[Climbing] Body Positioning

Good body positioning can make your climbing much more efficient. To learn body positioning, we first need to know where is our body's center of gravity.

Our center of gravity lies behind our belly buttons. It's pretty much at the middle of our body. This implies that when we're climbing, we should always move our core as close to the wall as possible. In principle, this is the major foundation of a good climbing style. 

Why? In footwork, I mentioned it is a good technique to use our legs and feet to share the weight of our body with the arms. Moving our core close to the wall is a great way to achieve this. 

In this picture, you can see that by moving his core towards the wall, the climber can let go of his hands completely, thus significantly save the energy of his arms. This picture is only to demonstrate how efficient we can be using good body positioning. When climbing, resting is often done by transferring body weight to the lower body and letting go of one or both hands.

But to execute good body positioning is no easy task. We need to train our body's flexibility, as well as the strength of glutes and back muscles.