Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

in a bit of a jam 19-Nov-2007 At 5:15:16 PM shiltz

Message

I found finger locks to be fairly intuitive. Foot jams also came easily enough although learning to efficiently remove your foot from a jam is more interesting.
Hand jams and fist jams have taken longer to master. Initially I thought a hand jam just involved flexing your hand (fingers and heel of hand against one side of the crack, knuckles against the other side) as hard as you could. Later I discovered how to use my thumb to adjust my hand or fist profile to suit the crack. Much less energy involved and less skin lost.
I'm still coming to grips with off-width. There are a couple of off-width cracks out at Werribee Gorge but you'll find a lot more at places like Mt Buffalo.
Ben Cairn is reasonably close to Melbourne and has some hand/fist cracks to practise on. There are some crack routes at Mt Alexander that would also make good practise.