A few bits and bobs that are worth reading:
Bounce Testing, Moving Up Efficiently, Extending Your Reach, Untrapping Your Foot From the Wall, Using Two Ladders.
For bounce testing: slamming your foot down while the majority of your weight is still on the previous piece will work much of the time, but to realy test something, you’ll want most of your weight over the new piece with a foot in the previous aider as backup. You can produce a looooot more force when you bounce your body than when you slam your foot. This will seem scarier (because it is) at first because you’ll feel like you’ll fall, but having a foot in the previous aider (and a hand too probably) will allow you to catch yourself without thinking long before the dreaded daisy fall.
Think of moving up as a big pullup. Screw the fifi hook until you’re ready to put it into the piece or ladder oval. Instead attempt to move up multiple steps in one fluid upward thrust. (granted, this is a hell of a lot easier in ladders than etreirs (etriers?). Another trick for this is to hold your weight on your hand/arm to put one foot in a higher step, then (before stepping up) place your next foot in the higher step sideways (big toe up) this will allow you to swiftly transition from the lower foot to the higher foot as you’re moving up by rolling the foot into place. (helps to do it to see what’s going on)
When you find yourself on rivet ladders in the future, remember the two nut trick. You can pull the head of one of the nuts down and use that to lasso a just-out-of-reach-because-everyone-that-drills-rivet-ladders-is-f##king-taller-than-me-god-I-hate-being-short rivet. OR do yourself a favor and get some of Mucci’s cheat-hangers-wait-not-cheat-I-meant-to-say-extender-definitely-not-cheat-hanger rivet extenders. I have one and love it.
a piece of extra advice.
You may have noticed that sometimes it’s hard to get your foot into a higher step because the weight of the lower foot is keeping the aiders tight against the wall. And when you do, only the tip of your foot, or just under your toes gets caught on the ladder webbing and DAYUM! that hurts!
To fix this, think of stepping up in your ladder the way you think of matching feet when free climbing.
1. place your higher foot into the space just above the step you want to go into. smear/pressure your foot against the wall to hold it there (you should not be touching the aider step wen doing this.
2. taking your bottom foot, lean out from the wall by pulling that foot backwards (support yourself via your hands on the top of the ladders or against the wall when you do this)
3. This will allow the steps of the ladder to move away from the wall just enough for you to then release the pressure/smear of your higher foot and drop it into the step (just like you would when you do a foot match when free climbing)
4. huzzah!, your foot drops into the higher step with the ladder webbing beneath the arch of your foot instead of barely holding on to the tip of your toes.
I use two ladders because I hate etriers. Ladders I can walk up and down without looking or thinking about my feet. I can’t do this in etriers. I had the same problem with russian aiders. I also haven’t really found that much difference in comfort between standing in two versus one ladder, maybe because the spreader bar prevents pinching, probably because I instinctively cam or climb with my non-laddered foot on the wall.
Plus it’s lighter ;P But seriously, I purposefully climb heavy, carry everything with me on the pitch, and like the freedom my heavy ass bag of tricks gives me. Since the 4 ladders hasn’t given me any comfort advantages when I’ve played with them, I’ve pushed the use of that weight into bringing more of something else. But granted, I’ve never really used the rest step. I’ll head back into the gym with 4 ladders and 2 ladders and a spare etrier to see if I can incorporate the rest step. I’m always up for new things.
