How to Ice Climb #1: Good ice climbing starts with good feet.

My name is Will Gadd and for the next few minutes we're going to be talking about how to use your feet ice climbing. You want to get solid sticks and you want to get solid feet when you're ice climbing. If you've got solid feet everything else goes well. Most of the time when people fall off ice climbing it's not because of their tools, it's because their feet blow, because they didn't get good feet. It's not as intuitive as you think. Very few people get good foot placements when they start ice climbing. It takes a different approach. So how to get good foot placements? The first part of it is where you kick. If you kick, just like when you you strike with your tools, if you kick on the outside of a convex area the ice is going to tend to break. It just isn't well supported. What you want to look for are horizontal features that you can get your front points on and then your secondary points below. Maybe if it's a perfectly smooth piece of ice you're going to totally build a placement, but in general you want to use what's there and what's structurally stable. You have to be precise. Most novice ice climbers when they start they're not even looking at their feet. They're just looking off like, where's my next tool, when in reality you want to be looking down. I can tell where somebody is in their ice climbing career very quickly by whether or not they look down at their feet as they're kicking. Most novices are looking up and they're trying to kick and things are going on and it's all sketchy. If you watch a good ice climber they're going to move their butt out from the ice, look down and then bring their feet up and kick, looking at it the whole time. You have to look where your feet are kicking or else the whole system doesn't work. So some other key points. Everybody in North America and Europe and globally, I guess, learns to kick a soccer slash football by dropping their toe and kicking it. Unfortunately what that does when you're ice climbing, if you kick like that, is the toe of your boot hits the ice and the points don't go in. So the big idea is that you've got a muscle on the front of your leg called the tibialis anterior and its sole function in life is to pick your toes up. So you've got to engage this muscle that runs along the outside of your shin, pick your toes up and then when you kick the points hit the ice, not your boot. So if you're out there and you're hearing a boom boom boom on the ice as the rubber toe of your boot hits the ice, think tibialis anterior, pick your toes up and then the sole of your boot will be flat as it goes into the ice. Again if you try to kick like this, just the toe of your boot hits. You've got to consciously and aggressively pick your toes up and then the points go in. So a couple of other tips. If you're close to the ice like this, you can't kick. It's impossible. You have to get your butt out from the ice a little bit so that you can look down, see your feet and kick. Again it's like martial arts. If you're up against somebody like this, you can't kick them. You've got to get a little space to engage your legs. So if I try to kick and my body's close to the wall, the only way I can kick is like this and this is what you see novices doing over and over and then they end up in this kind of weird frog position like this and it's totally ineffective. My feet are junk. Both feet are wobbling and they're going to rip out and slide. What you need to do is rather than being pulled in, you need to stick your butt out and now I can see my feet where I want to kick. Oh yeah that's good. Oh yeah. Stand up. My feet are truck. My tool is good. I'm happy. My hands are relaxed but again trying to kick here and this is where you know most people who go ice climbing, they pull in right away. Their arms are bent. They're already pumped just from hanging on here and now they're trying to kick out to the side here and their feet are shitty and it's like this and they're like bad things happen. So you gotta you gotta get your feet square to the ice and get your butt out. You got your front points and your secondary points. You want to get those front points in and then the secondary points engaged. Now my foot is quite stable. It's not going to rip through. It's solid. The other thing is you want to put that front point right on the ledge. Most people aim at the back of the kind of divot and it doesn't work as well. You don't get the secondaries in there and the boot tends to wobble. Whereas if I aim my front point on top of the ledge then I get good secondaries into the ice and my foot is so solid like I can actually torque it around a bit. It doesn't move. One thing to note here, so when you have to kick a few times to get to the surface junk ice, like again here my secondaries are just rolling around. So I kick a few times but now you start to hear my boot hitting the ice and the secondaries are still nowhere near it. That's classic because I've actually built a divot in there where my front point has gone in but I haven't moved it down so I can get my secondary points in. No matter how hard I kick those secondaries aren't going in. So I've actually got to come down here. There we go. Now my secondaries are in. Everything's good. Okay so toe too low the boot just tends to bounce off the ice. Pick the toes up tibialis. Oh yeah that's what I'm talking about. Now we're starting to get a good placement not just a wobble fast placement. If these secondary points are too far back then it's impossible to get them into the ice. So if your secondary points are behind the toe of your boot then the toe of your boot will always hit the ice first. So on most crampons you want to set the bail in the rear hole so that these secondary points are at the front of your boot or in line with the front of your boot so that when your points are in the secondaries engage. So when you're ice climbing the idea is that you use these features these ledges and so on get a front point on top secondary points in below it and it's like one little tick. You know this thing for here it's going to be pretty easy to get my it's going to be that's all I need to do that thing's truck. We're good but maybe there's more icicles more surface schnazzle going on here and you got to kick it a bit more and don't be afraid to do that. It's like if you have to kick it and oh yeah now we've got a good foot placement and my foot's actually slightly rotated that way. If I stand up and rotate like this it's going to come out but with that secondary point there for stability if I leave it slightly rotated it's a really good foot as I stand up. So the idea of kicking the ice with your foot square to it meaning that your heel sticks out 90 degrees from the ice it applies even when it gets a little funkier. So if you encounter this in the lead this is getting a bit more legit here it would be a bit more complicated. If you're going to kick here you can either kick out here which might fracture it right this is a rounded area it's going to be really hard to get any of your secondary points into there or you could kick into the corner but get rid of the snow on my boot you can kick into the corner but notice that I've turned my foot so it's it's at 90 degrees to this piece of ice and I'm going to try and get my whole at least one and hopefully both secondaries into that piece of ice and it won't break like if I kick it here it's going to break for sure it's a convex piece of ice but right there if I'm delicate and I'm not ripping it into the ice yeah okay that's a foot I'll buy that but if I stand up it's going to blow if I let my foot rock around it's going to blow. Once you get your foot into the ice it has to stay in the same place that's critical. It's not like rock climbing where you push on it from all different angles it's like in and then your body can rotate around that point but your foot's always got to stay totally chill. Key concepts are look where you want to kick which means you've got to get your butt out so you can see your feet. Pick up your toes when you kick so your sole is flat to the ground that's critical or else the front of your boot hangs below and just bounces like this and then be precise sometimes you need to kick pretty hard and clear out a bunch of junk other times just a light tick will do do it perfectly but that took me like 20 years of ice climbing to figure out I didn't understand that you know I spent most of the 80s and 90s like all up close to the ice my feet out to the side and the classic I don't know what I'm doing technique and yeah it's not good. Feet are everything in ice climbing good feet you're happy bad feet no it's no bueno.