Today, we have the third installment of an article series about technique written by UK based climber, coach, and author John Kettle. John was on the TrainingBeta Podcast where he talked about how improving his movement skills helped him break a decade-long plateau and improved his climbing from the V7 and 5.11d level to V11 and 5.13b.
If you aren’t familiar, this article is part three of three. You can find the first installment here, and the second installment here. In the series, John outlines three technique habits that may be hindering your performance, how to identify them, and how to address them through specific exercises.
In this third installment, John discusses “bouncy, scrape-y, noisy feet.” He describes how this habit may arise in the first place, what it looks like, and the symptoms that can help you identify whether this is something you do yourself. At the end, he gives you several exercises and drills you can add to your training routine that will help you address it.
Give it a read! If you missed the first installment, find it here. The second installment is here.
If you like what you see here, be sure to check out John’s book Rock Climbing Technique where he outlines in detail all of the drills and methods of technique practice he uses, both in his own training and with the climbers he coaches.
Three Technique Habits that Undermine Your Performance: Find and Fix Them
Part 3
For the final part of this series we’ll visit feet with a focus on accuracy, and an issue that is often misperceived as something only novices need concern themselves with. I have seen significant improvement in foot precision from climbers who were already sport climbing 8a, and others bouldering V10. Be especially wary of dismissing this as something you’re already great at, until you have taken a really hard look at it on small holds.
As for Part 1 and 2, I have split it into three sections to make the diagnosis and improvement process easier:
- Symptoms – the telltale signs to look for, that suggest this habit is one of yours
- Reasons – for those that like to know why they may have these unhelpful habits
- Solutions – The fix; how to practice in order to rebalance your skills with a combination of tactics and drills to practice at the wall and on the rock.
3: Bouncy, Scrape-y, Noisy feet
Symptoms
How many climbing skills articles on foot placement have you read? Hundreds, possibly? Then I’ll be brief: There’s a reason coaches are always banging on about it, so it’ll do no harm to re-check that you’ve not slipped into the ever-so-sneaky trap of unconscious footwork errors. Symptoms include noise (primarily indoors), quickly worn out shoes (front of toes and rand), heels jiggling up and down, and feet popping off mid move, or needing regular adjustment. Derisory comments from your climbing mates are always a useful indicator too.
These symptoms will typically be subtle but still present when relaxed, and become far more pronounced once the climber is under physical or mental stress on a tough route or problem. Usually climbers have a ‘lazy foot’ that is more often guilty than the other one, much like we have a left/right preference for most things. Mine is my left foot – the worn shoe gives it away!
Reasons
There are many reasons why a climber may have less than optimal foot placement habits: We bring a high degree of hand-eye co-ordination to climbing when we start, thanks to early childhoods spent manipulating objects with our hands. Our feet possess far less dexterity and co-ordination, so we have a serious catch-up game to do if they are ever to approach the precision of our hands. So we start on the back foot – so to speak.
As if this isn’t enough, any anxiety during our early years of climbing encourages an upward focus; towards the end of the climb, the next handhold, the next available gear placement or quickdraw. This draws attention away from our feet and balance, encouraging the top-heavy tension described in Part 1 that often accompanies noisy feet.
Finally, our hands are in full view, with our highly sensitive finger tips sending vast amounts of information to our brains every second, in stark contrast our feet are way down there out of sight, tightly encased in rubber that mutes all but the very loudest feedback to the brain.
Can you see why poor foot placement is so common, and so persistent in otherwise skilled climbers? All in all, the odds are really stacked against us using feet well simply by intuition, so we must engage with some purposeful practice to bridge the skills gap.
Solutions
Pretty much every coach in existence has a host of foot accuracy drills and games to encourage better foot placement. A few minutes searching YouTube and you’ll find a lifetimes’ worth of exercises to work on your feet. However if you’ve just lost your internet connection, devote five focused minutes of your warm-up climbing to forcibly pinning your toe to every foothold, as if your balance depends on it – it does! As you place the foot, make sure it is not only precise, but you apply high force through it immediately – pinning it down, as if you want to crush the foothold to dust.
In the words of Jacques LeMenestrel: “Put as much power as possible on your feet, just at the limit where your foot is going to slip… and only after that, the power you can’t put on your feet … you put on your fingers”
Repeat this five minute exercise on every session for one winter (it makes good use of your warm up climbing), and review in the spring to see how you footwork has progressed.
1. Dial up the Stress
As you become more skilful, gradually increase the stress present during your practice. Remember you’ll need ninja feet the most on you hardest climbs, where the physical and mental stress may be very high! Stress can be incrementally increased during practice in a variety of ways:
Paul Platt stress-proofing his footwork on Tapestry, E4/5.11c
– Get Pumped: Physical stress needs to be part of your practice progression, because it is inevitably present during important performances. Depending on your goals this could be powered out on a limit boulder, or very pumped on a tough route.
To practice your skills under physical stress, set yourself climbing tasks that are tiring but not also mentally taxing – avoid starting this process on the lead if you have any hesitations around taking falls. I find circuit boards, auto belays and traverses ideal. Set off with perfect foot placement in mind, and strive to retain a laser-like focus on it all the way to falling off with a debilitating pump. Notice how much attention the fatigue steals from you! Remaining relaxed and movement-focused under high fatigue is a hallmark of the skillful climber.
– Get Gripped: Anxiety, and its bigger brother Fear have an astonishing ability to redirect your attention to risk, away from technique. Clearly this is an essential survival trait we all hold, but if you find yourself less confident when faced with a lead fall that is safe, or at the top of the bouldering wall, it can interfere with your skill much more that it needs to, often costing your success.
Practicing foot placement when gripped means identifying the situations that (safely) push your buttons and get the jitters going, then spending time just on the edge of that feeling, working your foot skills. For most folk this means practicing on the lead, on harder routes, and sometimes on a certain wall angle that they find unsettling. A high volume of ‘slightly gripping’ practice can be very valuable. Occasional terrifying practice is no good, and can in fact be detrimental. Little and often is the key.
– Get Under Pressure: Both getting pumped and getting gripped create mental pressure for us to juggle alongside our climbing movement. Pressure also comes from a variety of other sources, both external and inside our own heads. These vary enormously between individuals, but if you can work out what gets you distracted and antsy on a climb, you can use it as leverage to stress-proof your skills. Here are some ones to try:
- Sharing your intention with you belayer or onlookers – telling others that you are practicing footwork makes you accountable; now your footwork credibility is at stake, and they are watching!
- Demonstrating the skill to a friend, or a better climber: Again this gets the ego involved, so is guaranteed to bring any underlying anxiety about failure to the surface, ramping up the pressure to perform.
- Making it competitive with peers: Now it’s become a measurable test and another way to get a little twitchier while you try to stay focused on the feet.
– Get Faster: Increasing the speed at which your foot movements must be made is a sure-fire way to tax the brain and demand a higher level of skilfulness. It only takes a tiny step up in pace to really ramp up the mental load so it’s a very accessible way to progress your skills. My current favourite is the Touch and Go drill:
- Every time a foot or hand make contact with a new hold, another must leave a hold and begin moving. This creates a consistent rhythm of movement with no breaks to procrastinate, ponder or falter. Try it on long, easy climbing terrain, or some moderate difficulty boulders.
Video of touch and go drill on Instagram
Combinations of some or all of these stress-proofing techniques are of course possible. Ultimately these recreate some of the mental conditions some of your biggest climbing achievements will be performed under, so including them in you preparations is essential.
2. Develop your ‘listening feet’
It’s a long old journey sending signals from your brain to your toes and back, so ‘check in’ with your foot placements on a regular basis to build increased awareness down there. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you should be doing with your toes, the only reason that you won’t have the feet of a vertical ballerina is if the dodgy placements are happening without you actually noticing. Awareness comes first, as always.
Reflecting on process once the stress has lowered is key to raising awareness of your techniques
Conclusion
Why would anyone habitually do these things long after they’ve started? The answer is awareness, or lack of it. No-one would be consciously climbing like this if they knew it was happening, so it is very likely to be sneaking in under the radar, as an unconscious habit.
Finding out if you’re guilty of any of these means raising your awareness of your current movement habits. You’ve made an excellent step by reading this, next is to search carefully for the described symptoms in your own climbing.
This can be done by paying close attention as you climb, watching video footage of yourself climbing, or getting a friend to watch and feedback on your performance. Work on the drills I have suggested, and keep an eye out for other coaches’ drills to compliment them. Many prominent coaches are really engaged with drills as an effective way to improve movement skills, so there are more equally good exercises out there that you could also benefit from.
Your unique height, mobility and blend of strength vs endurance play a huge part in deciding what movement style is best for you, and when any given technique might be appropriate. Fast and bouncy, gentle and precise, bunched, frogged, twisty, we all have our preferences, dictated in part by the physiology our genetics dealt us.
But within this style preference, check and be sure you’re not being sabotaged by unhelpful ingrained habits such as those listed above. The best climbers are the chameleons, those that can shed old habits and adapt their style quickly and easily to suit the demands of the climb in front of them.
“The most important ability is adaptability” Udo Neumann
Go Back and Read Part One Here
Go Back and Read Part Two Here
About the Author
John Kettle is a long-time climber, a full-time climbing coach and an instructor for aspiring climbing coaches in the UK. He also recently wrote a book called Rock Climbing Technique, and you can find more about him on his website at www.johnkettle.com. He lives in the English Lake District, where he does most of his climbing and teaching.
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