Cutting loose: what to do when your feet swing off

The moment everyone recognises

You pull hard for the next hold, you get it, and somewhere in that half second your feet leave the wall. Now you are hanging on two hands, swinging out from the overhang, and the only thought in your head is whether you can hold on long enough to stop moving.

Sometimes you can. Sometimes the hold spits you off before the swing has even finished. Either way it feels like something went wrong.

Cutting loose is one of the few things in climbing that gets treated as a failure and a skill at the same time, depending on who is watching. Both are true. Cutting when you did not plan to is expensive. Cutting on purpose, into a position you have already chosen, is often the cheapest way through a steep sequence.

The useful question is not how to stop it happening. It is how to decide which one you are doing, and then do that one properly.

What is actually going on

Your feet stay on the wall as long as your body pushes them into it. On slabby and vertical ground gravity does that for you, which is why you almost never cut loose on a slab. Tilt the wall past vertical and gravity starts pulling your hips away from the rock instead, and now the only thing keeping pressure on your feet is you.

So the moment your hands move past a certain point, or your hips swing out, or you pull with your arms instead of your legs, the pressure drops to nothing and your feet come off. They do not slip. They simply stop being held on.

That is why cutting loose is far more common on the board than at the crag for most people, and far more common on a 40 degree wall than a 20. It is not that the holds are worse. It is that the margin for having your hips in the wrong place is much smaller.

When cutting loose is the right answer

There are three situations where letting the feet go is genuinely the better option.

The footholds are behind you. On a steep problem the feet you were using are often somewhere near your waist by the time you have made the reach. Trying to keep them costs you the extension you need. Cutting, swinging, and putting the feet back on holds that are now in front of you takes a second and gets you a better position than fighting for the old one.

The move is a big one and the swing is going somewhere useful. Cut loose on a dyno or a long deadpoint and the swing will carry your body under the new hold. If you have picked the hold well, that is exactly where you want to end up.

You are on a roof. Horizontal ground is the one place where the feet coming off is close to inevitable at some point, and the technique is built around it rather than against it.

If none of those apply, cutting loose is costing you. A pair of feet on the wall is worth a lot more than most climbers think.

The three things that decide whether you keep the hold

Cutting loose does not throw you off. The swing does, and the swing is manageable.

How you were holding on before it happened. A crimp that felt solid statically will often roll open under a swing, because the load goes from straight down to sideways in a fraction of a second. If you know you are about to cut, take the hold in the grip that handles a change of direction best, which usually means open hand or half crimp with the thumb wrapped. Full crimp and a swing is how fingers get hurt.

Where the swing is going. Look at the hold you are about to grab and ask which way your body will travel once your feet leave. If it is straight down, you will absorb it easily. If it is sideways across the wall, you need a hand that can take a sideways pull, and you need to know it before you commit rather than halfway through.

When you make yourself tight. This is the one nearly everybody gets wrong. Most climbers relax through the move and then try to tense up once the swing has started, which is a second too late and asks the fingers to hold everything while the body catches up.

Tension goes on before the feet leave, not after. Pull your ribs down, squeeze your bum, and treat your torso as one piece from the shoulders to the knees. If you are already in that shape when the feet come off, the swing is small and slow. If you are loose, the swing is big and your fingers pay for it.

Getting your feet back on

The swing is only half of it. Plenty of people control the swing and then burn out hunting for a foothold with a straight leg, waving a shoe at the wall until they drop off.

Do it the other way round. Bring both knees up towards your chest first, which is a strong position rather than a weak one, then put the foot on. A bent leg placing a foot precisely is worth three straight legs scraping for one.

Two things make this far easier. Pick your foothold before you make the move, so you are placing rather than searching, and get the first foot on early, even a bad one, because a single point of contact kills most of the remaining swing and lets you sort the rest out calmly.

The other detail worth knowing is the rudder. If you leave one leg forward and slightly across your body as the feet come off, it damps the rotation and stops the barn door opening. Two legs hanging straight down is a pendulum. One leg forward is a brake.

How to stop cutting loose when you do not want to

Most unplanned cuts come from the same handful of causes, and each has a fix.

Your hips were away from the wall. Turn a hip in, get the outside edge of the shoe on the hold, and the pressure comes back. Front on with square hips on steep ground is the single most common reason feet come off.

You moved your hands before your feet. On steep terrain the feet should usually go first. Reset the feet higher, then reach. It feels slower and it is faster.

There was nothing holding the foot on. This is what flagging, drop knees, heel hooks and toe hooks all exist for. A toe hook is the strongest of them by a distance, and on a roof or a steep board it turns a move you cannot hold into one you can.

You pulled with your arms. If the arms initiate, the body comes away from the wall. If the legs initiate and the arms hold position, it does not.

Two drills that fix it faster than climbing normally will

Cut and recover, on purpose. Pick four or five problems on a steep wall that you can do comfortably. Climb them, and on one chosen move let the feet go deliberately, hold the swing, then get both feet back on before you carry on. You are practising the recovery when you are fresh and unafraid instead of learning it mid-fall on a project. Do this once a week for a month and the panic goes out of it.

Tension before the move. On the board, before each hard reach, consciously set the tension and hold it through the move. Say it out loud if you have to. What you are training is the timing, not the strength, and the timing is what is missing for most people.

Strength work does help here, and hanging knee raises, front lever progressions and hollow body holds are the ones that carry over. They are a slow fix though. The timing is a fast one.

On rock it changes slightly

Outside, the ground under you is not a matted floor, so an uncontrolled swing on a highball or above a bad landing is a different proposition to the same swing indoors. Grit roofs and limestone caves both ask for the same technique, but the decision to cut should be made on the ground while you are reading the problem, not in the middle of it.

The other difference is the footholds. Indoors they are obvious and reasonably big. On rock the foot you swing back onto might be a smear or a nub you can barely see from underneath, which is why picking it in advance matters far more outside than in.

The short version

Cutting loose is not a mistake and it is not a trick. It is a position you either chose or did not choose.

If you chose it, take a grip that survives a change of direction, tighten your body before the feet leave, keep one leg forward to stop the spin, and know which foothold you are going back to. If you did not choose it, look at your hips, look at whether your feet moved before your hands, and look at whether there was ever anything holding that foot on in the first place.

If you keep a log of the moves that spat you off rather than the problems you finished, the pattern usually shows up within a few sessions. It is nearly always the same wall angle, and nearly always the same missing thing.

Sendit keeps that history in one place, so the next time a steep problem shuts you down you can see whether it is genuinely new, or the third time this month.