Hip positioning: turning to reach further

Reach lives in the hips

Most climbers who feel short are not short, they are square. Facing the wall full-frontal, chest and hips parallel to the rock, is the natural beginner stance, and it is the one that wastes the most reach. When you are square, your shoulder is as far from the wall as it can be and your reaching arm has to span the full distance from a flat chest. Turn a hip in, and your shoulder rotates closer to the wall and upward, and the same arm suddenly reaches several inches further. No extra strength, just geometry.

This is why two climbers of the same height can find the same move easy or impossible. One stays square and comes up short. The other turns a hip to the wall and the hold drops into reach.

How the turn works

The move is to rotate the hip on your reaching side in towards the wall, so that the side of your body, rather than the front, faces the rock. If you are reaching with your right hand, you turn your right hip and shoulder in. Your body goes from facing the wall to facing along it, and your right arm gets to extend straight up the line of your body towards the hold.

To make that turn happen, your feet do the work. Standing on the inside edge of one foot and turning the opposite foot in lets the hips rotate. Often a high foot on the same side as the turn lets you press up and rotate at once, so the reach becomes a stand-up rather than a pull. The arm stays relatively relaxed because the leg and the hip are generating the movement.

Square versus turned

It helps to feel the difference directly. Stand under a route, pick a high hold, and reach for it facing the wall square. Note where your hand lands. Now turn the matching hip in, drop the opposite shoulder back, and reach again from the same feet. The hand will reach noticeably higher. That gap is reach you have been leaving on the table every time you climb square.

Squaring up is not always wrong. Slopers and pinches often want you facing the wall with weight pressing straight down through your feet, and some balancey slab moves want you flat. But on reaches, especially long ones to crimps and edges, turning in is almost always the answer.

Signs you should turn a hip:

• A long reach that comes up short when you face the wall.
• A move where you can get a high foot on the same side as the reaching hand.
• Steep ground where turning in also pulls your hips into the wall and saves your arms.

Making it automatic

Like every piece of technique, this becomes invisible with practice and stays clunky if you only think about it occasionally. Pick an easy route and climb it making an exaggerated hip turn on every single reach, even where you do not need the extra inches. Feel how the shoulder rotates in and how the leg drives the move.

Then watch for the shortfalls in your real climbing. Next time a hold feels just out of reach, the question is rarely whether you need to grow. It is whether you turned in or stayed square. Turn the hip, drive with the leg, and the reach is usually there. Over time you will set up for it in the route read without thinking, and a lot of moves you wrote off as too far will quietly come into range.