Rope Study was originally formed in 2015 as a series of in-person courses to promote responsible, risk-aware rope education. We originally created this website to provide supplemental, online support to those in-person courses. Unfortunately, since 2022, other responsibilities have prevented us from continuing to offer in-person courses. However, we know that other rope communities have found some of the resources we provided here useful for their own education, so we didn’t want to close the site.
Therefore, we continue to maintain this website as an online resource and introduction to the philosophy behind our original courses, though we are currently reorganizing the content to better reflect an online-only resource. You can learn more about that process, and a brief history of Rope Study, on our About page.
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Our Purpose
We do not intend this site to be an online rope tutorial site. There are a number of excellent sites of that type. Instead, we view this site as a supplement or complement to those sites.
In most cases, we do not provide tutorial videos or specific examples of exercises. Instead, you should view this site as a “tour guide” to the world of rope, laying out concepts, forms, exercises, and approaches that we think are important to know, in the order in which we think you should focus on them.
Armed with that information, you can seek out online and in-person resources for learning the specifics of what we discuss on the site.
Our primary goals are to help rope practitioners gain a better understanding of the following core concepts:
- Responsible Progression: Providing a pathway (which we call “responsible progression”) to help students move from beginner to advanced practitioners of rope by offering suggestions about what to learn first and next, what to master before moving forward, and what to consider as you go.
- Risk-Awareness: Offering information about risk and safety, but also promoting a particular approach to rope bondage that emphasizes the need for all participants to be mindful of the risks they are bringing to themselves and their partners.
- Tying Well: Focusing on the importance of tying well, helping to define what that means, and highlighting how it impacts successful rope interactions and the risks involved. We often sum this up in phrases like “tying well, not patterns” or “tying the person, not the rope.”
- Tying Together: Emphasizing the partnered aspect of rope bondage, meaning that both the person doing the tying and the person being tied have equally important contributions to make to the experience, have essential knowledge and skills that are distinct from one another, and that this understanding is vital to truly successful rope interactions.