Anyone can hit the campus board and get strong, but truly skilled climbers are able keep it together even when they’re drowning in lactic acid, miles above the runner. Too often our inner caveman—the beast with no technique—asserts itself at the worst possible moment, and our panicky fight-or-flight response causes us to do the wrong thing (take flight).

Among the first things we hear when we start climbing are exhortations to “stay calm,” “relax” and “use your feet.” Prompts like these shape our technique in the early stages, but such advice eventually dries up, making it harder to take technique to the next stage.

One secret to advancing your ability is to understand exactly how your technique is thrown off when you’re outside your comfort zone. We tend to blow it because we presume that our subconscious always knows best. Humans are a climbing species, and certain components of our natural, default climbing style are helpful, but the key is to carefully define those aspects that are counter-productive and counterintuitive. In the heat of battle, no matter how skilled and experienced you think you are, you will always have that simmering tendency to do the wrong thing. These 10 counterintuitive technique pointers can help you go from Stone Age to Stone Crusher.

1. Don’t bang your feet

Everyone knows how important it is to place your feet accurately, so why refuse to when you’re pumped or scared? Nine times out of 10, you bang your feet when you’re maxed because you’re off balance, or, to be more specific, you keep your hips in the center as opposed to directing them over the active (higher) foot. Stand on the floor with your feet slightly wider than shoulder width and then stand on one foot. You must shift your hips to the side, over the weight-bearing leg. A good climber’s hips will zig-zag up the wall. A bad climber’s hips will move in a straight line. So the next time you‘re about to drag your foot when you’re flailing at the top of a route, you know what to do. Shift, baby!

2. The biggest footholds aren’t always the best

Another classic symptom of being pumped or hit by adrenaline is to throw your foot onto the largest and most obvious foothold, even if it is in a bad position, either too high (which makes it hard to stand up) or too far out to the side (which throws you off balance and necessitates a giant rock-over). If only you’d had the confidence to trust those smaller dinks that were lower down and closer in, they would have enabled you to build your feet up in smaller steps. more to the point, if only you’d seen them in the first place. Next time the red mist descends, look again for your footholds and consider the position before you make a hasty decision.

3. Build the feet first, then reach

It’s a simple decision: either step up and then reach, or reach and then step up. I guarantee that when you’re fresh and on easy ground you’ll see the sense in stepping up first, so why when you’re redlining will you be so tempted to go for the reach? If you stretch for a handhold with both feet low down: your heels lift up, and you may slip and slam against the wall. Best case, you stay on but are tucked against the wall, lose visibility below you and have a nightmare trying to locate the foothold again. Yet when your fingers are uncurling, the handhold always seems more tempting. This is perhaps one of the most common reasons for failing on an onsight. Last year in Céüse I dropped from the last move of the onsight of a route that I’d been saving for 15 years, purely because I slapped for the pocket before building my feet. Coping with the failure was hard enough, without reminding myself that I’m supposed to be the guy who teaches this stuff!

4. Arms straight

Bending your arms wastes strength and restricts the blood supply to your forearms. It’s obviously smarter to hang from straight arms and direct all the force through your skeleton instead of draining your muscles, so why do you only do this when fresh and composed?

Once again, the straight-armed style does not come naturally. If you ask a beginner to step onto a climbing wall, using any holds, he will do so with straight legs and bent arms. an orangutan would probably do the exact opposite and pull on with straight arms and bent legs, but the natural human instinct is to stand and bend the arms and this becomes your undoing on steeper routes. Lowering the center of gravity is also counterintuitive because you’re focused on trying to climb up. The last thing you are thinking about is moving down. So the next time you’re holding a lock-off, shaking out, chalking up, or feeling for a hold, ask yourself if you could simply lower your hips and relieve the strain.

Related to this: you know that you shouldn’t lock off, pull up reels of slack and stretch up to clip from a tiny crimp when a better hold next to the draw would enable you to clip from a straight arm. But when you’re maxed you fool yourself. Perhaps there’s something different about this particular clip? No, there’s not. Think about it.

5. Don’t over grip

Over gripping is natural when you’re halfway up a rock face. It’s usually when you’re cruising on easier ground that you relax your grip as much as possible, but this is one of the first things to vanish when anxiety levels rise. Those moments of madness when you start trying to rip the holds off the wall are invariably the times when you should attempt to conserve grip strength. Similarly when you’re composed and thinking straight, you often stop to reassess how you are gripping a hold—perhaps there’s a sneaky catch for the thumb, or a hidden incut section, or maybe you can switch from crimping to a more relaxed open-hand grip?

For some reason, when you’re on the brink of taking a whipper, it’s usually a case of anything will do. How many times have you pulled back up the rope, only to realize that you weren’t gripping the hold properly? The answer is not to waste precious time faffing with holds, but instead make a split-second check of your grip. It could easily determine the difference between success and failure.

One of the most important performance skills is the ability to maintain good technique in high-pressure situations, and one of the best ways to achieve it is to work from a checklist of the most common mistakes that crop up when you’re climbing by the seat of your pants.

In the heat of the battle, instincts often take over and we ignore the highly counterintuitive, learned aspects of climbing technique. Last issue this column tackled five mistakes. This issue we take on five more. At the end of this article, you should have a good idea what to do next time you’re staring down the crux with your forearms feeling like balloons.

6. Stalling on cruxes

Why is it that when you reach a poor hold you stop in your tracks and waste time wishing that it was bigger? Stalling won’t make the hold get bigger or you feel stronger. If you’ve sussed the hold once or twice, sized up your feet and located the next handhold, then all you’ll achieve by delaying is increasing your pump and reducing your chances. If you can retreat to a good rest, then feeling around for a better grip might be viable, but a common error is to hold back for no good reason. The smallest hold on the route is the one you want to spend the least time on.

7. Tunnel vision

A surge of adrenaline has the effect of narrowing your vision. This primal response may prepare us for combat, but in a modern climbing situation it can cause some of the most irritating and easily avoided failures. By forcibly reminding yourself to “look wide” when the pump kicks in, you will be much less likely to miss crucial holds.

Acknowledge that when you are pumped or scared, you are less likely to spot rests or decipher sequences. Often, rests require you to break the climbing sequence and step to one side. I remember being way too amped for my own good while trying to redpoint Punks in the Gym (5.13d) at Arapiles, Australia, a route that I’d wanted to climb since childhood. Having fallen off the last move and split my fingertip on the third day, I found the only rest on the route by accident while lowering down. Infuriatingly, it involved shuffling half a move left and changing feet. The busted tip prevented me from nailing the route before I left but I know that if I’d had my eyes open, that rest would have made all the difference.

8. Forgetting to breathe

If you can take one thing for granted, it’s that you’re going to be breathing during a climb. But the chances of you breathing in a manner that maximizes your prospects for success are about a million to one, unless you make a conscious effort to override instinct. You naturally hold your breath during cruxes and then gasp off the oxygen debt afterward when you make it to a good hold. When a degree of fear enters the equation your natural breathing becomes even less effective as you suck thin, shallow and rapid breaths through your mouth and make yourself even more anxious. Entire books have been written on breathing but the key is to remind yourself to breathe deeply and regularly. By lengthening your exhalation you will naturally induce a
deeper inhalation. This is undoubtedly hard to remember when you’re fighting through a crux and effective breathing is often the last thing on your mind.

9. Not shaking the key arm

Picture this: You’re pumped out of your mind and you see the clipping hold. What do you do next? Option A: you go for it and then realize that you don’t have enough reserve in the tank to pull up the rope, so you’re forced either to grab the draw or pitch. Option B: you hang back, shake the arm you’ll be using to make the clip (perhaps even to the point that the other hand virtually uncurls) and then you take the clipping hold and make the clip with ease. This important tip for pump-management can also be used to enable you to save strength for a poor hold at the crux when you’re maxed-out. Of course, it requires that crucial extra bit of planning and restraint that so often evades us in the heat of the battle.

10. Not stepping through

This is the big one for anyone transitioning from vertical routes to overhangs. Most of us learn to climb on vertical walls, and master the parallel-hips style. When you see a foothold to the left side of your body, you use it with your left foot, and footholds on the right get used with the right foot. This approach works perfectly well on vertical walls, but has disastrous consequences on steep walls. First, you are forced wildly out of balance as your hips barn door away from the wall as you make each reach. Second, you must use extra arm strength to make each move. The net result is that most low- to intermediate-level climbers think that overhangs are impossibly strenuous.

It comes as something of a revelation to realize that there’s an alternative method that makes overhangs feel much easier. By stepping through and using the outside edge of the opposite foot (i.e. placing your left foot on a foothold to the right) you twist your hip into the wall and bring your body into balance. Better still, you can make the reach with your arms virtually straight, by twisting your torso instead of blasting your biceps. Other important variations to this technique also need to be learned and practiced—the drop-knee, the inside and outside flags and so on—but the key is to remember that this is not a natural way to climb. Even a 5.13 climber, pumped out of his mind, 10 feet above a bolt on a wildly overhanging wall, must remind himself to step through.

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Neil Gresham has been training and coaching for two decades. In 2001, he made the second ascent of Equilibrium (E10 7a/5.14X) on Peak District gritstone, and last year established Freakshow (8c/5.14b) at Kilnsey, also in the U.K. On October 13, 2016 he made the first ascent of Sabotage—an 8c+ (5.14c) extension to Predator (8b/5.13d) at Malham Cave, North Yorkshire, England. Sabotage is Gresham’s first climb of the grade.