How to Ice Climb: Swinging Ice Tools and Efficient Movement Sequence

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Efficient ice climbing, until you get to the most severe grades of difficulty, is essentially a repetitive process. I wouldn’t want you to confuse that with “boring,” though. I have never once been bored on ice. There is a real sense of creative effort. I am literally “creating” the holds I need for my arms and feet by using my tools and crampons. Now extrapolate that creative process to thousands of tiny decisions about where to make those holds, how to adapt to the changing ice (which varies based on each route section’s exposure to weather and sun), and the need to gather feedback from the ice when you don’t actually touch it with anything that has nerve endings, and you get a highly stimulating process. I actually become hyper-aware.

But from a movement standpoint, the reality is that the basic sequence of movements need to become second nature, built into muscle memory. That allows me to focus on the changing medium and the decisions rather than having to be conscious of each biomechanical move I make.

The catch to all of this is that it is hard to get in enough repetitions of the movement to build that muscle memory. This is where - like I did in last week’s post - I fall back on my old golfing days. When I needed to build a new and slightly altered movement into my golf swing, I did drills.

Because the ice climbing movement is repetitive and pretty darn transferrable to many different routes, you can use that to your advantage. For example, I have a friend who sometimes doesn’t bring his hips close enough to the ice after coming to a full stand on both feet. This inhibits the next swing. Well, you can hang a towel from on top of a closed core (pinched in the door) as your hand hold. Set your feet into “ice climbing stance,” and then hang from the towel. Now, stand up, thinking only about driving your hips into the door. There you go: a drill to improve the posture as one moves to the full standing position.

My point is that ice climbing is very trainable. Maybe even more so than other climbing disciplines (that is, until you get on varied terrain where the basic movement sequence can’t be relied upon for every move). You can break down the movement sequence into its component parts and get the engrained. And while you do need to get out on ice to learn how to read ice and adapt, you can also complement this by building muscle memory in the comfort of your home.

And for the gear hounds, in the video I am using the C.A.M.P. USA X-Dream Alpine Ice Tools.