How to Perform a Heel Hook for Indoor Rock Climbing

Video Transcript

"I'm here to talk about indoor rock climbing. Okay, in this scene, I'm going to talk about a special technique called heel hook. When we are bouldering, we use our heel (the back side of our heel; the rubber part of your shoe) to literally hook onto a hold as we are climbing up the rock. You do this because there are some short technical moves that are so hard that you can't stay on there with your hands; you really need your feet. You can't use your tippy-toes just because of the position of the hold. So we hook it with our heel. So as you take a look here, you'll be noticing that I'm going to start to use my feet a lot. I'm going to use the backside of my heel to help me hook each hold to help me stay on the wall. Okay, another one which is really convenient is called the bat hook. It is pretty much self explanatory. As you see, my feet kind of hook onto it (the hold) and I hang like a bat; my feet up top, and my head bottom. I use that in order to hook the hand hold, to move around and to do major overhang climbs."