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Climbing techniques

  • Flagging: Flagging is an incredibly useful technique and quite necessary if you are pushing into more intermediate climbs. When flagging, you use one limb (usually a leg) to point and balance your weight in order to keep from swinging out from the rock (i.e. barn dooring) or extend in the opposite direction of where the limb is pointing. You are not using this leg for support, but rather using it to shift your center of balance. It usually is not touching the rock. This is useful on big, reachy moves and allows you to gain a bit more span with your body without expending too much extra energy. This technique is also necessary when a right hand/foot combo is not possible.
  • Heel Hook: A heel hook involves you placing the heel of your foot on a hold that is usually waist level or higher. The move is most useful in situations where there is an arete or an overhang. The heel hook helps you keep your balance and can also provide important leverage for moving your hands and body higher up the route.
  • Toe Hook: Toe hooks are great for keeping your center of gravity pulled in towards the rock and they give you balance and leverage for moving up. You can use a toe hook on an arete, side pulls, or on underclings. To place a toe hook, you use the top part of your toe to pull sideways against an arete or side pull or you can pull inward on an undercling to help keep your body from swinging out. As you move up and above your toe hook, your foot easily transitions into using the hold to step up.
  • Stemming: When stemming, you use the tension of your body to move upwards while pushing on holds. Stemming is most useful in a dihedral (a.k.a. an inside corner) where you have holds on the left-facing wall and the right-facing wall and your body follows the line of the corner. Stemming requires some balance, technique and flexibility.
  • Back Stepping: Back stepping is a valuable technique, especially in overhanging, reachy situations coupled with flagging. If you step on a hold in such a way that the outside of your hip faces into the rock, you are backstepping. Compare this to a more common step, where your leg would be rotated so that the inside of your hip faces the rock (not back stepping). Back stepping elongates and opens up your torso for a longer reach in the same direction as the foot that you back stepped. Flag your other foot and your reach will increase even more.
  • Smearing: Smearing is when you apply pressure into an essentially blank face with the bottom of your toes. The goal is to make as much contact as possible between the rock and the climbing rubber on your shoes in order to create the friction to stay on the rock and stand up. The rock face needs to be slightly less than vertical for smearing to really work. Your climbing rubber is incredibly sticky and with some good body tension it will grip onto mind-bogglingly blank faces. What makes the difference between smearing and sliding off the rock is your confidence, pressure into the rock, body tension and your ability to spot the best footholds. Most faces that you will be climbing are actually not blank, so by placing your foot over tiny crystals, you will get more friction and be able to stand up. Also, by looking for places where the rock face levels out, you will be able to take better advantage of the face. Use small hand holds to maintain balance while focusing on spotting foot holds and smearing on them to move up the route or problem. Smearing is great practice for beginner climbers to hone their footwork technique and to develop a more graceful, less strength-exhausting style.
  • Crimpers: Crimpers hurt. They also will get you up a route or problem that is otherwise impossible. A crimper is a tiny hand hold that, depending on your strength and ability, can be as small as pencil or as wide as a ruler. They generally are only big enough for just the tips of your fingers to grasp a hold. They hurt because they require you to pull up on just the tips of your fingers, thus straining the tendons and muscles in your hands and pulling hard on the sharp edges that characterize crimpers. The key to using crimpers is locking-off your hold. By getting your joints into a "locked-off" position, your grasp is much stronger and you will spend less energy to maintain it and pull up. Lock-off your hold by curling your fingers down over the crimper so that your hand forms a hook and is hanging off the hold. For especially small or difficult crimpers, lay your thumb over the tips of your index and middle fingers. As you pull down, the added pressure and tension from your thumb will help you stay on the hold. 
  • Pinchers: Pinchers are exactly what they sound like: a hold in the rock, usually vertical, that you pinch with your fingers on one side and your thumb on the other in order to pull up or maintain balance. Pinchers range from full-handed pinchers to tiny spines in the rock that you grasp tenuously with the tips of your fingers - both can be excruciatingly difficult. Pinchers require hand, arm and back strength. After grasping a pincher, you can usually find a less tenuous stance by pulling your body in toward the pinch hold and popping the shoulder closest to the hold out toward the rock. This movement will lock of the joints in your shoulder and elbow and get you into a stance that is easier to maintain. From here, you can chalk up, get ready to make a clip or placement, or assess your next moves.
  • Slopers: Holding a sloper is like trying to hold on to a half a watermelon mounted to the wall. There is something there, but not much. They require an immense amount of hand strength. There is no way around it, you will need to practice a lot to get good at slopers. Try to get as much hand surface area as possible on the rock. You can even use your forearm if possible.
  • Mantle: The technique to mantling is hidden in the title. Imagine you wanted to climb onto the mantle above the fireplace. You would get up close to it, pull yourself up, rock sideways, turn your hand around and push yourself up, until you could slip a foot onto the mantle and stand up. That is exactly what you do when mantling in rock climbing. Watch small children climb onto counter tops for inspiration. You can also mantle off smaller holds and ledges to get your feet higher. Mantling is particularly important in slab climbing and in dihedrals and chimneys. You will often get better purchase by turning your hand around.