In rock climbing, a whipper is an especially hard or dynamic fall where the rope is weighed by a significant load. A fall is considered hard when the climber falls beyond at least one piece of protection, which in trad climbing would mean the last placed cam or nut and in sport climbing would be the last successfully clipped quickdraw. The term whipper comes from the whipping motion a climber will take if an unskilled belayer cuts the fall short, limiting the dynamic stretching nature of the rope and causing a pendulum effect (often into the wall). It has become synonymous, however, with a hard fall, regardless of whether the pendulum effect is achieved or not.