Climbing ropes get shorter with age for two reasons:

• Climbing ropes may become damaged with use and the rope may have been trimmed.
• Climbing ropes shrink naturally. With continued use, the diameter of the rope grows larger and the length decreases. After the first one or two uses, you may notice that the rope is 2-3% shorter than its previous mint condition, shrinking as much as 10%-12% over the life of the rope.

It is also important to note that on climbing ropes with midpoints, this phenomenon is not necessarily symmetrical at both ends: for example, one half of the rope may have shortened by 51 TP3 T, and the other half may have shortened by 101 TP3 T. In this case, the midpoint marking of the climbing rope is no longer in the correct position.

If the rope gets wet and then dries out without force (e.g. climbing a snow slope), the shrinkage will be more pronounced.

In order to avoid this asymmetrical shrinkage of the ends of a rope with a midpoint marking, we suggest you do the following:

- Alternate the ends of the rope regularly.

Finally, understanding that climbing ropes shrink and become shorter over time, we recommend that you:

- Regularly check the total length of the rope and update the markings on the ends of the rope as appropriate.

- Regularly check the middle mark of the rope.

There is an easy way to find the midpoint of a rope: connect the ends of two ropes together and then slide both ropes at the same time by hand until you reach the midpoint of the rope.

- We recommend using the following method to measure the length of the rope, on the ground first with a tool to measure a standard 10-meter length, and then straighten the rope back and forth measurements, so that the error is relatively small; never use the corner of the table or tile edge one meter by one meter of such a short distance test, which usually leads to a very exaggerated error!