Although sometimes heavily scrutinized, bouldering is perhaps the most popular, beginner-friendly, and cheapest way to get into climbing. Without ropes, a harness, belay devices, or sport/ trad equipment, a climber essentially just needs shoes and a place to climb to boulder indoors, and only an additional crash pad for outdoors.

Luckily, since many places offer shoe rentals, including the IM building on campus (free!), indoor bouldering is both accessible and affordable. Below I’ve outlined some helpful climbing techniques that greatly improved my climbing, and I hope will benefit you if you decide to try it, as well!

1. Focus on Footwork

When first learning to climb, most people, especially athletes, have a tendency to try to depend mostly on their arms. They use most of their strength pulling themselves upwards when they are already using much of their grip strength to hold themselves onto the wall.

This common mistake can be easily remedied by trying to use your feet more than your hands and arms. Moving your feet to higher holds first oftentimes makes it easier to reach holds that seemed difficult beforehand. Additionally, since our legs are naturally stronger than the upper body, it is much less of a struggle to spread your weight over two contact points through your feet than to fully depend on your arms.

Two underlying elements of good footwork are accuracy and balance. While keeping your weight on your feet is desirable, it will work against you if you do not understand how to best position your feet on small holds or slopers. Using the toe of a climbing shoe, designed to hold a person’s full body weight on a small surface of contact, will yield much better results than trying to fit a full foot sideways on a small hold. Being quick and precise with foot placement will also help your climbing shoes to last longer (you won’t be scuffing them along the wall, wasting both energy and rubber). Balance will come naturally as you get better at consistent foot placements.

2. Hips & Resting Points

Another element of climbing often overlooked is keeping your center of gravity close to the wall, making it easier to balance and hold yourself without getting tired or falling off. Men and women have different centers of gravity, requiring different climbing techniques. If you’ve ever seen one of the centers of gravity challenge TikToks where people trick their friends into falling, you know what I mean. Commonly, women are more flexible and have a lower center of gravity (in the hips), so they will climb differently than men with a higher center of gravity (the upper body). Techniques vary greatly from gender to gender, but also from person to person, but staying close to the wall will help with balance, strength, and technique all around.

Using large holds or kneebars as resting points will save your energy, too. Mid-climb, it is easy to get tired or need a break. Instead of starting over or jumping off, you are allowed to position yourself using the holds of that route to lean against the wall and rest your hands. For longer or harder routes, this is especially useful.

3. Plan & Deliberate

One of the best ideas to utilize before climbing is to study a climb and plan out your route. Walking through the movements mentally before executing them physically will help you with precision, spotting the holds once actually on the wall, and saving energy from holding yourself up while figuring out what to do next. Sometimes a different perspective from a few steps back will make a move seem more obvious or achievable. Talking to other climbers about how they completed the route helps with the strategy, too. You never want to waste time or energy making nondeliberate movements; planning your route ahead of time is always beneficial to your climb.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if there’s a certain type of climbing you’d like to hear more about in the comments below!