A common and fundamental mistake that many climbers make is being clumsy with their feet. They scrabble them about both indoors and out, like they were some cartoon creature trying to do some comedy climbing up a wall. If you are guilty of this then stop it right now with these few easy steps.
Firstly bad footwork is associated with noise coming from your feet, so try climbing silently, this will usually slow you down. If this isn’t enough then there are a couple of other things you can do.
The first is to practice using stick on targets on an indoor wall or simply put a few dabs of chalk in a variety of places close to the ground when outside. Standing away from the wall, try and get the tip of you big toe to just touch the target.
Next look at a traverse and examine the holds, look at each one in detail and try and envisage the best way for your foot to be placed on it. Then try and complete the traverse placing your feet only as you envisaged on the holds.
If it is an indoor wall then the holds might be too big, so you can make the task harder by balancing corks on the holds, and complete the traverse by knocking off as few holds as possible.
All of these and many more exercises on movement, body position and technique make up the fundamental climbing movement skills that are covered in depth in my forthcoming book How to Climb Harder, published by Pesda Press
