Climbing's Best Kept Secret Tip
This article is an expansion of the ideas presented in Get Better Immediately With Three Simple Tactics.
In my earlier article about three simple tactics to help you climb better, I mentioned a book by Dave MacLeod entitled 9 out of 10 Climbers Make the Same Mistakes. It is truly a classic climbing text and is cited by many professional climbers as one of their favourite books on training for climbing. The basic premise of the book is that, while it is important to be adequately strong, chasing strength and power gains as a way to avoid working on your true weakness (like poor footwork or fear of falling), will leave you looking like the image of the frustrated gorilla on the cover - having strong muscles, but only weak grades on your tick list.
For myself, even though I thought that I had understood the meaning of MacLeod’s warning, I still needed to read the book four times through before finally committing to give up my search for a mythical magic hang board routine that would allow me avoid having to work on my footwork and fear issues.
The turning point came when I really started to focus on what Dave MacLeod wrote below:
…in climbing, a common limitation is that climbers are far too passive with their lower body and only really ‘try hard’ with the upper body. You’ll often hear climbers remark that they focused on grabbing and pulling as hard as possible with their hands to complete… a move. But it’s rare (apart from elite climbers) to hear them remark that really focusing on delivering maximum power with a foot made the difference between success or failure on a move, but it often does.
Up until that point in my career I had been only occasionally successful at climbing moderately difficult boulder problems. As MacLeod predicted, my focus when climbing was often on my hands and not my feet. A friend of mine who had climbed multiple 5.14s (really really hard climbs) often said, “ultimately if you can grip the hold, you can send the route.” I interpreted his advice as an encouragement to buy my own hang board and train on it consistently in order to get stronger fingers. After years of being a hands focused climber, I was going to need a fool proof learning process if I was going to successfully teach my body to use my feet well.
By pressing into the rock hard enough with your toe, enough friction can be generated to allow you to simultaneously pull back with your leg and hip, thereby driving your hips forwards into the wall. By locking your hip forwards in this manner, you significantly reduce the percentage of your body weight that your fingers are required to hold to keep you from falling off the wall. You also reduce the likelihood that your feet will slip off the holds, resulting in a violent swing outwards from the wall that has to be stopped using the muscles of your fingers, shoulders, arms, and upper back.
As with learning any complex skill, the breakthrough happened when I devised a plan to practice pulling with my toes on easier climbs during my warmup, before gradually attempting the move on more difficult climbs as I felt comfortable. Even though it likely made me look a bit silly, I started pulling my hips into the wall at the finish of every move on my slab wall warm-up problems and routes - using only the pressure of my toes to generate the inward force (I even took my hands off the holds in some cases).
With time I become more confident and the movement more natural. I started to practice this “hips in” finish position on slightly more difficult climbs until I finally felt like I was proficient enough to notice a significant difference on steeper routes as well. Within about half a year of constant practice, this technique of digging my toe into the rock and keeping my hip close to the wall during hard moves on steep walls became almost second nature.
While I still regard my 5.14-climbing-friend’s statement to be true, and I appreciate having the strength I received from those workouts, I now realise that I can also make the hold easier to grip if I use my toes well to reduce the strength required of my fingers. This tactic allows me to more efficiently apply the force I do have, and allows me to climb harder climbs, without constantly having to add more and more weight to my finger board routines or risk injury from overtraining.
Now, I can say that even though I don’t possess the raw strength or power of many climbers I see at Hangout or at the crag, I am still able to complete relatively difficult climbs largely because of this toe-pulling technique. I would say it is the one skill that has made the biggest difference to my top-end performance in my entire climbing career, and the secret to my ability to climb well past the merely modest grades of which my physical upper body and grip strength would suggest I am capable.
If you would like to learn more about this trick and others for climbing on steep walls, check out the video below:
About The Author
David Murray has been coaching climbing for more than 17 years. He has helped over 5000 new and experienced climbers become more efficient and have more fun. David is currently a co-owner of The Hangout Climbing Centre in Duncan, Canada.