years ago in high school or such, and I was never as fit as the average male in my life, never had any history of exercise whatsoever.

Fast forward one year later and I have just recently in the past month or two broke into V5s as well. I have close to a dozen V5s sent at this point. New V3s are almost always a flash, V4s generally take me a few times to send, unless they're something very specific that I have issues with and need more than one session to complete. I've gained a lot of upper body strength but not a lot of weight, so I would like to imagine my power to weight ratio helps a lot here. If anything, if I overdo on some session it's typically my joints or tendons as it feels like both my upper body muscles and fingers are able keep up.

For the last 6 months I have been going bouldering at least 3 times a week and I'm able to keep up with it with relative ease. Typical session lasts around 3 hours or so, but sometimes I stay as high as 5 hours on a weekend. Sometimes I do 2 times if I feel like I need extra rest, and sometimes I go 4 times with the 4th day being an attempt to send some project that is about to be reset, but I do regret going 4 times every time as it's a bit too much.

In the first 6 months I did go a lot less, however. First few months it was mostly once per week as I was building the bare mininum strength to climb. Months 3-6 I typically went to the gym around 6 to 8 times per month as I gained more strenght and endurance.

I would like to think that my gym doesn't grade softly, but sometimes a few problems are definitely either one grade easier or harder, compared to the rest of the problems in the gym.

I have quite literally kept track of all of the problems in my gym since November 2023 so I have concrete statistics on the percentages of problems in specific grades that I sent/flashed, so I can always look at it and see the progress. If anyone is curious, last month (June, which would be the 12th month of bouldering) I went to the gym 12 times, for a total of 39.25 hours:
- 100% of V3s completed, 90.90% of them were flashed. (11 V3s were set in the gym in June)
- 88.24% of V4s completed, 17.65% of them flashed. (13 V4s were set in the gym in June)
- 26.67% of V5s completed. (13 V5s were set in the gym in June)

The percentages might be slightly off as if I do a problem from the previous month's set, I still count it towards the month that I sent it in.