The Learning Curve: The Fix for Painful Climbing Shoes
In my eleven years of climbing, I’ve come across a lot of different tricks for making climbing either easier or more enjoyable. Some seem like common sense once they are explained to you, (e.g. brushing holds or climbing in the shade), and some will still seem like complete shenanigans even after you’ve seen them used successfully.
In this new series of blog posts that I'm calling "The Learning Curve," I plan on sharing many of the helpful tricks and tactics that I’ve picked up across the last decade; the dark arts of rock climbing, if you will.
Today’s tactic is one of my all time favorites, and probably the one that I’ve shown other people more than any other. This one definitely falls under the "making climbing more enjoyable" category.
Climbing shoes can hurt sometimes.
Breaking in a new pair, putting shoes on when you have a blister or cut on your foot, or dealing with hot spots from shoes that don’t fit perfectly can all be very uncomfortable, and can make climbing miserable.
Have you ever continued to climb in a worn out pair of shoes, with a brand new pair sitting at home, for the sole reason of not wanting to break in the new pair?
Have you ever had to avoid climbing for a couple of days or wear your friend's giant shoes just because you had a blister on your foot and it hurt to put your size 35 "Solutions" on?
Are your climbing shoes a pain to put on for the first time each day before they loosen up for the rest of the session?
For everyone who both loves and hates climbing shoes, this is for you:
The Grocery Bag Technique
Take a plastic grocery bag, and cut out four squares. Roughly 5 inches per side is usually a good size.
Use these squares to cover your toes and your heels.
Attempt to put on your climbing shoes...
...and BOOM! The plastic bag takes away most of the friction, making it easier to put your shoes on. It also eliminates almost all irritation on your toes, the side of your foot, and on the back of your heel.
When I get a new pair of shoes, I’ll use this for the first 30 minutes or so of each session. No more blisters from wearing a new model that you’ve never owned before.
You can also use this technique for shoes that are hard to put on for the first time of the day, like "Dragons" or "Teams" (from "FiveTen"). I’ll put the bag over just my heel, climb a handful of warmups, and then take it out for the rest of the session.
This is also a great method for new climbers who haven't developed toe calluses yet, and feel like their climbing time is limited by the pain of wearing climbing shoes.
I always make sure to keep a few cut-out squares in my bouldering bucket at all times now.
Hopefully this helps take out some of the headache of dealing with painful climbing shoes! I plan on making "The Learning Curve" series a regular occurrence so let me know what you think, and if you have any favorite tactics or any topics you'd like me to talk about!
Do you really have terrible willpower? Or are you surrounded by distractions and obstacles?
Giving artificially low grades to climbs increases their perceived value for our training and development. The more something is mis-graded the more we naturally want to prioritize it.
Climbing starts off as this self-feeding cycle that has you wishing you could climb seven days a week. What happens when this cycle stops bringing improvement though?
Use strength to leverage every other aspect of your climbing, not replace them.
If everything you do is a finger workout, then when do your hands get a chance to recover?
There is a common theme between a grilled cheese sandwich and good training advice.
The more accurately we define our problems, the more approachable it will feel to find solutions.
Maybe the most understated way of getting better is to build fallback successes into your plan.
How much time should climbers spend becoming more well rounded vs. improving their strengths?
As cool as assessments and standards are, they can easily leave people settling for “good enough” when they have the potential to do much more.
Being able to quickly recognize familiar sequences is a crucial ingredient to harder climbing.
It’s far more comfortable for us to blame ignorance for our lack of progress than it is to blame our own efforts.
Once you learn the power of good tactics it can be hard to step away from them.
Of all the people that I spoke with this year who were stuck in plateaus, many of them had the same thing in common: they climbed and trained alone.
The belief that you are getting better at climbing is one of the most important ingredients in actually getting better at climbing.
How many times have you gone up a route and felt overwhelmed, only to look back and realize that it’s not as intimidating as it initially seemed?
Most of us go into a training plan or an outdoor season with an expectation, but expecting results can make us brittle when problems arise.
Whenever there is a training article online or some tidbit of knowledge on social media, it’s important that you consider the context.
At a certain stage in climbing, the hand and foot beta you use stops being the deciding factor in whether or not you are successful.
The intermediate climber’s problem with perception starts to arise when they can’t recall all of the solutions they have attempted during the problem solving process.
If you want to get the most out of your skill work and practice, being able to remember what you tried is a great first step.
Well-intentioned brainstorming about improving ourselves can quickly devolve into avoiding the challenge in front of us.
You’ll get more value out of replicating the times that things go well than you will from dwelling on the bad days.
I never thought I’d be recommending this, but some of y’all should be putting less effort into becoming technically better climbers.