Pockets: how to climb them without wrecking your fingers

The hold that asks the most

A pocket is the simplest hold on the wall to understand and the easiest one to get hurt on. There is a hole in the rock, you put fingers in it, you pull. No subtlety about how to hold it, no trick to finding the sweet spot the way there is on a sloper.

The problem is arithmetic. On an edge, four fingers share the load. In a two finger pocket, two fingers carry the lot, and they carry it in a position your hand did not evolve for. Nothing about the move feels harder than a crimp. Your fingers just quietly take twice the load they are used to, and they take it again on the next attempt, and the one after that.

So pockets are worth learning properly rather than discovering by accident on a trip. Here is what actually matters.

Know what you are looking at

Pockets come in sizes and the size dictates everything.

• Monos. One finger. Rare, brutal, and the reason a lot of climbers have a story about a middle finger that has never been quite right since. Nobody needs to climb monos.
• Two finger pockets. The common case, and the one worth getting good at.
• Three finger pockets. Much friendlier. Often big enough to half crimp normally.
• Jug pockets. A hole you can get your whole hand into. Limestone is full of them, and they are just jugs with a rim.

Depth matters as much as width. A shallow pocket that only takes a fingertip is a crimp in disguise. A deep one lets you sink to the second knuckle and hang from bone rather than skin, which is far more comfortable and far more secure.

Which fingers, and why it matters

The default two finger combination is middle and ring. It is the strongest pairing for most people, the two longest fingers sit level in the hole, and the load spreads reasonably evenly between them.

The alternatives are worth knowing because pockets are not always oriented to suit you.

Index and middle is the other useful pair. Slightly weaker for most climbers, but it lets you turn your hand and pull from a different angle, and it keeps the ring finger out of it. If a pocket is going to be loaded sideways, this pairing often sits better.

Ring and little finger is a genuine option on the odd pocket that faces the wrong way, and it feels alarming the first time. Weak, but occasionally the only way the hand fits.

The one to be careful with is anything that isolates the ring finger. It is the most commonly injured finger in climbing, it does not extend independently, and it tends to end up doing more than its share in a pocket while feeling fine at the time.

Whichever pair you use, get the fingers as deep as the hole allows and keep them together as a unit. Two fingers stacked side by side, skin to skin, share load far better than two fingers with a gap between them.

Pull the way the pocket wants

This is the bit that separates people who are strong on pockets from people who are simply strong.

Every pocket has a direction. Look at the shape of the opening and the angle of the rim, and pull in line with it. A pocket with a flat lower edge pulls straight down. One with an angled lip is really a side pull with a hole in it, and fighting that by pulling straight down gives you half the hold and twice the strain.

Two things follow from that.

Set your body before you commit. Move your feet so your hips sit under the line of pull rather than off to one side. A pocket you have to yard on sideways is a pocket that is about to spit you off or hurt you.

Do not twist in the hole. Rotating your hand while it is loaded in a pocket is the single most reliable way to injure a pulley. If you need a different angle, get it with your body, or take the hand out and put it back in differently.

Open hand over full crimp

In a deep pocket, an open or half crimp position, with the last joint slightly bent and the thumb doing nothing, is the position to default to. It puts less strain on the A2 pulley than a full crimp, and in a hole there is rarely any advantage to crimping anyway, because you are hanging off the depth of the pocket rather than an edge.

Shallow pockets pull you towards a crimp because that is the only way to get purchase. Treat those as crimps, and treat them with the same caution you would give any small edge on a steep wall.

The injury bit, honestly

Fingers and hands take the majority of climbing injuries, and the flexor pulleys take a big share of that. A review of finger flexor pulley injuries published in Wilderness & Environmental Medicine in 2021 puts pulley injuries at roughly 15 to 20 per cent of all climbing injuries, with the A2 pulley of the ring finger the most commonly ruptured. That is the pulley that sits over the base of the finger and holds the tendon against the bone.

Pockets are not the only cause, and crimping on a steep board probably accounts for more of them. But pockets concentrate the same load into fewer fingers, which is exactly the condition those numbers describe.

Practical version:

• Warm your fingers up specifically. Not just a few easy problems. Five to ten minutes of progressively harder pulling on big holds before you touch anything small, and a couple of easy pocket moves before a hard one.
• Build the tissue slowly. Pockets respond to months, not weeks. If you have never climbed on them, a trip to a pocketed crag is not the moment to find your limit.
• Stop at a twinge. A pulley strain that you back off is a fortnight. One you climb through is a season.
• If you hear a pop, the day is over. Ice it, stop climbing, and see a physio who works with climbers rather than reading forums at midnight.

Tape does less than people think. The evidence on preventative taping is weak, and a strip of tape does not stop a pulley from failing under load. Warming up and loading sensibly do far more.

Feet, as always

The best way to survive a pocket is to put less weight in it.

Pocketed rock is usually steep limestone, which means feet want to cut and your hands want to take everything. Fight that. Find the highest useful foothold, get your hips in towards the wall, and move off the pocket rather than hanging on it while you think. Every second you hang on two fingers is load you did not need to take.

On steep ground a heel hook or a well placed toe can turn a desperate two finger move into a controlled one. Use them.

Where you meet them

In the UK, pockets mean limestone. Kilnsey in Wharfedale is the obvious one, a great overhanging prow full of pockets and tufa, and the classic hard routes there are pocket climbing at its most honest. Malham, Raven Tor and the Yorkshire dales crags all have them.

Abroad, French limestone is the deep end. Buoux built its reputation on pockets, and the tufa and pocket climbing at Céüse is what most people picture when they think of European sport climbing.

Indoors, pockets show up as moulded holds and dual texture blobs, usually more forgiving than real rock because the edges are rounded and the depth is generous. They are a good place to learn the movement without the sharp rim.

Keep track of what your fingers are doing

Finger injuries almost never come out of nowhere. They come after a block of sessions that were harder on the hands than you noticed at the time: three board sessions in a week, then a pocketed sport route, then a hangboard session because the wall was busy.

That pattern is obvious in hindsight and invisible in the moment. Logging your sessions in Sendit, what you climbed, how it felt and where it loaded, gives you the hindsight early. When you can see that the last two weeks have been all small holds and steep ground, adding a pocket day to it becomes an obvious decision rather than an accident.

The short version

Middle and ring for most pockets. Fingers deep, together, and pulling the way the hole faces. Open hand where you can, never twist under load, and let your feet carry what they can.

Pockets reward patience more than any hold on the wall. Get strong on them over a season and they stop feeling like a risk, which is roughly the moment they start feeling like the best hold on the route.