How to Get Better at Slab Climbing

Hey, what's up guys? My name is Jason Schmalz and I'm an AMGA single pitch instructor. And today I'm in North Carolina at Looking Glass, which is one of the iconic crags here in North Carolina with a couple of my friends. And so we're gonna go climb on a couple of the classics, but we're also gonna take some time to talk about slab climbing, which is one of the more common styles out here. While we're out climbing, we'll spend a lot of time talking about some different techniques on slab and the importance of it. But just to highlight a couple of those before we get going, firstly, slab climbing really transfers to all different types of climbing from the perspective of footwork and core engagement. So it's a really good style of climbing to learn. A lot of people have a love-hate relationship with slab climbing. They basically hate it when they don't know how to do it, but as soon as they learn how to do it, they love it because of the way it transfers to the other styles of climbing. Another real value add for slab climbing is the ability to increase your mental toughness and aptitude. So slab climbing requires a lot of commitment, and we'll talk about some techniques on how to step into that commitment level that it requires. But you can then take that commitment that you learn through slab climbing and apply it to a couple of the other objectives that you might have in mind. And the last kind of benefit for slab climbing that I'm sure you'll realize as you learn more about it is that it's a very common style, both on the East Coast, but then also out West. So it's definitely worth your time to learn. It'll help you get on a lot more objectives, kind of the iconic objectives that you see in videos and stuff like that, that you've always wanted to do as you learn those techniques. So let's go ahead and hit the trail, and I'll see you at the crag, and we'll get to climb together. Okay, so we're at the base of the climb now. So we're gonna climb one of the classics here at Lookingglass called the nose, and the nose is almost completely slab climbing. So we'll get to highlight a lot of the techniques on that. The key behind all slab climbing is friction. So I thought being an engineer in a past life, it would be cool to talk about the force of friction and how that's generated, because you can see that translated into all the techniques we'll highlight today. So you can see on the nerdy Newtonian mechanics diagram I have displayed now, that there's a couple of forces going on on my foot as a climber in friction climbing. So the first force is, of course, the force of gravity that's pulling me down. And then there's the opposing force, which is the friction force, which is keeping me on the rock, which is pulling up equal and opposite to that gravity force. And what causes the friction to be more or less is two things. One is the coefficient of friction. So between my foot and the rock, there's a coefficient that's predefined by nature of the amount of friction my foot can have on that rock. Same with my foot with a piece of wood or climbing a tree around here or whatever, it changes based on surfaces. So we'll talk about ways to maximize that coefficient. And then the second part of the equation for the force of friction is the normalized force. So the force of the rock pushing directly perpendicular to its surface back onto my foot, so that if it didn't have that force, my foot would push completely into the rock. And so that force of friction can be amplified with a couple of techniques we'll go over in slab, but basically the force of friction is dependent on the coefficient of friction and that normalized force pushing back through my foot perpendicular to the rock. And so we wanna maximize both of those. If those go up, then I have higher friction, I have less likelihood to fall and a better chance to complete my climb. So let's talk about the techniques in action on the climb and see what happens. So we're on route now and the first technique we're gonna talk about is maximizing the friction coefficient with use of your shoes. So there's two points I wanna make on this. The first is shoe choice. So in order to maximize the friction coefficient, we wanna maximize surface area on the rock. So you wanna choose shoes that are neutral and have soft rubber. And what that's gonna do is firstly, it's gonna give the maximum surface area on the rock because your shoes are neutral and they don't have these pointy aggressive toes where you would only maybe have a point or a couple points on the rock. So now you have your whole ball of your foot and toes on the rock. And then the soft rubber will allow the rubber to slip into all the little crevices and crystals on the rock. And so that's what you wanna be thinking about with shoe choice. The second thing you wanna be thinking about with shoes is not edging, but instead putting your toes or the balls of your feet right under your nose, okay? So my whole thing is I wanna maximize the surface contact with my shoe. So if I try to edge like in the climbing gym, like how I'm used to, now all I have is the edge of my shoe on the rock and it's liable to just slip right off just like that. But if I get my toes square with the wall and put them right under my nose, now I have this entire ball of my foot making contact with the rock and I can push up and I can actually almost balance my entire body on one foot with no hole, okay? So that's the first technique I want you to think about, maximizing surface area and softness of rubber on the rock to get that good friction. Okay, the second technique you wanna use in friction climbing is to maximize the normalized force on my foot by getting nose over toes or getting my weight all over my toes, okay? So what we wanna do is if you remember that force diagram, that normalized force coming out, the higher we make that, the better the force of friction is on my shoes and therefore keeping me on the wall. So the technique that we do is called nose over toes and all that is is a mental reminder where I am basically, the mechanics of getting my nose directly over my toe results in my body's center of mass being over my foot and that maximizes that force down into the rock which maximizes the force of the rock back up into my foot which then maximizes the force of friction to keep me on the ground. So the basic technique is just keeping my hips close to the wall, my body slightly forward. Obviously if I start to lean back and now my nose isn't over my toes, I start to lose that weight, that center of gravity weight over my toes and I can start to slip. Or same thing if I go too far forward, now my weight, I have hardly any weight on my toes and I could slip back like that, okay? So that's in the vertical plane, how to keep your normalized force maximized. But then we also wanna think about in the horizontal plane when we're shifting as we go up the wall. So I may have to take a big side step to the right. So if I was gonna go here and then to this hold, I step up and I may, if I had to make a big step, go like this but now I don't have all my weight over my toe. My weight's in the middle. My weight's in between my feet. So if this was a marginal friction hold, I could potentially, as I shifted my weight over, start to slip off. So there's a couple ways to try to make that transition to the side a little bit smoother. The best way is to take smaller steps matching feet so that you constantly keep your weight over your feet. So the classic technique would be if I was up here, I would step, I would take two steps for that move, keeping my weight over my toes the entire time as I did two steps and stepped up versus doing one big move. Another technique that'll help you as you make side steps or high steps in friction climbing is tightening your core. And one way to consciously tighten your core is to hold your breath on a big move. So of course we wanna breathe while we're climbing but this is just for one move. If you hold your breath and tighten up, it can help keep your hips into the wall as you make the move and also control your weight as it shifts from one foot to the other a little bit better. So if I were to have to make a big move like that, like we talked about, I could step my foot out. Right now, my weight's still over my left foot. Step my right foot out. And as I go to shift on a big move, tighten my core by holding my breath. And nice and controlled up, okay? So that's another technique you can use. So the third technique to think about in slab climbing, real slab climbing, is how to even identify holds. Sometimes when you get on this rock, it can just look totally blank and you're like, man, I have no idea where to even put my hands and feet or where to get started. And a good way to do that, the first thing you wanna think about is looking for color imperfections in the rock. Of course, you can see some color imperfections here as lichen, so that would be not good for us. What I mean by color imperfections is looking for little crystal systems in the rock. So these can look like strands, or in this case, at looking glass, they're in these little eyebrows. You can see there's some white crystal forms here. There's some more right here. You can see that white on the black. You can also see some booboo on my finger. So those are places where you wanna start, is looking for those kind of crystal imperfections. Another kind of imperfection you wanna look for is any slight change in the slope of the mountain. So of course, we just showed on these eyebrows how there's a little bit of a slope difference, but another good place to look is you can see there's these little dishes in the rock where you can see it just barely changes. And that's just enough to get a good hand or foot, again, maximizing the surface area, both with hands and feet. I'm not gonna grab this like a cramp. I'm gonna grab this like a sloper like you would in the gym to try to maximize my friction, although my fingers are still tense, okay? So by identifying those different crystal systems, that's where I wanna put my foot. So even though they're steep, watch how my foot can stick to them really well. Again, nose over toes, maximizing force. And you can see I can get almost all my weight on what looks like not even a good hold with one foot. The fourth technique involves, again, maximizing the normal force pushing back on our body from the rock. So of course, our weight helps to maximize that force. But what if I wanna maximize that force even more than what my weight can provide? And that's if I can find some underclings or a place to provide a counter force with my hand as I go through maybe a more difficult part of the climb. So here you can see I have a nice undercling that's not really great for holding me up. But if I step up onto this friction part with my foot, I can start to pull my body weight down onto my feet and really maximize the force going downward into my feet, into the rock, and thus the normal force back up. And this is really good for making a couple moves. One thing about this is normally you'll use these kind of counter forces for a crux part, but make sure that you know where you're gonna find some relief where you don't need that extra force pulling you into the rock to provide that extra friction. Because if you don't identify that and you're still in the steep part where the extra force is required, but you have no way to apply it as you stand up, you can run into trouble. So for me, this is the relief spot here. So if I pull myself down, but then I step up and now I'm gonna relieve the downward force, but I'm on a hold that requires less friction to stay on. All right, the last technique to use in friction climbing or slab climbing is the use of momentum. And this is a little bit different from a dyno. It's more controlled and you're never actually losing contact with the rock. But sometimes there's a little bit of a difficult spot that maybe fully waiting feels insecure. Or in this case, I have to do like a high foot or something like that, where I'm almost pushing myself off the mountain if I try to stay in that position. So I may try to use some momentum to get up to the good hold. As you think about using momentum, you wanna think about a start, middle and an end. You don't wanna just use the momentum blindly and then get up to a spot where you're not sure what to do. So in this case, I see a good hold right there just out of my arm's reach, but I can use some momentum to help me get through this little steeper part where I might not get as good a friction as some of the other holds on the climb, okay? So let's see how I can use this. Again, kind of getting nose over toes. I have all marginal holds here, but I'm gonna use some momentum to get up. And you could see it was just a small boost to get up. I wanna control the momentum completely because if I lose control of the momentum, I start bouncing. Now my normalized force can become unpredictable, which means my friction can become unpredictable. So think about that while you're using that technique. Okay, so we're gonna keep climbing now. I'm gonna get to the top of this pitch and belay Annamarie up and we'll see you guys out at the crag. I hope you found that video useful on friction climbing and slab climbing. Feel free to leave any comments or questions below. And if you found value out of this video, be sure to give our channel a like or a subscribe. Thanks and we'll see you guys on the next one.