Is This the World’s Best Home Climbing Gym?

Tomoa Narasaki and Akiyo Noguchi are the king and queen of Japanese comp climbing, and they have a home climbing gym befit for royalty. Magnus Midtbø recently visited the couple’s home gym in rural Japan, which he documented in a recently released video (embedded below).

The training facility includes three commercial gym-sized bouldering walls (with both comp-style and spray wall sets), an 18-metre lead wall with eight bolt lines, a full-sized speed wall, a truck with a platform lift to make setting easier, and a huge training room with weights and exercise equipment.  “This is the craziest [home] gym I’ve ever seen,” said Midtbø. “This would be like a big commercial gym, and they have it just to themselves. It’s insane. I want this too.”

Over his long comp-climbing career, Narasaki has won gold at seven Boulder World Cups (Chongqing 2016, Munich 2016, Moscow 2018, Wujiang 2019, Meiringen 2022, Salt Lake City 2023, and Keqiao 2024). He also won gold at the Boulder & Lead Combined World Cup in Morioka, Japan in 2022. He’s had similar success at World Championships, earning Boulder gold in Paris in 2016 and Hachioji in 2019 and Boulder & Lead Combined gold in Hachioji in 2019. He placed fourth in the Tokyo Olympics and has already qualified for the Paris Olympics this summer.

Noguchi is one of the most decorated comp-climbing boulderers of all time. Now retired, she won 21 gold medals across World Cup and World Championship Boulder competitions. She has the second-highest Boulder gold medal count of all time, sitting just behind Austrian Anna Stohr. She won over 20 silver and over 20 bronze medals as well in Boulder and Lead competitions throughout her storied career.

Magnus Midtbø trains at Tomoa Narasaki’s home gym