How tight should climbing shoes be?

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One of your most critical climbing decisions precisely determines how tight your rock shoes should be. Your shoes, like your insurer and soul mate, are your connection to rock and therefore to life itself. Do it well and you will discover eternal happiness. If you mess up, that is, your shoes are too tight, you will burn in a hell of pain only relieved when you replace said shoes with a pair that fits you perfectly. After that, you’ll always live with the regret of wasting over a hundred or even hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes that not only hurt you, but held you back.

This begs the question: how tight should you rock shoes?

Aeons ago, when rock shoes were designed to fit like dress shoes with pointy toes, you had to carve the shoes tight like torture devices to have them sealed around your feet with no wiggle room to compensate for the round ankle square (your foot) hole effect (your shoe). Over time, like in a season or two, these shoes molded to your feet somewhat, but it was never a happy process and the footwork suffered. As John Bachar once said, “You can’t have good footwork if your feet hurt.”

Bachar and other shoe designers such as Heinz Mariacher were instrumental in removing old shoe lasts and constructing foot-shaped rock shoes. As a result, today’s models, of which there are several hundred, are more anatomically correct and available in so many shapes that you can get a pair that feels tailor-made just for you. But these shoes should always be tight.

My hunch is that many veterans like me still buy shoes that are too small out of habit and that many climbers could go up half a size without sacrificing performance – I don’t think I’ve ever fallen because of my shoes, but more once I finished a day of climbing because my feet hurt.

Also read: How to choose, fit and break rock shoes

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have one rule of thumb: size rock shoes one size smaller than your dress shoes? But that is not possible. Different shoe brands use different sizes – a size nine in model X might be a size 10 in model Z, plus your dress shoes might be a little too big or too small and which pair of dress shoes are we talking anyway? Then add the complication of width – are your feet as narrow as ninja blades or as wide as ping pong paddles? – and you can see the problem.

You have to try rock shoes. Begin the process by selecting a pair close to your dress shoe size. How do they feel? I bet these shoes are comfortable and too big. Go down a half size and see how it goes. Keep going down until you can barely fit your feet in the shoes, indicating that size is too small. Now go up half a size, then another half size if necessary. A new pair of rock shoes should feel like a tight pair of driving gloves, a little uncomfortable is okay. “Uncomfortable” is subjective because comfort and pain thresholds vary. One thing is for sure, if you can walk around in these shoes without feeling any discomfort, they are too big.

Read also: Unbearable pressure from Rock-Shoe? Try This Slice-And-Dice Hack

If you can’t find a model that suits you, try a model with a different shape. The shoe for you is here, keep trying.

Keep in mind that all shoes stretch. Leather shoes will stretch more than synthetic shoes, and unlined shoes will stretch more than lined shoes. Unlined leather rock shoes stretch the most; I had them stretched a size or more, so I painfully adjust them. Unlined leather stretches quickly, so you’ll only have to suffer in the shoes for one or two outings (or wear them home to stretch.)

The rand will also affect sizing, fit and stretch. Some rands are stretched like slingshots to compress your feet. A compressed foot has more power than a relaxed foot, which is why a tight shoe is more powerful and precise than a looser shoe – tightness equals compression. Slingshot Randed shoes still stretch, but bounce when you take them off and don’t stretch as much as shoes with more casual rands. Yet another variable to factor into the adjustment equation.

8 Tips for Adjusting Climbing Shoes for Problematic Feet: Yours

A shoe’s support or lack of support will also affect fit and sizing. You can fit stiff shoes that are a bit taller than soft slipper-like shoes, because the built-in stiffness (often called “board lasting”) provides support without needing the shoe to squeeze your feet. The most flexible shoes should fit almost to the skin, as they rely on the pressure of your feet to provide support.

You might be tempted to over-tighten your shoes. Don’t! If you wince when you put your shoes on, they’re too tight. Pain isn’t the only issue here. Shoes that are too tight can, over time, damage the joints in your feet. For exemple, Hallux Rigid is a form of degenerative arthritis of the big toe joint that can be caused by rock shoes. I know this first hand. I developed Hallux Rigidus about 20 years into my climbing career, but continued to wear shoes that were too small. Performance mattered more than anything… who cares about problems on the road? Eventually my toe joints deteriorated to the point where I had to remove the joints and replace them with synthetic joints. here is a horrible video (be careful, it’s very horrible) of a replacement of my toe joint. Don’t let the same happen to your happy feet.

Ultimately, you’ll probably need at least two pairs of shoes. A large, comfortable pair you can warm up and wear in to send your compound lines over and over again, and to wear on longer multi-pitch routes, and a much tighter, more accurate pair for red dot attempts or flash and block where you usually only wear your shoes for a few minutes at a time.

If my advice sounds squishy, ​​it is. I can’t tell you exactly how tight your shoes should be because I literally can’t walk or climb a mile in your shoes. I can say with certainty that you need to get the sizing right.