Reachy problems: how to climb when the beta was set for someone taller

The word that ends a lot of sessions

Someone taller pulls on, does the problem in four moves, drops off and says it goes left hand to the pinch. You get on, reach for the pinch, and it is not there. Not "hard to hold" not there. Physically somewhere else.

At that point most people say the problem is reachy and walk away, and a fair number of them decide quietly that they are the wrong size for climbing.

Reachy problems are real. Some spans genuinely cannot be made without the height, and no amount of technique invents an extra ten centimetres. But that group is much smaller than it feels on the day, and almost everything else in the reachy pile is a sequence problem wearing a height costume. You are not failing to reach the hold. You are trying to reach it from where a taller climber stood.

Why the beta you were given usually does not fit

Beta is not a description of the problem. It is a description of one person solving it, and it carries all of their proportions with it.

A taller climber tends to solve a long move by standing still and extending. It works, so that is what they remember and that is what they tell you. What they do not mention is that their hips were forty centimetres higher than yours will be at the same point, because their feet were on holds they could reach without thinking about it.

So the sequence you get handed is missing the interesting half. The useful question is never "how do I get to the pinch from here". It is "where would I have to be standing for the pinch to be close".

That reframing does most of the work. Once you are looking for a body position rather than a hold, the wall stops being a set of fixed distances and starts being a set of choices.

The intermediate

The single most useful habit for anyone climbing under about 5'6" is looking for intermediates, and it is worth being precise about what that means.

An intermediate is any hold you use on the way to the hold you actually want. It might be terrible. It might be a hold from another problem, if the wall allows that, or a smear, or the very edge of a volume. You are not trying to hold it. You are trying to touch it for long enough to move your feet up underneath it, then go again from higher.

Two moves instead of one, and the second one is short.

This is the move that taller climbers genuinely do not need and therefore genuinely do not see. Ask three tall people for beta on a reachy problem and none of them will mention the sloping bit of the volume at chest height, because they have never once put a hand on it.

Practical version: before you write a move off, stand under it and look at everything between the two holds. Anything at all. Then work out which of those things would let you move a foot.

Your feet are where the reach comes from

Height gets discussed as arm span, which is the least useful way to think about it. What actually determines whether the pinch is in range is where your hips are, and your hips go where your feet put them.

Three things worth drilling.

Get the high foot in earlier. Most climbers step up after they have committed to the hand move, when they are already extended and cannot see their feet. Do it first. Set the highest foot you can use while your hands are still comfortable, and let the reach happen from there.

Turn the hip in. A square, frontal body position wastes reach. Drop the opposite knee, turn the hip to the wall, and the shoulder of your reaching arm travels a surprising distance for nothing. This is the drop knee doing its actual job rather than its Instagram job.

Use worse feet. Shorter climbers are usually better served by a bad high foothold than a good low one. A smear at knee height often beats an edge at ankle height, because the smear puts your hips where they need to be and the edge does not. Trust the rubber and stand up on it.

None of that is exotic. It is just applied more aggressively than a taller climber ever needs to.

When to go and when to stay

A long move you cannot make statically is not automatically a dead end. It is often a dead end for a static attempt.

Deadpointing, moving so you arrive at the hold at the top of the arc where you are briefly weightless, adds real range. It is not a jump and it is not a lunge. You pull through the feet, the body rises, and the hand meets the hold at the moment everything stops going up. On a reachy problem it is frequently the difference between the hold being out of range and being just about there.

The cost is that it is less accurate and less repeatable, so it is a tool rather than a default. If you can do the move statically from a better body position, do that instead. If you have run out of body positions, this is the next thing to try.

And the problems that are just badly set

Some are. It is worth saying plainly.

A setter who only ever sets from their own body ends up building spans that split the room, and every wall has a couple. Good setting teams check problems with climbers of different sizes and build in the intermediate rather than leaving it to luck, but that takes time and a spread of people on the setting crew, and not every wall has both.

If a problem at your wall genuinely cannot be done under a certain height, tell someone. Setters mostly want to know. The feedback that helps is specific: which problem, which move, what you tried. "It is reachy" is a shrug. "I cannot span from the blue pinch to the finish without an intermediate and I could not find one" is something they can set around next week.

The tall climber's version

For balance, height is not free either.

Tall climbers get folded up on low crux sequences, cannot fit into compact positions on steep ground, and find the sit start under a roof deeply unfair. They also carry more weight on smaller holds and have longer levers to control on anything that swings. The moves that shut them down simply look different, so nobody names a problem "cramped" the way they name one "reachy".

Everybody is climbing a slightly different problem to the one next to them. That is the honest version of the sport.

What to do on Saturday

Pick a problem you have already written off as reachy and give it twenty minutes with a different question in your head.

Stand under the move. Find every possible intermediate, including the ones that are not really holds. Find the highest foot you can physically use, not the one that feels natural. Turn the hip in before you reach rather than after. If it is still short, try arriving at the hold moving rather than static.

Log what happened, including the attempts that failed and why, because the pattern across a season is the useful part. Most climbers who think height is their limit are actually climbing every problem from the first stance they found, and that is a habit rather than a measurement.

Sometimes the answer really is that the move needs more reach than you have. Far more often the answer was standing somewhere else.