Offwidth foot work

J Achey wrote:Kent mentions the T-stack, but underrates it. This is the ticket. Learn it, practice it, it will change your life.

Maybe I undervalued the usefulness? Good — something to work on!

If it's bigger than heel-toe, then you can either t-stack or you can throw your whole leg in the crack and cam your shin bone (ankle on one wall, knee on the other) or get some thigh and butt action. For the record, I love heel-toes. I can usually get a good high-elbow chickenwing in that size.

I've seen some ppl get a cool butterfly foot stack going on splitters but usually in the #5 C4 size.

I have a size 13 foot so . . .

13 foot? that's cheating! i usually consider this size to be the green big bro / 9" valley giant range. this is definitely my hardest OW size.

I think it's that size that is problematic. Something just a bit bigger than a wide country technical friend #6 (the big green more or less the size of your head). It is problematic for me as well, that's how I found the forum thread. It is not that it's undoable to climb this with the 'caterpillar' technique:

- press inside of your knees on one wall, heel on the other
- squeeze a bit
- lock the torso and hands by either chicken wing (if possible), arm bar or putting your hands in front of you and pressing them hard to have a spinal cord - breast - forearm lock

However, I find this technique very strenuous and I get exhausted after 1.5 m or so. Moreover it feels very insecure. The moment I try to relax, is when my body is just a few millimeters smaller than the crack and I feel like falling out. Constantly applying the pressure with the inside of your knee (having the leg a bit like for breaststroke swimming technique) is not a rest position at all. When I am trying to go a bit horizontal, I get an artificial overhang and it spits me out even more. One more thing to keep in mind is that because #6 is just not big enough, I can probably find only one spot to place it somewhere in the crack (usually it's at the beginning of the crack, as when you go up the deeper part usually widens for obvious erosion reasons) and then I have to solo the rest.

I've tried bros where I climb (the pictures are from there), but the rock has just so rough surface, that I cannot get a decent placement with them.

I do agree it's more of a squeeze through chimney rather than the offwidth. 

As long as the crack is not too flared and I therefore can get all or the majority of my lower body into the crack (past my butt and therefore at least halfway up my torso), I like to climb this size at a bit of an angle like the picture of (I believe it is at least) Pam Pack on that desert crack (even though that one is wider than the size under discussion).  Hang on a chicken wing on the leading arm and down palm/mantle/press with the lower hand.  For the lower body, open up the hips and get a high thigh/knee scum with a bent leading leg and use that as a cam similar to the chicken wing, driving between the outside edge of the foot on one side and the knee/thigh on the other.  Move the leg up, then press, chicken wing, and shoulder roll your upper body higher, then kick the leg higher again, etc.  Note how the hip position in terms of rotation relative to the crack will effect how hard your leading leg cams, and take advantage of this, both in terms of moving the leg up as well as stabilising off of it.  How high the inside leg is relative to the chicken wing is situationally dependent, and can be pretty extreme in some situations in that you can be completely sideways at times and as a result I find this to be one of my favorite techniques.  For further reference I believe Craig Leubben described this technique in print in several places as 'The Sidewinder'.