Technique and physical conditioning for crack climbing
Very recently I had been to a climb where I learnt about an alternate route that requires a huge crack to be climbed. It is of about a 100-120 ft roughly.
Though I have experience in climbing open faces of walls with the aid of equipment like pegs, I have never tried much of my skills to climb through natural cracks, so before I get there, I'd like to prepare a bit in that point of view.
As far as I can see the kind of an activity it is, offset pull-ups should be good exercise to start with.
Can anybody suggest some more sort of a warm-up/exercises one should follow while beginning to prepare/practice for such a climb? Are there good online educational resources for learning specialized techniques for crack climbing?
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Update 2019: video links and PDF links fixed, and new 2019 video added. Please let me know via comment if the links break again.
I don't have a lot of experience with cracks myself (I refuse to make my feet hurt, and so far I haven't found a way around that), but I found these Wide Boyz videos quite helpful in getting the basic jams correct.
Each video (except the newest ones: #7 Advanced Fingers, and #8 Advanced Hands) is accompanied by a PDF, though I found the videos themselves the most useful.
Video, and where available accompanying PDF file:
- Crack School #1 - Finger Cracks
- Crack School #2 - Hand Cracks
- Crack School #3 - Fist Cracks
- Crack School #4 - Offwidth Cracks
- Crack School #5 - Gear + Gear Placement
- Crack School #6 - Taping
- Crack School #7 - Advanced Fingers
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/5301. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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