Members judge a gym on how fresh the walls feel, and freshness is a labour schedule. Every route has an hours cost — stripping, washing holds, setting, forerunning, tweaking — and a setter only gets so many productive hours out of a day on a ladder.
45 boulder problems at 1.2 hours each is 54 hours — eight setter-days at a realistic seven productive hours.
The example
Three wall types on one reset cycle, each with a route count, hours per route, and the productive hours in a setter's day.
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wall | Routes | Hrs/route | Setter-day hrs | Setter-days |
| 2 | Bouldering | 45 | 1.2 | 7 | 8 |
| 3 | Top rope | 18 | 2.5 | 7 | 7 |
| 4 | Lead | 10 | 3.5 | 7 | 5 |
The formula
Hours first, then convert to days of labour:
How it works
Three inputs, one of them chronically overestimated:
B2*C2is total setting hours. Hours per route rises sharply with wall type — a boulder problem is around an hour, a 40-foot lead route three or more./D2converts hours into setter-days. Seven productive hours is generous; a setter also strips, washes, logs grades and moves scaffold.ROUNDUP(...,0)gives whole days, because setters are scheduled in shifts.- Sum the column for the labour a full reset costs, then divide by the setters on staff to get the calendar weeks.
Against a reset frequency — say a third of the boulders every week — this becomes a standing weekly staffing number rather than a fire drill.
Try it: interactive demo
Enter the routes to set, hours per route, and a setter's productive day.
Variations
Calendar days with a crew
Divide by the number of setters working together.
Setting cost
Multiply the raw hours by the setter rate instead of rounding to days.
Pitfalls & errors
Hours per route must include stripping and hold washing, which can be a third of the total. A gym that budgets setting time only for the setting itself always runs a day behind.
Forerunning is not free either. Every route gets climbed and adjusted by another setter before it opens, and on lead walls that can add half an hour a route.
Do not use an eight-hour setter-day. Real productive time on the wall is closer to six or seven once meetings, breaks and scaffold moves come out, and the optimistic figure compounds across a whole reset.
Practice workbook
Frequently asked questions
How long does one boulder problem take to set?
How often should routes be reset?
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