Foot swaps: how to change feet on one small hold

The wrong foot

You are three moves in. The next hold is out left, and to reach it you need your left hand high, your hips turned in and your right foot on that little edge under you.

Your left foot is on it.

This happens to everyone, constantly, and there is no way to climb around it forever. Sequences change feet. Traverses change feet. Any problem with a decent number of moves will eventually ask you to put the other foot where one already is, on a hold that was clearly designed for exactly one.

There are five reasonable ways to do it. Most climbers know one of them, use it everywhere, and quietly lose a grade to the ones they never learned.

Why it feels so much worse than a hand swap

When you swap hands, the hold does most of the work. Your fingers can share a rail, stack, or hook over each other, and if it goes wrong you feel it going wrong with plenty of warning.

Feet are different in three ways.

You cannot see them properly, or you can see them but not without dropping your head, which shifts your weight at the exact moment you need it still. You are standing on them, so any wobble goes straight into your centre of gravity instead of being absorbed by an arm. And a climbing shoe is a stiff, blunt object with almost no feedback compared to a hand. You get one small patch of rubber and a rough idea of where it is.

So the swap is not really a foot problem. It is a balance problem you happen to be solving with your feet, and every good version of it starts by taking the weight off the foot before you move it.

Get the weight off first

This is the whole thing, and it is worth saying before any of the techniques.

If you are standing hard on that foothold, you cannot move that foot. Any attempt to lift it either pushes you off the wall or costs you a huge amount of arm strength while you hang there sorting it out.

So before the swap, load something else. Options, roughly in order of how cheap they are:

• Push through the other foot. Even a poor smear takes real weight if you press into it.
• Get your hips closer to the wall. Weight going down through your feet is easier to shift than weight hanging out from them.
• Straighten your arms. A straight arm holds you in place for free. A bent one is a countdown.
• Take a moment on the best hand hold you have. Do the swap from the good jug rather than from the crux crimp, even if that means doing it a move earlier than you thought.

Get that right and most swaps become undramatic. Get it wrong and none of the five techniques below will save you.

The five ways to swap feet

1. The step-through

The simplest one and the one nobody remembers exists. Instead of putting both feet on the same hold, you find a second foothold and step across, freeing the first one up.

It sounds obvious. In practice climbers get fixated on the hold their foot is already on and never look for the alternative, especially indoors, where the foot chips can be off to the side and easy to miss. Have a proper look before you commit to sharing.

On real rock this is even more true. Grit and limestone are covered in small usable features that are not officially holds. You do not need a jug for your foot. You need somewhere to put ten per cent of your weight for two seconds.

2. The hop

Both feet leave, briefly. You unweight, take the standing foot off, and land the other one in the same spot.

It is the fastest option and the one most people use by default, which is a shame, because it is also the loudest and the least controlled. On a big foothold, at a moderate angle, it is completely fine and there is no reason to be precious about it. On a small edge, on a steep wall, or on polished rock, it is a coin toss.

If you are going to hop, do it small. The foot should barely leave the hold. People who look bad at this lift the foot fifteen centimetres and try to land it back on a two centimetre edge, which is a harder move than the one they were trying to avoid.

3. The toe-behind-heel swap

The proper one. Your standing foot has the toe on the hold. You bring the new foot in behind it and place the toe of the new foot right at the back edge of the hold, tucked in behind your heel. Then you roll the old foot forwards and off, and the new toe slides into the space it leaves.

This is the swap that works on small holds, because for most of it you have two points of contact and the transfer happens over a couple of centimetres rather than through the air. It feels awkward for the first month and then becomes the one you reach for automatically.

Two details make it work. Point the new toe in the same direction as the old one rather than square to the wall, so it fits into the same narrow space. And roll the old foot off, do not lift it. Lifting is a hop with extra steps.

4. The heel-toe swap

The same idea, inverted. The new foot goes on the hold heel first, on top of or beside the standing toe, then you pivot as the old foot comes away.

Useful when the hold has a lip you can hook, and when your hips are already turned so a heel is the natural shape. Common on topouts and on big sloping volumes where a heel gets purchase that a toe never would.

It puts your ankle in a slightly vulnerable position, so keep it as a quick transition rather than a rest, and do not force it on a hold that is not shaped for it.

5. The pivot

Not technically a swap, but it solves the same problem more often than the real swaps do.

Your foot stays exactly where it is and you rotate on the ball of it, turning the knee out and the hip in, so the same foot works for a move that seemed to want the other one. Inside edge becomes outside edge. A frontal position becomes a turned-in one, your reach goes up by a good few centimetres, and you never took a foot off at all.

Watch a strong climber move on a steep wall and a lot of what looks like clever footwork is really this: not more foot placements, just better use of the ones already there. If you learn one thing from this article, learn to check whether a pivot removes the need for the swap entirely.

Choosing between them

A rough rule that holds up on most walls.

Big hold, low angle: hop. It is quick and nothing is at stake.

Small hold, any angle: toe behind heel. The contact never fully breaks.

Hold with a lip, hips already turned: heel-toe.

Steep ground, feet cutting is the risk: step through to another hold if one exists, and pivot if it does not. Both feet off on a steep wall is how you end up swinging.

Polished rock or a slick indoor foot chip: anything except the hop. Landing accurately on something that slick is optimism, not technique.

The mistakes that show up again and again

Looking away too early. People find the new spot, then look up at the next hand hold while the foot is still arriving. Watch the foot until it is on and weighted. It costs half a second.

Swapping at the worst moment. The swap belongs on the most stable part of the sequence, not the most urgent. If you can see the swap coming from the ground, plan it for the move where you are best positioned, even if that is not where it feels most necessary.

Standing on the middle of the hold. If your toe is planted in the centre of a small edge, there is nowhere for the second foot to go. Stand on the half of the hold you are not going to need, and leave the other half free. This is the same habit as aiming wide when you match hands.

Trying to be quiet about the wrong thing. Silent feet is a good habit for placement. It does not mean a swap has to be slow. A controlled, brisk swap beats a long, trembling one that drains your arms.

How to drill it

None of this improves on your project. You get four goes, you are trying hard, and the footwork is the first thing to go. Drill it on ground where falling costs nothing.

The one-hold traverse. Pick an easy traverse and make every foot placement a swap. Go along it once hopping, once toe behind heel, once refusing to hop at all. Twenty minutes of that will tell you more about your ankles than a year of climbing normally.

Downclimb your warm-ups. Downclimbing forces swaps you would never choose and does it while you are fresh. It is also the cheapest volume in the gym.

Set a problem that requires it. On a board or a spray wall, set something with two feet and six hands. You will be swapping constantly because there is nowhere else to stand, and the angle means you cannot get away with the hop.

Pick one problem per session and pivot instead. Climb it once with your usual footwork, then again with a rule that you may not take a foot off unless you truly have to. Most people find two or three moves where the swap was never needed.

The part that gets lost is which version worked where. A swap takes a second, and by the time you are back on the mat with your shoes off, you have forgotten that the toe-behind-heel went fine on the left-hand edge and the heel version spat you off twice. That is the sort of detail worth keeping with the problem itself, which is what a session log is for. Sendit holds those notes against the climb, so next time you pull on, the answer is already there.

The short version

Take the weight off the foot before you move it. Look for a second foothold before you agree to share one. Learn the toe-behind-heel swap properly, because it is the one that works when the hold is small. Check whether a pivot makes the whole question go away. Then drill it somewhere easy, where a mistake costs you nothing but a step back onto the mat.

It is two seconds of a climb that nobody films and nobody praises. It is also the difference between a sequence that flows and one you fight the whole way up.