Hand jams: how to climb cracks without fighting them

The gap in your climbing

You can be a solid indoor climber, comfortable on a steep board, happy on slopers, and still get shut down by a route that would have been a warm up for someone in 1985. Cracks do that to people. Almost nothing in a modern gym prepares you for them, because a crack has no holds on it at all. It is a gap in the rock, and the gap is the hold.

That is the first thing to accept. You are not looking for an edge hidden inside the crack. Every time you reach in, feel around and try to grab something, you have already lost the move. The crack works when you stop searching for a hold and start making one out of your own hand.

A jam is a wedge, not a grip

A jam holds you because your hand changes shape inside a gap that is slightly too small for the expanded version of it. Bone, muscle and skin press outward against both walls, and friction does the rest. There is no pulling in the usual sense.

Once that clicks, a lot of the mystery goes. A good jam is passive. You set it, you weight it, and it holds without you clenching. A bad jam is the one you are gripping with everything you have, because you know it is about to slide. If your forearm is screaming on jams, you are almost certainly gripping instead of expanding.

The reason this matters on a long route is stamina. Jamming, done properly, is one of the few things in climbing where you can rest while still hanging off your hands.

Hand jams: thumb down, thumb up

For a crack roughly the width of your palm, slide your hand in flat, up to about the base of your thumb, then tuck your thumb across into your palm. That single movement fattens the back of your hand and the knuckles press into the far wall. Cup the palm slightly and you get more expansion still.

Which way you point the thumb depends on where you are going.

• Thumb down for a hand you are reaching up with, or in the lower part of a sequence. It puts the jam in a position that stays solid as your body rises past it, and it feels far more secure than most people expect on their first go.
• Thumb up for the higher hand, and for anything you want to shuffle upward. Less positive, easier to move.

The classic sequence on a vertical hand crack is a shuffle. Higher hand thumb up, lower hand thumb down, move one, then the other, without crossing. It looks slow and unglamorous. It is also the reason people can climb pitch after pitch of Yosemite splitters without falling off.

Fingers, fists and everything awkward

Not every crack takes a hand. The width decides the technique, and each width has its own trick.

Finger cracks. Slot your fingers in as deep as they will go, then twist so the pinky rolls downward and your fingers cam against the walls. Thumb down again, elbow dropping toward the ground. That rotation is what locks it. Straight fingers pushed into a slot do very little.

Fist cracks. Too wide for a hand, so make a fist inside the crack and let the fist itself do the wedging. Palm facing in or out depending on the flare. Fists are less painful than they look and considerably more secure.

Off-widths. Wider than a fist, narrower than your body, and universally disliked. Arm bars, chicken wings, heel and toe cams, and a lot of grunting. Nobody is asking you to love these. Knowing an arm bar exists is enough to get you up the occasional wide section on a normal route.

Your feet are doing half of it

Almost every beginner overloads their hands on a crack and forgets that a foot jam is stronger than any hand jam you will ever set.

Turn your knee out, put your foot into the crack sideways with the sole roughly vertical, slot it in past the widest part, then rotate the knee back to level. The twist cams your foot in place and you can stand on it as if it were a large ledge. Get that right and the hands become balance points rather than the thing keeping you on.

On grit, where cracks are often shorter and the rock is rounded, the feet frequently go outside the crack instead, smearing on the face while the hands jam. Look at the rock and take what it offers, rather than forcing every part of you into the gap.

Skin, tape and the honest bit

Jamming hurts a little at first. The backs of your hands take the load against rough rock and you will lose skin before you gain technique. This is normal and it does get better as your jams get more precise, because a good jam grinds less than a bad one.

Tape gloves help on a long day. Two strips over the back of the hand, anchored around the wrist and between the fingers, and you can climb all afternoon. Some people never bother. Either is fine, but do not let sore hands convince you that you are doing it wrong. Set the jam, weight it once, and trust it rather than sawing it up and down.

Getting good at it

Cracks reward mileage more than strength, so the plan is simple. Find easy ones and climb a lot of them.

• Start well below your grade. A Diff or a V Diff crack you can jam badly and still get up teaches you more than a route where you must jam perfectly.
• Practise on the ground. Set a jam in a boulder crack at head height and hang off it. Try thumb up, then thumb down, and feel the difference before you are twenty feet up.
• Do a whole pitch without pulling. On easy ground, climb with the rule that you may only jam, never grab an edge. Awkward, extremely useful.
• Go to the right crag. Millstone, Curbar, the Lakes, Pembroke, anywhere quarried grit or clean rock gives you full length cracks rather than the occasional metre.
• Log the sessions. Cracks improve in steps rather than smoothly, and it is easy to forget how bad your first day was. Keep a record of what you climbed and how it felt, and the progress shows up clearly by the end of a season.

Set it and stand up

Crack climbing has a reputation for being painful and old fashioned, and that keeps a lot of good climbers away from some of the best routes in the country. The technique itself is not difficult. Put the hand in, change its shape, keep it still, and let your feet do the work.

Give it a few sessions this summer and something odd happens. The crack stops being the thing you avoid on a route and becomes the thing you look forward to, because it is the one feature that lets you rest halfway up.