Start footwork with three things: keep your eyes on the foot until it takes weight, place the front of the shoe precisely the first time, and make no noise. Warm up on routes two grades easier with quiet-feet and sticky-feet drills. 'Climb with your feet, not your arms' roughly holds on vertical walls; the steeper the wall, the more weight shifts to your hands, so on overhangs the cue becomes 'keep your feet on the wall'.
"Three points of contact" was climbing dogma until the 1950s; today it is a beginner drill and a safety rule on loose rock. What you actually need to learn is "shift your weight onto the other three, then move the fourth." Hugging the wall helps when you are holding still; when you move, find the plumb line. Straight arms save your biceps, not necessarily your fingers.
A barn door happens when your hand and foot on the same side are your only contact, and your body swings open around that line. Fix it with diagonal support (push on your right foot, hold with your left hand) or by swinging your free leg out as a flag. With one foothold, backstep or flag; with two footholds at similar height on either side, drop knee. In one knee-injury study, drop knees accounted for 16.9% of acute knee injury mechanisms, so skip them if your knees are hurt.
Tell the three grips apart by two joints. In an open hand the fingers are only slightly bent. In a half crimp the middle joint bends to about 90°, the fingertip joint does not bend backwards, and the thumb stays off. In a full crimp the fingertip joint bends backwards and the thumb wraps over the index finger. The full crimp puts the most load on the A2 pulley; one biomechanical model puts it at 36 times the open-hand load. So default to an open hand or half crimp, and full crimp only when nothing else works. Hooper's Beta's 'open crimp' is a half crimp, not an open hand.
Dynamic moves are sorted by how many points stay on the wall: a slap keeps at least two, a jump keeps one hand on, a dyno keeps none. A deadpoint means catching the hold at the instant your body stops rising and hasn't started to fall, usually with your feet still on the take-off holds. Use them when a hold is too far or you're too tired to reach slowly. Done well, dynamic moves aren't necessarily riskier than static ones; the worst case is the half-committed attempt, so pick static or fully dynamic. Start with small deadpoints on big holds with your feet staying on.
Stop hammering the problem from the start for a sixth time. Break it into sections and start from just before the move that stops you. Watch someone climb it: in one study, climbers topped more often after a live demonstration than with no preview. Change one variable per attempt and film it. Rest 3–5 minutes between full-effort goes. Whether you must match the finish hold depends on the rules: competition rules require both hands on it, gyms vary. Downclimb instead of jumping whenever you can.
A 3-minute preview before climbing led to fewer and shorter stops in one study, but not to more completed routes; watching someone else climb is what raised send rates. When you read a route, mark the rests and the crux and mime the moves. At a rest, hang straight-armed with an open hand, keep your weight on your feet, and shake each hand in turn; on short, sustained gym routes, sprinting to the anchor often beats stopping. G-Tox (alternating the arm overhead and down) rests on one small study. When setting your own problems, change one variable at a time: hold quality, distance, orientation, direction of travel.
The steeper the wall, the more weight moves from your feet to your hands, and the research agrees on that. So on slab, press your weight onto your feet and smear with heels low; on vertical, follow the fundamentals; on overhangs, lesson one is keeping your feet on; on roofs, treat heel hooks and toe hooks as a third and fourth hand. "Straight arms mean resting" is only half right: it spares the biceps, but your fingers are still working.
Crack climbing is not gripping and pulling; you insert a body part and expand it. Climb straight cracks thumbs-up; thumbs-down is usually the most secure for resting or placing gear; on slanting cracks, top hand thumbs-down and bottom hand thumbs-up, shuffling without crossing. Long Dong's rock is described two ways: Taiwanese sources say 四稜 sandstone, Mountain Project says quartz-rich metaconglomerate, and both call it coarse and high-friction, so tape up. Taiwanese trad courses mostly teach protection; jamming needs separate practice.