Footwork Is Not Optional

October 19, 2025 · 2 min read

A friend who climbs considerably harder than I do watched me on a problem last week and said one thing: your feet make a noise. I had not noticed. Every time I placed a foot, there was a scrape and a clonk as the shoe found the hold by feel rather than by eye, and every bit of that noise was weight going through my arms while my foot searched around.

So the next session I did nothing but footwork drills, which felt silly and was probably the most useful hour I have spent at the wall. The main drill was simply climbing easy problems in complete silence: look at the foothold, decide which part of the shoe goes where, place it, and only then move. If the shoe made a sound, I climbed down and did the move again. On the first problem I failed the silence test on nearly every move. By the end of the hour I could do three easy problems in a row without a sound, and I was noticeably less tired in the forearms afterwards.

The second drill was downclimbing everything I went up, which forces you to find footholds you cannot see and to trust them with your weight. The third was climbing easy problems with only one hand on the wall at a time, which makes it impossible to muscle through and shows exactly where the balance should be. I found that my hips were almost always too far from the wall, and that pulling them in by a few centimetres made the next handhold suddenly closer.

Two weeks on, the habit is starting to stick. I catch myself looking at my foot before I place it, which I apparently never did before, and I have stopped using the slab as a warm-up to be rushed through. The cost is that climbing feels slower and more deliberate, and sessions have fewer problems in them. The benefit is that one of the overhanging problems that had been stopping me for a month went this week, not because I got stronger but because I stopped wasting strength on the way up.