Climbing Tips

Many beginners, especially the guys, depend way too much on their upper body strength. Having strong arms will certainly help you send routes but it will also tire you out pretty quickly. You may make the first couple of routes look easy but once your forearms start to burn, you're going to struggle on the later routes. In order to take the weight off your arms, use your feet and legs more often. Instead of hand, hand, foot, foot combination, do foot, foot, hand, hand instead. Your legs are way stronger than your arm so use that strength to your advantage.

A great way to learn technique is to watch the female climbers. Since they typically have less upper body strength, they will often rely on better footwork and technique in order to send a problem. You'd be surprised how many female climbers can make a route that many guys have a tough time sending look super easy. In terms of specific techniques, get familiar with different types of hand hold positions as well as different leg positions to help balance yourself.

A good pair of shoes for climbing can help you on routes that have very small foot holds. It's important that you buy shoes that fit your feet correctly. The shoes should be quite tight and almost hard to put on and take off. The last thing you want is for your shoes to come off while you're trying to do a heel hook. You can find cheap climbing shoes online.

Among the different brand choices that you have, Mad Rock and Evolv are the more popular ones for beginners due to their price level. It's a good idea to stick to something that will last you more than a few months since you'll be quickly wearing down the rubber on your shoes due to poor footwork. Once your footwork improves, you can go for the more expensive brands or models that can give you a better feel of the foot holds. In terms of price, for your first shoe, find something under $80. Again, the most important thing is how well the shoe fits your foot. You can head down to a local REI store to try out a few different models before making your purchase.

If you look at most of the top climbers in the world, they all have one thing in common and that is that they've been climbing for years and years. Most people who start out climbing will have a lot of excitement because the sport is new to them and their progress is increasing rapidly. It's pretty easy to blow through the first 3 or 4 difficulty levels. However, almost everyone will hit a plateau and this is where many people will start to lose interest.

Instead of focusing on what rating your are able to climb, focus instead on just having fun. Focus on the challenge. If you do this, you will stick to the sport longer and will automatically be better than most climbers who climb for part of the year, get discouraged or bored, stop, then start again a year later. Consistently climbing is important and in order to keep it up, you need to have fun. One of the best things to make climbing more fun for you is to simple climb with some friends. Not only will it be more entertaining, you could help each other improve by pointing out various things that the person climbing may not be able to see.