- Feet Hips Hands
The fundamental order of operations for climbing, move your feet, twist your hips, move your hands. This allows you to maximise your reach and maintain straight arms.
- Silent/Precise Feet
Try your next warm up using ‘silent feet’, it is exactly how it sounds, don’t allow your feet to make any noise when you place them. This will force you to be intentional about where you place your feet on the hold, using just your toes and reducing the chance of slipping off.
- Pivoting
Using just the point of your toes when climbing is one of the first things you will learn in any climbing course/class. This will mean you can pivot around your toe and smooth out your climbing, pivoting allows you to change direction with ease and adjust hip positioning to improve balance.
- Straight Arms
Straight arms is the first step to improving your efficiency on the wall and the longevity of your session. Maintaining straight arms where you can will allow you to loosen your grip, reducing the fatigue in your forearms and spread the load of your body weight through your entire arm rather than isolating it in the bicep.
- High Feet and Rocking Over
Following on from straight arms to improve your efficiency even further is to weight your feet as much as possible in order to take more weight out of your arms. To do this try getting one foot up as high as you can and then shift your body over the foot. Rocking over won’t work in a roof climbing scenario but getting high feet will still allow you to extend as much as possible for the next move and drive through the legs rather than pull with the arms.
- Maximising Reach
If you are finding that you are always struggling to reach things try combining Feet, Hips, Hands with rocking over high feet. This will allow you to get into a higher position and extend through your leg while using your hips to stay close to the wall. (You can also try being more dynamic and using momentum or dynos).
- Foot Matching
Foot matching is a move where you place both feet on the same hold, generally you would use this technique to swap your feet when you need to change direction or if you are moving sideways.
- Hand Matching
Hand matching, much like foot matching, is placing both hands on the same holds. Often used in similar scenarios where you are moving sideways but also commonly used if there is a big distance between holds and you need both hands to generate power.
- Balance
Many people think of balance as just being able to stand no hands on a slab or volumes, but it applies to all angles of wall. Creating a stable base of support will allow you to balance and stabilise better in any situation. To do this try creating an imaginary triangle with your feet and one hand while you are moving the other hand, and remember the bigger the triangle the more stable you will be.
- Route Reading
This one definitely takes a lot of practice and experience, but try to map out your path before you climb. Think about which hand will go on which hold and in what order, what will your feet be doing? Where should your body be positioned? This will help you to move with more confidence and spend less time figuring out what you are doing while hanging from your arms.
