Advice to get genuinely good at heel hooks?
I’ve been climbing for a little over a decade on and off, and for most of that time I’ve hovered around the V9-10 range inside, past few years outside as well. By far my biggest weakness is heel hooks. I’m not naturally flexible, but I stretch regularly and have a decent level of at least passive hamstring flexibility. I’ve tweaked my hamstrings a few different times, worked with climbing PTs and although they are very strong and decently flexible on paper(very heavy deadlifts, single leg RDLs, Bulgarians) I find that pulling hard on heel hooks is like rolling the dice for injury. Hammy injuries take a while to heal and affect my quality of life significantly outside of climbing, so my risk tolerance is pretty low. I find myself actively avoiding hard projects with heel hooks due to this. As I try to push into harder V10-11, this really is limiting my outdoor project options.
Most of the climbers I know who are good at heel hooks never really did anything special for them. They just were already pretty flexible, did climbs with heel hooks, and naturally got better at them like any other climbing motion. For people who particularly struggled with them and now are sending V10+ heel hook boulders, what exercises do you think made the biggest difference? I feel like I’ve tried most of the typical PT for hamstrings, I warmup by heel hooking random spray wall boulders, but I haven’t found a consistently progressive movement that I can feel improvement from. Any advice from people with similar experiences is appreciated!