Training-Free Hold-Usage Detection in Sport Climbing with Foundation Pose Models

Abu Bakar, Abdullah Aftab, Amir Hamza

Detecting which holds a climber uses, and when, underpins automated scoring, movement analysis, and assistive systems for sport climbing. Existing approaches train task-specific models or repurpose 2D pose estimators whose hand keypoint sits at the wrist and foot keypoint at the ankle i.e. offset from the fingertips and toes that actually contact the holds, and whose hands are occluded in roughly half of all frames. We show that a frozen, off-the-shelf pose foundation model is sufficient: using the fingertip and toe keypoints of Sapiens, a per-frame proximity test against the annotated holds, per-limb mutual exclusion, and a short temporal-persistence rule, we detect hold usage without any climbing-specific training. On the The Way Up dataset (22 videos, 10 athletes, two routes), our method reaches an event F_1 of 90.2% on a held-out split (89.8% under leave-one-participant-out cross-validation) and 79.9% over all 22 videos at any temporal overlap, and performs best on footholds (F_1,89.8% overall, 96.6% held-out). Under an identical protocol it exceeds our reproductions of the YOLOv8-pose and ViTPose pipelines at every temporal threshold, with the margin widening under strict…