4 Lessons to Master Slab Climbing Like Anna Hazelnutt

We're back to reviewing pro climbers and this climber is known for making one of the fastest rises in trad climbing that any climber anywhere has ever done. We're going to review four key attributes that has helped this climber climb some of the hardest and most technical routes in the world but I'll let her introduce herself. My name is Anna and I'm a professional rock climber who specializes in outdoor vert and slab climbing. This first skill is something Anna was well named for perhaps even before her climbing achievements and that is her insane ability at high stepping. Anna has an amazing ability to bring her foot up high, rock over and then stand up on it. This in itself is a pretty basic technique but what makes Anna so advanced at this technique is her ability to keep her hips close to the wall while doing it. If we check out this second angle of this high step you'll see that Anna's hips stay close to the wall throughout the entire movement. This is so important when you're going to be on really small holds because you want as much weight going through the foothold as possible. If you need to push your hips away from the wall to get even deeper hip flexion then you're going to be pushing your weight away from the wall and this is going to put way more weight into your fingers. In this example of Anna on the Quarryman in North Wales you can see the size of the holds are tiny and the footholds are few and far between. Effective high stepping is going to be so important to success on a climb like this. Again something like push the sky and magic wood has almost non-existent hand holds. The success to this climb is going to be in the footwork. So how do you improve your ability to high step? I would always consider a move like this in two respects. First it's going to be about gaining the position which is often to do a flexibility and secondly it's going to be about the strength to stand out of it which is going to be the pistol squat. Let's consider that first part, the gaining the position, actually getting your foot up to the foothold. I'm going to break this down again into two components. Firstly it's going to be the flexibility that is in the lengthening side of the joint. So here we're looking at the glutes and the hip adductors and potentially also the hip flexor of the leg which is staying down. We are going to want to develop the flexibility in these muscles which is something Anna has heaps of. Secondly we want to work on the lifting portion of this movement. This is going to be in the hip flexors. These are the muscles used to raise the knee towards the foothold. One simple stretch to develop the flexibility required for this move would be in a long lunge position bringing your elbow to the floor on the inside of your knee. This is a great stretch for the hip adductors and if we focus on extending the other leg behind us this can also put a bit of stretch into the hip flexors. It's very similar to the movement we do when we're doing a high step. An extra stretch that I'm going to throw in there is going to be a kneeling calf stretch. This flexibility around the ankle is often actually going to help you get a few extra inches in height when we're doing a high step. The second component of this lifting portion we want to strengthen those hip flexors. What we can do is staying in this lunge position, we can actually just work to lift the foot off the floor. It's only going to be small movements, we want to work in that end range position so we're strengthening the hip flexors in that specific range of motion. We can also work the hip flexor raise in a standing position against the wall so it's going to mimic what we do in rock climbing. This is going to engage the glutes a little bit more so it's externally rotating the hip. Now that we've developed the mobility required for a high step, we want to develop the strength of standing out of it and moving to the next hold. I mentioned this is essentially a pistol squat but I actually think this exercise is quite advanced for a lot of people so we're going to take it a We're going to start with box step ups. This is really easy to progress in two ways. The first is obvious, it's going to be adding more weight and building more strength but really the first thing you want to progress is the range of motion. We want to be able to step up from the highest point possible so that eventually our back leg is not actually giving us any support to initiate the movement. Gradually work into deeper and deeper positions in this box step and if you need to work on using assistance with a resistance band. Something I noticed while substantially increasing Anna's watch time and ad revenue was that she is really good at keeping her chest close to the wall while making upwards progress. Watch this clip where you can see two things are happening. As Anna builds her feet high, her elbows are coming away from the rock but her head is on the inside of her elbows and her chest is close to the wall. Here is a really good example of Tom and Anna working the same route but having quite different techniques. You can see how Tom's elbows are down but Anna's elbows are out and she keeps her chest much closer to the wall. What I believe Anna is doing here is using her excellent ability to crimp on small holds and more on that later on to keep her chest close to the wall and keep her centre of mass over her feet. Watch her climb the classic to bolt or not to be. Watch Anna climbing this classic in Smith Rock to bolt or not to be. You can see her keeping her chest so incredibly close to the wall and she's doing this by not just pulling down on the holds but pulling out on the holds too. This outward direction of pull helps her then pull the rest of her body into the wall keeping the weight over her feet and her centre of mass so close to the wall. This is something that Aidan Roberts is really well named for as well but on steep terrain. Aidan and his coach Ollie Torr coined this the vacuum style. Essentially they're trying to suck their body into the wall but to do this you need some direction of pull which is actually pulling away from the wall. This is what Anna seems to be doing really well but more on vertical terrain. So how do we do this in our own climbing? How do we keep our chest really close to the wall as well as our hips? What is clear from the observation is that our elbows often come away from the rock with the same direction of pull which works for applying force but really the key is with the connection point to the rock and this all comes down to crimping. This technique is only really possible with a full crimp or high angle crimp on the rock. This is important for two reasons. The crimp or high angle grip position is going to allow you to change your wrist angle more easily while you're moving through the position and secondly because we can change the wrist angle it allows us to change the direction of pull allowing more force being pulled away from the rock rather than just straight down. This 2012 research paper that compared different hold depths and different gripping techniques had some really useful insights for this. What is particularly useful is that they didn't just measure vertical force but they also measured what they called anterior posterior force direction. Yes got it right fiction. Essentially this is the ability to pull away from the hold or away from the rock and this is what we're doing if we're talking about that vacuum style of climbing where we're pulling ourselves into the wall to keep that flat profile. Compared to the open hand or half crimp the full crimp allows us to apply significantly more force away from the rock and this is what we're going to need to do if we want to pull our chest into the wall. The researchers write this would be the advantage of the crimp grip as climbers have more liberty to adjust their body posture with the fixed hand. This is exactly what we see Anna doing when she's able to pull into deep lock positions or pull her chest into the wall. She's changing her body positions because she's so well experienced with this full crimp position. One other thing you'll also notice in Anna's climbing is that she's able to keep her chest close to the wall even when her hips aren't close to the wall and although hips away from the wall might seem counterproductive as a technique this is something Anna will do purposefully so that she can create a better force vector into really bad sloping footholds. So we've just covered that you're going to need to full crimp to be able to do Anna's chest to wall technique so this technique should not come as a surprise to you. It is high angle crimping and full crimping. If you're going to climb on vertical and slabby terrain like Anna specializes in, you're going to be climbing on loads of really small handholds. Anna's full crimp is a full crimper's full crimp. You can see she gets really high angle on these holds. She's able to get a huge amount of extension in the dip joint meaning this knuckle raise is really high and she'll also get a lot of flexion in the MPC joint or what I've called herd, what I've called herd, which I've also hold, hold curd, or what could also be called the puncher's knuckle, puncher's, punching knuckles, I'm just going to get rid of that. She'll also get a lot of flexion in the MPC joint or the knuckles which you would punch with so essentially she's going to close a fist on the handhold. These angles created with the fist is what we call a high angle crimp and if we place the thumb over the index finger this is what we're going to call a closed crimp. Anna may be a full crimp dominant climber but it's not out of preference it's almost out of necessity. If you're going to climb exclusively on small holds you'd be mad not to full crimp. If we go back to that research paper I mentioned earlier it clearly shows that the full crimp technique allows us to apply significantly more force on small holds. This was in the maximal vertical pulling force so pulling straight down and then we know the other benefit is that it allows us to pull more outwards and change wrist angle so we can move our body around the holds. It should be noted that this benefit seems to disappear as soon as the holds get much bigger than 20 millimeters however for Anna a hold bigger than 20 millimeters is probably a jug and that's where she's going to be resting. Oh and adding the thumb in a full crimp position allows us to apply potentially 20 percent more strength compared to an open grip position which makes sense because it's the fifth digit. So if we want to climb more like Anna then we clearly have to do more full crimping or at least we have to get better at full crimping but there's definitely some concern out there with this gripping technique particularly because it does place more force on the annular pulleys the connective tissue that holds the tendon to the bone and the fingers. When we go into this really high angle crimping position a lot more force is going to get put through these passive structures and that's often where we feel like we're going to get pulley ruptures which no climber wants. But I think we should be less cautious about full crimp as a technique or even a training method in itself and we should be more cautious with not paying attention to basic training principles like progressive overload and graded exposure. People like Anna and even Aidan Roberts use full crimping technique on some of the hardest climbs in the world and manage to do so without getting injured. This is partly down to genetics of course but a lot of training history has gone into their ability to do these techniques on the hardest climbs. So my recommendations for training the full crimp won't be specifically in the technique itself. Your individual finger lengths, your joint mobility and your hand anatomy will define the techniques you use when it comes to full crimping or high angle crimping. Really my recommendations are going to be how you can gradually build in the exposure to using this technique in your climbing. My first comment would be don't be afraid to use full crimp in a hangboard or pickup style training method because you can use this with very low loads and it's very very controlled more so than your actual climbing. The risk is not the technique or grip position itself the risk is picking up a ridiculous amount of weight or going straight into hanging body weight without any build-up. If you wanted to get more confident with this grip doing some really light hangs in this grip position before you started climbing would be an easy way to gradually build it into your climbing. The next step is of course to use this grip position in your climbing. The issue here is that it would just feel weird to use a full crimp on big holds so naturally you're going to be using relatively small holds when trying to use this technique but we want to keep it controlled and we want to regulate the intensity. So my recommendation would be to try and use this grip position in one a low velocity environment don't go jumping to small holds make sure your movements are controlled and two try and keep on big footholds. So this could be combining multiple climbs so that you crimp the small holds of one climb but you keep your feet on the big holds of another climb. This lets you try out some new grip positions without being in an uncontrolled environment where you might have foot slips. Ultimately though you're going to need to use your full crimp technique on harder climbs and probably on board climbs and something that's going to push the intensity up but keep in mind this grip position works so well because of the biomechanics and the connective tissue which is allowing you to apply so much force. This is going to take longer to develop than potentially your physical strength or your confidence will increase so take your time with it consider that your full crimping ability will develop over several months and years not within weeks. This next standout attribute for Anna is her head game. There are a lot of amazing climbers out there with incredible head game doing some really scary routes but I just don't know of any climbers that have managed to jump from HVS to E9. The confidence to climb E9 takes climbers many years of experience and a slow build up through the grades if they even make it that far but for Anna she seemed to ignore all of that and just do it overnight. I'm going to dig into Anna's video of Once Upon a Climb in the Southwest, the E9 that she did with Tom Randall because this acts as a really good case study of some of the things she's using to develop her confidence and ability to climb such a hard trad route. I really want to do this one day in the future I don't know when it might be years from now. This is not overt confidence this is enduring confidence this is the belief that she can do anything as long as she puts her mind to it and stays consistent. Day one there was absolutely no pressure I was excited for the opportunity to hang off the static line with Tom and play on my absolute favorite style of climbing. This mindset does not put the goal on a pedestal because she is there for the experience of the route. This removes a lot of the pressure and is probably why Anna can approach such audacious goals. She has nothing to lose and everything to gain in this situation and this also shows a growth mindset she's there for the experience and to learn from it not necessarily just to achieve the goal. I actually managed to link the climb from ground up on a shunt which was a wildly cool achievement for me. Finding success in being able to do the route on a shunt shows that Anna is able to take the small wins along the way. This is another strategy in being able to build up the confidence but be part of the process of growth mindset. I'll be completely honest I don't think many people are going to emulate Anna's level of confidence and push themselves to jump from HVS to E9 although Anna did have the sport climbing ability behind her most people just won't be able to do that because it's going to take ages to build up that confidence. But I do have four things I think are really key to improving our own confidence when it comes to trying to tackle scary goals. Number one is you're going to need a growth mindset. The saying to focus on the journey and not the goal is a bit overused these days but it's still as true as ever. This is not to say you can't focus on goals entirely my next point is that you want to be able to take the small wins. These might be pre-planned process goals like being able to do the route on top rope or just making small links within the project or these might be unplanned things like being able to find flow state while working on a top rope. Number three is to be able to reflect on previous successes. Let's call this your confidence journal this might just be in your mind but be aware of situations in the past where you are able to overcome a challenge then use things like self-talk to encourage you that you can do it again in these new situations. Number four is to build a support network. Anna has some amazing mentors around her like Tom Randall well known for doing some of the scariest trad routes in the world. If you can find a Tom they will help build you up so that you can achieve your own goals. If you're enjoying this series and want to learn from more pro climbers that can improve your climbing make sure you subscribe to the channel. Also if you want to learn more techniques on how to crimp go check out this video over here. Thank you for watching we'll see you next time.