Done well climbing is something of a beautiful dance, every climber has a pace, rhythm and style of there own. Hidden in the gait, is a wealth of experience and technique that can seem quite unfathomable to a beginner. Unfortunately there are no short cuts to such perfectionism, and it is often years of experience, combined with a questioning mind that takes feedback from as many places as possible.
The above video highlights what good technique is, i have to thank Paul Diffley from Hot Aches who put the video online for me specifically for this series of blog posts. It comes from his collection of short climbing films called Commited Vol 1.
A Nobel prize winner, said that it takes 10000 hours of ten years of deliberate practice to perform to the most elite of levels in any sport. Note the word deliberate it is there because as one sports science, John Fazey I believe who coin the term first, ‘It is not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect’. All that practice is going to do is make any movement pattern permanent and harder to unlearn.
Other sports scientists have suggested that we will take at least 150 reptitions of an isolated skill to move from the conscious to the unconscious. If you add in the problem of leanrt bad technique, then overcoming this takes a lot more direct and deliberate practice.
The idea that improvements in technique can lead to quicker and better improvements in climbing performance is something that I strongly believe in. I have said on here before that for 90% of Climbers that improvement in technique will lead to improvements 90% of the time. I am probably being cautious here with my percentages.
It begs the question what is good technique and how can we work on improving it. To answer this ephemeral question, I think we need to ask what bad technique is, and what we can observe and learn from it. Firstly people with bad technique, in my opinion suffer from a few major problems, these are best described as the three B’s of technique – Boot, Balance & Body Position.
Here I am going to concentrate on the Boot aspect of these three pillars of good technique. This is going to include rock shoes, how we use footholds and the Speed/Accuracy Trade off.
Rock Shoes
First up, you are only going to be as good as the shoe’s you are wearing. Too tight and you will be in so much pain half way up a pitch that you will invariable have a preferred place to stand on a hold with your foot, to minimise the pain. An overtight boot, can also bunch your toes up some much that it becomes near impossible to smear on the rock, as you develop and overly aggressive toe down position, which might be great if you boulder or climb steep limestone, but will do you no good if you want to climb that Three Pebble Slab at Froggat!
Too loose however and your foot will move about inside the shoe, severely limiting your ability to stand on a small edge. Given that many routes require standing on edges, if over the years you have fallen off edge after edge due to over large boots, this is going to directly effect your confidence in standing on them, and therefore you ability to simply believe that, as John Redhead said ‘A weight foot never slips!’.
So your first port of call for addressing the Boot part of the technique trilogy could well be a shop for some new shoes. To give you an idea of how this can effect climbing, many climbers who climb the hard slate slabs where edging in taken to its very limited often believe that a new pair of good edging boots it worth at least a grade and a half on slate. On the flip side on friction based slabs and climbs a more broken in pair of boots designed with a softer midsole that allows more of the rubber to be place onto the rock is much better. Whatever type of rock you climb the most of, is the type of shoe you should get.
The Sweetspot: Using Foothold
The next step it to realize that rock boots have more than one place that you can stand on a hold, and that every hold has a unique sweet spot on which to stand. So having got an appropriate fitting pair of shoes, you need to start working on your foot work, as however you climb at the moment good or bad is probably happening automatically. To override this you need to start making a deliberate and conscious effort to over come this.
Exercise 1 – The sweet spot
To start with everytime you go out climb start to look along the base of the crag, at five to ten different foot holds. Look at them and if neccessary feel them and try and stand on each one in two or three different ways. Try hopping up and down on them, and decide which of the ways was best. Remember that you can stand on your toes, the inside and the outside edge of the boot. Often the best way is to use the inside or outside edge, this is because it helps us to utilise the body position that we will exaime in the body part of the trilogy.
This exercise can be done in isolation bouldering, by identify the sweet spot on all possible foothold on simple boulder problems and concentrating on using those holds how you identify you would. Above all though the idea is that you look at a foot hold and decide how you are going to place your foot on it before you move. In essence it is LOOK – ANALYZE – PLACE
Becoming Accurate with your feet
The next part of the the Boot part of technique is the speed and accuracy trade off. Basically in everything we do we can either be quick or accurate, but never both as a a result of speed or accuracy deminishes. Try drawing a simple bulleyes target on a piece of paper, and place it on a desk, now try and place your index finger in teh middle of the bullseye as quickly as possible, then try and do the same thing as slowly as possible. The chances are you missed the target when going quickly.
So the first step towards accuracy is slowing everything down, and if you remember the last exercise and the LOOK – ANALYZE – PLACE. This takes time and helps you to slow everything down. Like a marksman or sniper we can train ourself to be be more accurate, although again accuracy can be seen in terms of precision and consistency.
Precision is the ability to hit a target, which is the true end point we are looking for, however we might be very precise, but consistently just miss the target because our aim is slightly off. Therefore we need to work up to consistently hitting the target as precisey as possible.
Exercise 2 – Acciracy and Precision
There are some exercises for working on this inside here. However outside we can do a similar thing, in that we can make targets for us to hit. The easiest way to do this is to use chalk to hitlight the sweet spot of a hold. I will often do this when standing below a crux, by simply adding a chalk dot to every possible foothold, this then gives me a target. However to start with try a traverse and tick the sweet spot of the holds, deliberate slow down your movements and try and place onto the footholds first time. You can also try this everytime you are seconding or toproping a route.
Key Points
- Well fitting rock boots
- LOOK at a Hold – ANALYZE it – PLACE your foot on the sweet spot
- Concentrate on ACCURACY, not speed
- Set yourself a goal for each route, session, day e.g. I will focus on ANALZYING footholds, or PLACING my feet ACCURATELY
- It will take over 150 repitions over several session to unlearn bad habits and Learn new ones and make them a unconscious decision.
More Information and exercises for improving your technique can be found in the amazing new book “How to Climb Harder”, a climbers self coaching manual that re-defined the How to genre by making it as interactive for the reader as possible. The book is available from Pesda Press, alternatively ask for it in your local climbing store as it is available through Cordee the major distributor of outdoor books in the UK.