Suspension Bondage Is Dangerous

We love suspension bondage and we’re excited to share it with you. We want to be very clear, however, about the risks involved.

1. Suspension bondage involves unavoidable risk. Like rock climbing, suspension is a risky activity. Good preparation and training can reduce your risk, but even if you do everything right there is still a chance that you may be injured or killed, or that you may injure or kill another person.

2. We don’t have all the answers. Unlike rock climbing, suspension bondage has no professional standards bodies and no expert consensus about best practices. This book is based on years of study, practice, and consultation with outside experts. Nonetheless, you should be aware that suspension is still a developing field, and our understanding of the best way to do things is still evolving.

3. You can’t learn suspension from a book. The only safe way to learn suspension is to work with a qualified instructor or mentor. This book is a valuable adjunct to expert instruction, but not a substitute for it. Without a skilled teacher to guide and evaluate you, you cannot learn suspension without placing your partner in tremendous danger.

4. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Suspension is fun and exciting, and you will likely be tempted to rush ahead and try activities that you aren’t yet ready for. We can’t stress enough the importance of proceeding slowly and methodically, and always working within your skill level.

5. Always use good judgment. Your best defense against mishap is your own common sense and good judgment. Always be mindful of what you’re doing, and err on the side of caution.

Your partner is placing tremendous faith in your competence and judgment. If you are careless or overly ambitious, they are likely to pay a heavy price for your foolishness. Make sure that you are worthy of their trust.

Suspended Animation accepts no responsibility for any injury or death which may occur as a result of the activities described in this book. By reading this book, you agree to take full responsibility for your actions and their consequences.

Intermediate Rigging

Yokes

If you use a suspension bar or similar piece of hardware instead of a suspension ring, you will need to connect it to the hardpoint using a yoke. A yoke is simple to rig: it’s just an inverted V, with separate lines going from each of the endpoints of the bar to a central ring.

Why use a yoke?

If you rig to the center point of a suspension bar, it will be unstable. By rigging a yoke, you stabilize the bar and keep it from misbehaving. The same principle, incidentally, applies to rigging people: rigging someone from a single vertical line attached to the hips will cause them to tip.

An alternative to the yoke is to rig each end of the bar to a separate hardpoint, if you happen to have two conveniently located hardpoints. Note that this configuration will allow swinging perpendicular to the line of the bar, but not parallel to it.

Right: Use a yoke

The yoke stabilizes the bar and keeps it from tipping.

Wrong: Single attachment point

With only a single attachment point, the bar is unstable.

Rigging the ring

A simple way to rig a yoke is with a rappel ring using the lark’s head on a ring technique. If you have a ring with a removable gate, you can pass the sling directly through the ring. Either way will work fine, but the latter solution is slightly more attractive and somewhat stronger.

A rappel ring rigged with three slings for a yoke.

A ring with a removable gate is a more elegant solution.

Tri-axial loading

This carabiner is tri-axially loaded, which weakens it. Use a ring instead.

It’s tempting to use a carabiner instead of a ring. We recommend the ring, however: a carabiner rigged in this way is subject to force in three directions. This is called tri-axial loading, and it significantly weakens the carabiner.

The eagle-eyed among you may notice that a few illustrations in this book use tri-axial loading. We shot those images some time ago and haven’t yet found time to re-shoot them.

Angles and force multiplication

We’ll discuss the physics of rigging in detail in a future book. For right now, you should know that any time you rig a vee shape, it’s important that the angle of the vee is less than 90° in order to avoid force multiplication.

Right: Keep the angle small

When rigging a triangle, keep the angle less than 90 degrees.

Wrong: Angle is too wide

This yoke is incorrectly rigged: the top angle is greater than 90 degrees.

For the nerds

The eagle-eyed among may have noticed a few violations of these guidelines. This image, for example, shows tri-axial loading of a carabiner with a load angle of 112°. What’s up with that?

  • Our position on tri-axial loading is new, so some of our old images don’t reflect the new policy. We’re OK with that: it’s better to avoid tri-axial loading, but it isn’t critically important for suspension (unlike rock climbing). As we re-shoot different sections of the book, we’ll phase out the old images.
  • In this particular case, we had limited headroom for photography, and after running the numbers, we decided to go with the wide angle to save a few inches. (If you’re interested, a 112° angle means that the force on each arm of the yoke is about 116 pounds, leaving us with a design factor of 10.3).

There are a few other minor deviations to be found, but we decline to point them out. Most of you don’t care, and those of you who do will enjoy searching for them.