In smearing, you need to use your foot to gain traction with a rock before you push it off for gaining the next hold. It may sound easy, but it is not. The only thing you need here is a pair of climbing shoes. For beginners, this may require practice. To begin, ensure to spend some time in a gym practicing to get a hang on smearing.

How to do it?

Begin with placing your foot on hold. Ensure to put your weight on the hold and push off when you reach for the next hand hold. When climbing at a gym, rock climbing classes like indoor rock climbing Montreal or mountain, smearing must be used by all means. Not all smears are made equal. For instance, you may notice that smaller footholds need more effort and weight, and you need to go for digging your feet into the hold. At times, you may also have to pull your body away from the rock to gain weight on your toes. When you develop a practice, you will begin to feel better with smearing. This helps in deciding the weight you can put on each hold.

What type of shoes must you invest in?

Here, you need to invest in good quality rock climbing shoes. So, you must know that not all shoes are good for smearing. Downturned shoes may turn out good, but they don’t have much leverage for smearing. When choosing a rock climbing shoe, you need to find the one that stretches the sole contact with the rock face. It means that the more shoes space you have on the rock, the better. This is because your shoe rubber has most of the friction between you and the rock. So, flatter shoes gain more coverage when you place more rubber on the rock face. Softer shoes also come in handy than stiffer in this case. With such, you can mold your feet better when climbing. This also lets them put more weight on the rock and increase their grip as well.

How to increase the grip?

For this, you need to clean your shoes regularly. This lets for faster traction between the soles of the shoes and rock face. You can wash them after every climb. For the same, use warm soapy water and crush to clean the dirt from the bottom of the shoes. Cleaning also keeps your shoes in a top notch state. This helps in keeping them stickier, longer and have better traction.