Flight Log | December 30, 2022

If you have any interest in rope beyond admiring the pictures, you may have encountered the common problem. Its challenging to learn! Not only are there hundreds of patterns, teachers with different ideas, outdated safety information etc. but the actual process of learning to control your body, and your partner learning to control theirs is difficult. This can be expected. However, it is also not rocket science – so let’s explore the research on how best to learn new physical skills. And if you get nothing else out of this writing, I hope you come away with the knowledge that the body self organizes around its physical practice.

All the way back in the 20s (the other 20s) a researcher named Nikolai Bernstein wanted to better understand how people acquire physical skills, in his case to improve the efficiency of manual laborers. And he found something very interesting when tracking the movements of blacksmiths. What he noticed was that beginner blacksmiths had a very consistent hammer swing – their hand and shoulder tracked in almost the same arc every time with great consistency. But, their output, the actual stuff they were making, was very inconsistent. In contrast to this, expert blacksmiths had very inconsistent swings – the angle and approach they took changed almost every time, but their output of products were all very regular. This was termed the Degrees of Freedom problem.

With a name like that, you can see why this may have relevance to the world of bondage! Now this was not the only study – he also looked at people who chiseled things, people walking etc. but a body of work was built up to where we can start to draw some conclusions about what caused this DoF problem. The hypothesis is that when we first learn a movement, we need to limit the input. In order to simplify the problem, we stiffen up and remove some degrees of freedom – we pull the slack out so to speak. Then, as we become more competent in the limited form of the movement, we begin to explore the available degrees of freedom until we arrive at an optimal point where we feel the skill is mastered. This is not a conscious process, but one which is self managed by the nervous system. Which leads to some very interesting implications for rope educators.

If you accept that the body must self organize, this should change how you approach teaching a physical skill. Let’s take as an example the skill of laying a wrap across someone’s body with good tension. Very skilled teachers can and do show how to hold the rope, explain with which fingers they pinch the strands, and how to draw the lines across the body. But then they get frustrated when their beginner students grab the rope up like a crayon and fist it across their partner’s chest. However, this is a crucial developmental step in the ladder towards mastery! The student needs to first focus on the movement of their whole arm, how their shoulder and hand are tracking, before they can think about what their fingers are doing. It isn’t even conscious on their part – their nervous system is limiting the degrees of freedom.

I have more thoughts on this, but I expect most of you reading this page are not teaching rope. So, it is more interesting perhaps to discuss how understanding this concept can help you get better at tying or being tied, outside of a dedicated class time. I actually think this is crucial for bottoms to understand – so I will use this tie I did with VioletCaroline to explain some of the ways I apply this theory practically.

The way most of us are taught rope is through a series of patterns and set recipes. You’re given a pattern for the upper body, one for the lower body, some uplines, and then shown how to lift them up and down in a set way. This is a great step along the way, and it also works to support your nervous system’s need to limit complexity. But eventually, people get a bit bored and start to branch out – learning new patterns, trying different sequences, and either they start to see minor injuries popping up or they get very lucky. I am about to commit a cardinal sin, by giving blanket advice to strangers on the internet (unasked for!) so here it is. When you start to branch out, you need to do it slowly, and you need to do repetitions of new movement patterns in order for your bottom’s nervous system to adapt to the new movement. The first time you do something, they will very likely tighten up – and you may not even notice it! Which can lead to injuries.

So let’s see what this can look like:
Because VioletCaroline and I have tied several times and I hope to continue to tie her for a long time to come, I wanted to start exploring some different possibilities. This tie started in a very static and straight position – maybe it doesn’t look so from the pictures, but knowing that she is a very physically active person who also is frequently tied, I was fairly secure that her body already knew how to be in a back bend, chiefly supported by the hips, with her spine in alignment.

Staying in this very nice position and coming down would have still been an excellent tie, but I wanted to play a bit more with torsion and explore the idea of untying the tenshi. So next we moved into a more twisted position:

At this point in the tie I noticed that she was using her arms to control the twist of her spine, limiting the range of motion. If we can put this in the framework of the Degrees of Freedom problem – this is very likely the response described by Bernstein, where the body unconsciously simplifies the new pattern before beginning to explore and find the optimal position. I added a kettlebell for intensity, but if you are making a dedicated study of a new movement, and not just keeping these ideas in mind during play time, you should probably skip this step.

Finally, I took her out of the torsion by releasing one leg and allowing her to move into a more aligned side suspension.

I expect this should feel intuitive at this point. If I want to tie my partner in torsions, I should tie more torsions! But, I think it is very useful in deepening your practice with rope to start to pay closer attention to the small details. All of us will develop habits – say we enjoy grabbing the TK from the back, or maybe we prefer grabbing it from the side – but it is easy to not even notice what our habits are – and then on the day we decide to grab the TK from the front, something our bottom has never experienced – we will be at an elevated risk of causing injury. In this case, in order to prepare my partner for something new, and help them to help me grow and explore, I need to go slowly. Bring her into the torsion and out of it, try to not force the desired position but allow her to find it herself, and not giving too many new inputs at once. In that way, she will find the optimal way her body can organize itself inside this new movement.

Luckily, that just means you get to tie more!