What is a Roof in Climbing?
A roof in climbing is a severely overhanging face. There is no hard and fast rule, but a steep face typically becomes a roof when the angle gets to about 60 degrees past the vertical. Horizontal roofs are generally close to or exactly parallel to the ground.
Your Hips
The control of your weight begins to be more evenly split between your lower and upper body. Typically, the initial focus of each movement involves shifting your hips over your heel before pushing up, with your hands serving as much for balance as for any other purpose.
In roofs, the arms and legs work as near equal partners in creating tension through your core to hold your hips as close to the wall as possible and to control any unnecessary swings. As such, movement in roofs is essentially accomplished by carefully controlled and planned swings from one tensioned position to another.
In terms of feel, roofs are about as different from technical slab as you can get. The reason is that at extreme steep angles it is nearly impossible to get your hips truly over your heel. In roofs, because of the angle, the concept which is most useful is that of body tension.
Straight-Arming
As routes become steeper, straight-arming puts more tension into your shoulders (up to a maximum on a horizontal roof), and requires more arch in your lower back to isolate as much weight as possible onto your feet. It’s value, though, too becomes more apparent, as steeper climbs inevitably require more effort from your hands to stick to the holds. It is at this angle that over-gripping is a common, and devastating, habit to overcome.
Heel Hooks
Heel hooks become a mandatory tool for roofs and roof exits. The basics of a heel hook are quite simple. You put your heel on a hold and pull your weight toward it. That’s it. The trick to this move is knowing when to use it, and how to keep your heel on.
Keeping your heel on requires understanding that, when switching from a normal foothold approach to a heel hook, you will, in general, be unable to fully get your hips over your heel. As such, heel hooks have more in common with how you typically use your hands as a climber, than how you typically use your feet.
Heel hooking is typically (though not always) a pulling motion, similar to pulling on a handhold. As such, the trick to keeping your heel on is similar to the trick to keeping your hand on with the least amount of effort: pull against the major axis of the hold you are using.
The most common error in heel hooking is that climbers ignore the fact just mentioned and simply slap their heel anywhere on a hold and crank in with their knee. This pops the heel.
Knee Bars
In roofs, knee bars are an excellent means for controlling you swing and isolating your weight in a similar fashion to good weight shifting at lower angles. A solid knee bar on a horizontal roof can isolate enough weight to allow you to use holds that you wouldn’t even consider for decent feet at that angle.
Use All Your Skills
Climbing at your best requires an almost unconscious integration of many skills at once. It is difficult to draw clear boundaries between skills on different angles, for instance does a 45-degree wall require roof skills or steep skills?
The most interesting routes or problems involve several different angles and the transitions between them. It is therefore important to keep in mind that nearly all of the skills have some application on every angle, and at nearly every grade.
You will, for instance find heel hooks even on slabs, and foot smears even in roofs. The ultimate goal is to be able to quickly and intuitively whip out whatever skill is useful at the time.
All material is reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 2022 David H. Rowland. All rights reserved.
