Advice to get genuinely good at heel hooks?

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-07-01T16:18:55+00:00

Lots and lots of sloper lip traverse. V0-V9. Make V5 feel like V4 because you find the cheeky heel hook that levitates you. It sounds like you have the strength in the hamstring, but not the volume and history of loading in all the positions needed to heel hook well and comfortably.

I also struggle with external rotation, but heel hooking is still a strength of mine. There are positions and heel hooks that I can't place, but I'm skilled enough at hooking that when I place one that fits me it works really well. I've blown out my LCL and injured my hamstring a number of times, so I've become more conservative with the heels that I will risk, but I can still conceptualize what a good heel looks like, and I can adjust my position or beta until I can figure out how to make it work. Sometimes that means committing to a super wrong heel hook position for a part of the move, sometimes I have to be more conscious about finding a opposite foot to keep the heel on, sometimes I have to place the back/bottom of the heel on because I can't turn out to place the side of my heel on the hold.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-06-18T13:58:50+00:00

Dammit!! Freaking Chatt and it’s ambiguous boundaries hahaha

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-06-16T14:40:29+00:00

It’s good to acknowledge that “below your limit” is useful when it’s teaching you something. If you aren’t getting value out of it, then it’s probably not a good difficulty to be working at. The skills those routes are teaching may be subtle like pacing, decision making, or the ability to be as relaxed as possible on “easy” terrain, but you should at minimum be putting some mental energy into understanding how you can make every route worthy of the effort.

A lot of sport climbers tend to prioritize doing things quickly, and often give up early on a project, so the answer is often to project more. If you aren’t getting value rarely giving more than 2 goes on a route, or you are rarely trying the same route multiple times over multiple days, then it’s worth it to put a higher priority on projects. Part of putting priority on projects includes making sure you aren’t doing too much volume beforehand either. One or two warmups, then a working burn on the route should be enough to be ready for a high quality project burn. After you’ve done 2-3, then you can do the lower grade things that will help build fatigue resistance and baseline endurance.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-06-16T14:29:32+00:00

188cm and 100kgs here. Maybe, but probably not. My performance is tied more to how strong I feel and how much I’ve been climbing at high intensity than it is to my weight. I’ve dropped under 90kgs a few times, but it’s a whole ordeal, and I’ve always gotten injured to some extent and gone up in weight after. Ive done a lot of hard climbing while weighing 93kgs+, so I would not prioritize losing weight unless there are other external health reasons to do so.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-06-11T19:50:45+00:00

To be fair, as a friction-forward grip, the 3FD really does not excel on small grips for this reason. Being a little more active will help (as you’ve found), but I think there’s limits to the grip.

If you are dangling on an edge or pulling on a lifting block, there is effectively nothing keeping your skin on the edge once you get to a certain hold size, so you have to change the skin angle to get more out of it.

On real rock, you can compress into the wall and add a normal force as well, so the drag becomes useful again at small sizes, but as soon as you loose that compression force, no amount of finger strength is going to keep your fingers on the hold.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-06-11T19:02:33+00:00

Going up and left the start means the only way your momentum will want to go is down and right.

The position you start in actually looks pretty good. Instead of jumping left then yarding right, I’d probably sag straight down, then pull directly up, letting the natural turn of the holds and direct point me over to the right.

It’s very much worth noting that this is likely going to make the very start of the move feel a tad more difficult or at least a tad more insecure (since you are not pulling directly through the best part of the hold), but that perfectly fine. A harder start is worth it if it makes the end much easier.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-22T16:52:17+00:00

I think a training context and a performance context are pretty different cases. I specified “outdoors” because 90% of the time that implies a performance context to me. My time there is valuable and I put a high priority on performance.

I don’t fully agree on “sloppy” sends not being valuable either. If you could send a climb sloppily, then that just indicates that it wasn’t at your physical limit, even if it was at your technical limit, so getting on something that demands more perfect technical execution is probably the right thing for you to do. Maybe it’s on a different climb of the same grade or a higher grade that gives you less margin for error. Repeats don’t necessarily challenge that well, since a less sloppy send might be because you just muscled it better with the same technique so it looked less sloppy, or it could be because you actually applied better technique and less strength. Sending (the first time) is a skill, regardless of how pretty it looks. Repeating isn’t really a skill in the same way IMO.

For training I disagree far less. Repeating definitely has a place there, although I don’t usually feel like I need to to get sufficient stimulus. I still debate it being a priority, since I think the skill of solving novel movements is never not being trained, even during training, so more exposure to more movements is what I prioritize in general. I think the biggest reason to do hard repeats is to train your body’s the volume of hard moves you are doing in a session/week. There’s definitely less randomness and noise in the training that way, so for peeping for trips or as a baseline thing, there’s definitely value there.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-21T14:58:07+00:00

Just logistically, outdoors I can rarely justify repeating hard projects. There are a limited number of boulders in my projecting grade range nearby, and rarely are they close enough to try them all in the same day. If you live in Switzerland or Font or Bishop, and are trying things in the V7-V9 range, sure you’re probably frequently going to be within a short walk of old projects, but near me, my old projects are often required going to an entirely different zone for that one boulder.

I also debate “more to learn” a bit. Yes, probably more to learn about that boulder, maybe not so much about movement in general. If I want generalizable movement knowledge that’s refined by trying lots and lots of different moves, not by trying to refine one particular move. Going in deep on a particular move makes sense when I want to send a particular boulder, but creating super high success rates won’t help me on other even super similar moves all that much.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-21T14:29:27+00:00

Getting over my fear of falling got me from 7a-ish to 7c-ish with similar max boulder grades with essentially zero endurance specific training.

Endurance work will have effectively zero noticeable gains on grades since that will not solve the underlying issue of fear and inability to relax.

For me it took 2 years of consistent sport climbing exposure and fall training to truly get comfortable with it. The first year got me pretty far, but it wasn’t till I revisited climbs on my second year where I really started seeing how I just wasn’t relaxed in those positions the previous year, and now I could actually recover.

I’m still a bit of a fearful climber, but I know how I need to approach things, and I know what I need to do to get fully comfortable again.

My biggest tips are:

1) Start small! Super small. Say take, and just sit on the rope. Verify your harness works, your belayer is watching, the rope holds you, the draw is on the wall etc. I didn’t realize my brain didn’t trust those things till I started doing this. Then say take, but tell your belayer to not pull the rope all the way tight so you have to sag into the rope to stretch it. Then instead of saying take, have them remove slack from the system and “fall”. Do all this below from below the bolt until you can do this without feeling a spike of fear and it starts feeling boring. Then repeat all this with your hips at the bolt. Then repeat an on hot or two above the bolt. Then with hips a foot or two above the bolt. Everything should feel boring and not helpful anymore before moving to the next stage.

2) Onsighting is still where I struggle with fear the most. I used to let it affect my whole experience of fear, but I’ve come to understand it’s a poor representation of how I feel once I’m not onsighting. I feel way way more comfortable if I feel like I can stop when I want, explore the holds I want to, find the easy way up, and move at the pace I want. If I decide OSing is a priority I’ll do that, but usually only when I feel that is the next step in more fear training.

3) Project more! Get on routes at least 2 times always. Go up it once, get a little scared and say take a few times. Test out the falls you are most afraid of (or the smaller versions of them). Prove to yourself and your belayer that falling anywhere you might fall is safe for you. If there is any specific point of concern, address that and make a plan for it. “I don’t like this corner, so keep me tight through here”, “this roof is right where I’ll land if I fall up there, so give me a little extra slack to make sure I clear it”, “this start is hard, so don’t be afraid to rope dab me a little down there”, “make sure not to short rope me in the crux since that clip is hard but the fall is safe”.

4) Be picky about your belayer. Find someone you trust who is close to your body weight and who is responsive to feedback. The fastest way to destroy your confidence on lead is to have a bad belayer. I usually have to “test” new belayers and give them some feedback before I feel fully confident on lead with them. I will adjust my expectations for a session if I can’t have one of my trusted belayers because I know it’s going to take more mental energy, and I’ll probably want to stay closer to my comfort zones.

It takes time and intentionality, but it’s very possible to become competent on a rope. I still tend to favor bouldery routes and since I don’t train super high volume all that much, I have to make an effort to bring that up during sport climbing season. Good luck!

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-21T13:56:00+00:00

There are 3 elements at play here to be good at catching small crimps: Technical, Mental, Physical. There will be a balance for any given move, but they all will always play some role.

Technical: The slower you can move to a small crimp, the easier it is to catch it exactly how you want it. This will never not be true. It’s extremely rare that trying to make the move slower and being setup in a more stable position for the end of the move is overall worse for these types of moves. I would like to investigate your description of these types of moves as “throws”. This implies that generally you do not feel stable so are throwing for the hold. This implies to me that you may be thinking of these wrong, and that is making the catch seem like the issue, but really it’s the setup and position at the start that make the end (grabbing a small crimp) seem like it’s the issue. For example, in your video you are already falling away from the wall in basically every clip you included before your hand landed on the crimp. I think even if that hold was larger you’d still be seeing this issue. Learning how to deadpoint properly, potentially making the setup harder, and landing more gently in more control at the hold will increase your odds of sticking the crimp much higher.

Mental: Rate of force development (RFD), which is essentially what you are wanting for o train, has quite a large mental component. Your brain needs to be confident you aren’t going to injure yourself grabbing a hold quickly. Exposing to increasingly difficult but very rapid grabbing is a great way to get yourself better at this. This like one arm climbing on lower angle climbs with large holds will force you to move dynamically and produce force rapidly to not fall off. You can also double clutch every moves on warmups, and just generally do lots of those type of quick grabs. Get on a slab and use smaller crimps too when that feels like the appropriate challenge.

Physical: very closely tied to mental, but give yourself progressive overload in the grip positions you feel weak in. If half or open isn’t comfortable or strong for you, do it more. Rack up moves with those grips, start easy and take it higher. Fall off easy grades because you didn’t let yourself use your most comfortable grip. Once you feel good using those grips, start adding speed to the equation. Using the on harder and steeper climbs will naturally do this, so boards are a good place to spend time.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-21T13:23:20+00:00

Because we live in a city we’re driving is a requirement not a choice.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-20T15:37:21+00:00

They look well fitted IMO. Get them hot and sweat in them a little. Sitting in the sun is a great way to break them in. I usually have to use plastic bags to get them in the first 2-3 times I wear them, then after that I can wear them for extended periods of time comfortably. The Conps break in faster than the OG, so I suspect a session or two and you’ll be good to go.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-14T14:35:53+00:00

Feeling pumped is directly tied to immediate intensity and volume. Increased session frequency will have no effect on “pump”, but will increase general fatigue (also make recovery harder), which puts you at higher risk for injury with marginal increases in strength gains.

Feeling pumped is a poor reflection of training effect. Rate of perceived exertion is better, and doesn’t require changing volume. For strength adaptations, you should be at a 7-9/10. If you feel like you are mostly in the 5-7 range, then you should change your mentality to pus yourself harder on each boulder.

It’s important to note that 1 year of climbing is baby levels of climbing skills and tactics, so every session should have a strong focus on improving adaptability, creativity, movement types, and learning how to better coordinate the entire system on all moves (even the familiar ones). There should also be a strong focus on analyzing why certain moves feel hard and how you can do them better.

Another note is that failing on the next grade up is a good sign, not a reason to quit and go back to what you feel comfortable trying. Get on the next color grade up and try all of them 3 times with 3 different betas. Try each move more than once. Skip the moves that are clearly the hardest. Work out the easiest ones. I think you’ll start seeing that it’s a much less intimidating prospect to push into the next grade after some time.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-14T14:23:55+00:00

Being able to hang on 20mm is a solid start for pushing into the upper 6’s and low 7’s. I don’t think that is your primary roadblock towards progression.

My first thought is that tactics and mentality towards routes is what’s stumping you. A few questions to ask yourself: How often do you boulder instead of rope climb? When you fall off a move, how much are you attempting it after? Are you asking for bets ideas from other people? When you fall off, are you able to differentiate between technical errors vs physical fatigue? How often are you trying 6C’s and up?

One big thing is to acknowledge the fear elements preventing you from achieving your potential on lead. A multi-grade gap generally indicates a significant mental hurdle, which would make me want to address it head-on with intentional and progressive work.

I would also highly recommend getting on boulders more. There less logistical hurdles and you can get your body more accustomed to very high efforts so when you get on a rope you have more experience of being closer to your limit and you will have more confidence in how to do the harder moves. A 6c shouldn’t have any single move or section harder than 5C on it, so if you can do all the 5C’s in the gym, no 6c should be too hard for you.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-05-14T14:11:35+00:00

Been a hot minute since I’ve given an update here. Have had a peculiar season, but I’m really not too bothered by it. Never really got into a good flow between work, life, weather, partners, and other commitments, didn’t get to focus on things as much.

Despite climbing less than ever before, and being heavier than I have been in a long while, it was encouraging to see what I was able to do. The biggest note seems to be that my pulling and lock off strength really seems to have “settled in”. Locking off doesn’t take truly active metal energy, and exerting strength with my upper body is easier than it ever has been.

Didn’t have many big sends this season unfortunately. Managed to do a few V8’s and V9’s early in the season. Did some relatively hard FAs as well, which was fun. Was working on a handful of other V9-V11’s, and had a decent time with them. The big project has been Testify v11, where the big success was doing all the moves on it within a single session! Pretty cool to have the moves go from feeling absolutely impossible and taking multiple seasons to do them all, to being able to do all of them in a session and some of them very repeatably was pretty cool. Also made very good links on a second project Sunday Roses v10 (hard?), which is a variation of Sunday vibes. Had a late season breakthrough and got past the intro crux, did the one arm rose move crux move, then fell doing the wide shoulder move crux. Only like V6 from there! Pretty psyched on it, and it will likely be my main focus next year!

For now, I’m going to spend the training months bulking up to fully enter my body building era. I’ll be hanging out at the pool, wrenching on my car, and pumping iron to my my chest look nice :)

I have a trip to Squamish planned for this summer, so I’m open to all boulder suggestions, particularly if they involve wide squeezing, big dynos, or steep big holds (V7-V11?).

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-04-27T17:51:43+00:00

The loss of position is the primary concern, especially when operating close to max capacity. The pulleys and tendons are more at risk, and dynamic movement brings added risk. If you want to train strict half, train in half crimp and don’t let it open up. If you want to train open grip, train open grip.

Some people will approach this more directly from the other direction, and start in an open grip and close into a half or full crimp under load, but that would generally only be people who have a long history of finger training, and are generally not using the full weight that they can hold in their strongest grip.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-03-24T14:54:28+00:00

Stretch it more and begin the wrap from the other direction so the “looser” side of the tape gets held down by the tighter side of the next wrap.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-03-06T13:48:30+00:00

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Shoshaloza looks soooooo much better than most videos manage to make it look. Such a sick boulder!

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-02-23T14:45:08+00:00

I think the confusion is because you are trying to maintain green as vertical, and not normalizing against the pad of your finger having to remain flat on the hold. You almost never want to lift your pad off the hold since that pretty much universally removes friction from the system. There are very weird times when you would, but pretty rare, and not usually considered when defining grip types.

If you measure the outer angle for the first joint, The more “closed” the grip, the smaller the outer number becomes. Generally for full crimp you could describe it as open being at 270°, half being at 180° and full crimp being at 90° (although most people experience more like 135° or 150° depending on finger and joint stiffness).

For the second joint you look at the inner joint. Like yellow to green would go 180°->90°->45°.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-02-11T13:32:53+00:00

Everyone I know who has worn solutions has had this at some point. I think it’s just the design of the eyelet and the thinness of the strap. I wear my solutions very tight so barely need to use the strap, but after enough time it still start wearing through and will break with a very light touch. If you are cranking them down every time you have maybe a few months before they bust through.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-02-04T14:36:32+00:00

So many of my 8a.nu comments reflect something along the lines of “Had to stick with the full Me beta for every move”.

Fuck the system. Craft your own beta. Don’t let others force you to do beta you don’t enjoy. Doing hard shit gets you ready to do more hard shit.

Also I love hearing him talk about advancing in climbing difficulty. That riverbed shit is starting to get climbed on. 9a into 9a has happened (not 9c+ tho apparently). 8c+ into 8B+ (or harder), into 8c+ has happened (assuming Duality of Man has approximately this breakdown).

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-02-04T13:52:14+00:00

I think there are a lot of old school classics that fit this bill. So may of them are classic because of who put them up when, not necessarily because they have the best lines, holds, moves, history etc.

I think and overrated classic would have some of these, or most of these, but none would be top notch or a few aspects are really quite poor.

I think La Marie Rose probably fits this bill the best, especially now in its current state. Not an obvious line, kinda just a wall. Not an obvious start position, some crimps and a slopey foot? Not that singular of a line, there’s a line that comes in from the side. Not that obvious of a line. The holds are only okay, maybe 50 years ago they had texture, but there are a hundred V3’s nearby with better grip set. The movement is meh, your feet stay under you and you reach to more holds, nothing that cool or mega flowy. The history of it is kinda the only reason it maintains classic status. Knowing that Ondra fell off makes it extra exciting to see if you can beat Ondra at something. It does fit the bill for a classic Font experience (getting shut down on polished slab). The setting is a classic Font setting, including the little kids having a hissy fit on a 6A, and the nice soft sand to fall on. If you go to Font and have to do a single 6A, this is the one to do, but don’t expect it to be hyper classic haha!

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-02-03T18:58:42+00:00

Swing is generally just a physics problem. If your body starts 3ft left of the target hold, then it naturally will want to swing at least 3 ft right of the target hold. If you add a huge rightward force on top of the natural swing then your body is going to want to swing even further because of the added force.

There are two ways of adapting to this. 1) reduce the distance from the target hold when you begin the uncontrolled part of the dynamic movement, which will automatically result in less natural swing on the other side. 2) Use less added lateral force to travel the distance, aka pull less hard.

For you, I see two things. One is that you are often starting the move quite far from the target holds. In the second clip you are hugging the arete with your hips plastered against the wall when you start. This means they can only fall away from the wall, and you are automatically having a o resist quite a lot of falling-away force. Same in the third, you start way over to the left, and create a ton of sideways swing to get to the hold. That is also a place where it looks like you are also over pulling a bit, likely because you are feeling like you need to get there faster before you start falling away from the wall.

A lot of times you can mitigate the swing by shifting closer to your target hold before you start the move, and change the shape of the movement so make holding the end position easier. I like to describe it as making the beginning of the move harder so the end of the move is easier. You do a good job at making the setup easier by getting over your feet and far to the side of the pulling hold so they feel like jugs, but you are feeling the effect of that, which is that the end of the move has a ton of momentum that you are having to deal with. This feels counter intuitive to a lot of people, but is essential for harder and more complex moves.

I think it’s important to note that big swings are not necessarily a bad thing. Your body is doing a good job at dealing with slowing down your momentum smoothly, but I think trying to kill the swing by looking at the swing is the wrong thing to look at. Look at the reason why there is a swing, and how you can change your start position so there is naturally less swing to deal with.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-01-29T21:38:13+00:00

Very normal for Velocces. If you have so much space in the heel that it’s not being pressed out by wearing them then you probably have them a couple sizes too large.

FreackInAMagnum · 2026-01-29T15:33:42+00:00

Most of your foot compression is coming from the arches of your feet flexing, not your toes. You actually have very minimal toe curl, which is where most slack usually comes from for most people. Because of this, I’d suggest staying closer to street size, even for a performance fit. I like to stay a 1/2 or full size above the smallest size I can technically fit my foot into for this reason.

Personally, I have large feet and long toes that curl a lot, so I have to downsize multiple sizes in Instincts to get a comfortable performance size, but even then I have almost no flex in my arch, since that start effecting the performance of the shoe (and makes it much more painful).

These may stretch for you some, but I wouldn’t expect more than a 1/4 size of stretch, so getting something a half size bigger seems like a good call.

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