Roofs: how to climb through horizontal ground

The angle that changes the question

Most climbing is a question of how hard you can pull. A roof asks something else entirely.

On a slab, gravity presses you into the rock. On a vertical wall it hangs you off it. Once the wall passes horizontal, gravity stops pulling you down the climb and starts pulling you straight off it, and every hold you are holding is suddenly working sideways to the direction you want to go. Nothing about your usual approach transfers. People who climb V6 on a steep wall get shut down on a V3 roof, and they usually blame their core.

Their core is probably fine. What they are missing is that a roof is climbed with the feet, and on a roof the feet do not push. They pull.

Roof or overhang

Worth separating, because the two want different things.

An overhang is steep but still leaning. You are underneath it, but your feet can still stand on things and your weight still has somewhere to go. Good footwork, straight arms and hip turns get you up it.

A roof is horizontal or close to it. There is nothing to stand on. Your feet have to grip, hook or jam, and if they come off you swing, and once you are swinging the fight is already over. A roof is a horizontal problem wearing a vertical problem's clothes.

The practical line between them is simple. If you can rest a foot on a hold and take weight off your arms, it is an overhang. If letting go with a foot makes you swing, it is a roof.

Feet that pull

This is the whole thing. On a roof, your feet are a second pair of hands.

Toe hooks. The top of your foot hooked over a hold, a rail, or the lip itself. This is the roof move. A toe hook stops you swinging out and lets you take real weight off your fingers. Point your toes hard and pull with the shin, not just the ankle, and keep the leg reasonably straight so the pull runs through the whole limb. Downturned, stiff shoes with rubber over the toe box make a genuine difference here, and it is the one time a soft slipper is the wrong tool.

Heel hooks. A heel over a hold turns your leg into a third arm. On a roof they are usually how you get your hips up to the wall so you can reach through, and how you hold a position while you shake out.

Heel-toe cams. Heel on one hold, toe pressed against another surface above or beside it, foot locked in between. This is the closest thing to a no-hands rest a roof will give you. Look for two features about a foot length apart and you have found the rest most people climb past.

The bicycle. Toe hooking with one foot while pushing with the other, the two feet squeezing a block or a volume between them. It looks like a party trick and it holds an enormous amount of weight.

None of these are advanced moves. They are the basic vocabulary of horizontal ground, and most climbers never practise them because they never have to on a vertical wall.

Tension is not a sit-up

Body tension is the phrase everyone uses and almost nobody defines. It is the ability to keep a straight line of force between your hands and your feet, so that when you pull with a hand, the load goes through your body into your feet rather than folding you in half.

That line runs through your abdominals, but it also runs through your hip flexors, your glutes, your lats and your shoulders. A roof breaks at the weakest point in that chain, and for most people the weak point is the hip flexors, not the six-pack. If your legs sag away from the roof the moment you move a hand, that is hip flexors giving up.

Two things help immediately.

Keep your hips close. The further your body hangs below the roof, the more leverage gravity has on you. Squeeze your feet towards the ceiling and keep the whole body within a hand's breadth of the rock where you can.

Move in one piece. Reaching with an arm while the rest of you stays passive is what peels your feet off. Initiate from the hips, let the arm follow, and the feet stay where you put them.

Read it from the ground, properly

Roof sequences punish improvisation more than anything else in climbing, because you cannot hang around and work it out. Ten seconds of hanging upside down costs more than a minute standing on a slab.

Before you pull on, find three things.

1. Where the feet are. Not the handholds. The toe hooks, the heel hooks, the block you can bicycle. If you cannot see how the feet work, you do not have the sequence yet.
2. Where the rest is. There is almost always one position where the body locks in and the hands come off. Find it, and treat everything before it as the approach.
3. How the lip works. More on that below, because that is where most attempts die.

Then commit to a pace. Roofs reward moving decisively between good positions and resting properly in them, rather than creeping through move by move. Static and slow is how you get pumped in a roof.

The lip is the crux

Getting through a roof is one problem. Getting over the lip is another, and it is nearly always harder.

At the lip everything reverses. Your body has to swing from hanging underneath to standing above, your feet have to come off the roof and find something on the wall, and the holds you have been pulling out on suddenly want to be pushed down on. It is a transition, not a move, and it takes more time than the reaching does.

The way through it is boring and reliable. Get your feet as high as you can before you commit. Aim to move your hips over the lip early rather than reaching high and hoping. Expect a rockover or a mantle, and expect it to feel unglamorous. People fall off the lip of a roof having done every hard move below it, because they treated the last section as a formality.

What to train, if you want to be good at this

Roofs improve fast, because most people start from nothing.

• Climb on a steep board. Forty degrees and up. The board teaches tension in a way no amount of floor work does.
• Do the drills nobody does. Ten minutes of deliberate toe hooking on easy problems at the end of a session. Traverse a steep wall using only toe and heel hooks for feet. It feels silly and it works.
• Hanging leg raises and front levers. Slowly, with a straight body. This is the hip flexor and lower abdominal work that stops the sag.
• Get shoes that hook. A stiff toe box and rubber over the top of the foot. It is the cheapest technical improvement available on steep ground.

Where you meet them

In the UK, roofs mean limestone. Raven Tor and the Cornice at Water-cum-Jolly in the Peak are roof climbing at its most concentrated, and Kilnsey in Wharfedale leans out over the road in a way you can see from the car. Grit has its own roof problems, usually short, sharp and involving a heel you would rather not trust.

Abroad, Rodellar in Spain is tufa roofs and knee bars for days, and roof bouldering at Hueco Tanks is where a lot of the modern movement vocabulary came from.

Indoors, the steepest section of a bouldering wall and the top end of a board angle are the same skill, and a good setter will put a proper toe hook problem up at least once a set.

Track what your body actually does

Roof climbing loads shoulders, hips and hamstrings in ways vertical climbing does not, and the soreness usually turns up two days later somewhere you were not expecting. That is normal the first few times and worth watching after that.

Logging sessions in Sendit is how you notice the pattern rather than guessing at it. When you can see that the last three weeks have been steep board sessions and roof problems with nothing on your feet but hooks, a tweaky hamstring stops being a mystery and starts being a scheduling decision.

The short version

Feet pull, they do not push. Hips close to the rock, move from the middle, and keep the line between hands and feet under tension. Find the rest before you start. Then treat the lip as the crux, because it is.

Roofs feel impossible right up until the first time a toe hook takes your weight properly. After that they are just another angle, and a very good one.