Part of our "Toes to Knows" Climbing Academy series--covering climbing from footwork to mental preparation.
Tags: Intermediate, Movement
Flagging your foot is a climbing move where one of your feet presses to the side and touches the wall, but doesn’t rest on a hold. Flagging is a really useful technique for maintaining good balance and is a key part of the foundational X-Motion movement pattern that I coach. In this post, I describe a great drill to help you learn to make good flagging a habit.
Climbing with balance is critical to minimize the relative amount of effort you need for any given move. X-Motion is a great movement pattern to help achieve that balance. There are many times, when practicing X-Motion, where you don’t have a foot in just the right spot to create the balance you need to reach the next handhold. In those situations, you should “flag” your foot to the desired location, even when there’s not a hold there. Body position is usually more important than a foot hold for your non-dominant foot.
There are two different methods of flagging most commonly used, the forward flag and the reverse flag.
To do a forward flag, place your non-dominant foot out to the same side—the right foot in this picture. Press the side of the foot against the wall. In this case, the climber is anchored between her right hand and left foot. The right foot hangs out to the right to offset her left hand that is reaching up. She’s in very good balance and is able to easily reach the left-hand hold. A forward flag as shown here is a classic X-Motion movement.
To do a forward flag, place your non-dominant foot out to the same side—the right foot in this picture. Press the side of the foot against the wall. In this case, the climber is anchored between her right hand and left foot. The right foot hangs out to the right to offset her left hand that is reaching up. She’s in very good balance and is able to easily reach the left-hand hold. A forward flag as shown here is a classic X-Motion movement.
If you’re not flagging a foot, which I usually do about 50% of the time, then you have both feet on holds. This is a great method as well, provided the feet are positioned properly enough to keep you in balance when moving to the next handhold. In this picture, the climber has most of her weight between right hand and left foot, but is using the right toe to push her toward her reaching left handhold.