Climbing is a beautiful sport: it looks like a painting; it reads like a poem.

If you do it right, you perform a fluent and well-balanced body movement, and you demonstrate efficiency and elegance.

Climbing attracts me because it’s not about muscle strength – it’s about combining it with your mind in order to achieve maximal performance. Also, climbing is not a lonely sport. By saying that, I am not only referring to your belaying partner, but your best friend, gravity.

When I was reviewing the lecture notes from my 4-session climbing classes, the principal “Work with gravity, not against it” jumped into my eyes and soon caught all my attention. Isn’t gravity our nemesis since we are constantly bringing our body weight into the sky?

Let me try to use two common mistakes of a beginner to elaborate the point. As a beginner, I use my arms too much. I know this because my arms give up way too early when I climb. Another mistake my instructor usually yelled at me for is standing on my toes too much. Instead I should drop my heels when I climb.

I have addressed the arm problem in the article “Rational Brain; Rebellious Body.” Basically, if you straighten your arms and let gravity do its work, it will put more weight on the legs, which are stronger body parts than the arms. And when the handhold is a round rock and hard to grab: with the palm flat on the rock, gravity will give you better traction.

Standing on the toes put too much stress on the calves. My instructor asks us to put our toes into the wall, which makes our body position natural for weight shifting. Also she reminds us to use the ball area to make contact with the rock, and by doing that, you can put your toe area on the wall, which gives you better traction.

You might say that the above examples only told you not to work against gravity: We put emphasis on how to position our body and increase the contact surface area in order to have more traction. But in fact we are working with gravity too: by dropping the heels instead of standing on the toes, we changed the direction of the force and the force comes from gravity. Combining the right direction of force and bigger contact area, we have better traction to keep our body stable and balanced.

Now you can see the equation for working with gravity: correct body position + gravity = maximal traction. The climbing technique that explains this formula the best is: Smear.

When we climb, the best situation is that both our hands and feet can hold on to something. This, of course, is not always the case. The purpose of Smear is to put one foot on the wall in order to bring the other foot onto a higher foothold. It’s better to smear high so that your upper body and your smear leg are almost perpendicular. This right angle will drive your weight into the wall in the way which generates the most traction.

Working with gravity is the beauty of climbing and this also reminds me about working with current while white water kayaking. When we maneuver our kayaks to perform eddy turns or peel outs, if we drive our boat to cross the eddy line with a correct angle and we lean our bodies so that the river water always hits the bottom of our boats, we don’t have to paddle hard because the current will take us to where we want go.

Working with gravity and working with current – is it a coincidence? I am afraid not and it seems that working with nature is always the key. I wonder why human beings like to say “conquer” nature. If we can be friends, why should we be enemies?