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On September 5th, ihung got together with some good friends and went out to the top of a hill and hung one another from a tree.  It was a knee suspension sort of day, with three of the five suspensions that day being variations on knee suspensions.  Our friend Chase came up from West Virginia and showed us a thing or two about rigging into trees, well actually he showed us how to use an ascender and a grigri to get into a tree, and then we got down to business.

First up was none other than Chase with a 2 point, single knee suspension.  Now, I’m terribly paranoid when it comes to knee suspensions at the best of times, and when he told me his plans, I was worried, for sure, but he assured me he’d done one not too long ago and wanted to revisit it to see if it went better.  I’ve been around single knee suspensions, and so I know how awkward the hanging is, and how much pressure is on the hooks, so I was somewhat prepared.  Chase showed me where his old hooks were and explained that he wanted these in the same spot.  This is the point where I became a little more worried as his old hook placement was drastically different from where I place knee hooks.  His were on the sides of the knee joint whereas my placement is more alongside the kneecap.  Again, Chase assured me that this was good for him and he liked it and that it held last time (never a guarantee it’ll work again) so we went with it.

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Needless to say, he hung great and enjoyed this suspension much more than his previous attempt, and best of all, the hooks were rock solid!

Next up was Kelsie, who was super excited to hang from her knees again as it had been a while. She was also concerned with comfort and skin tearing, so to minimize the chances of tearing and maximize her comfort, we went with six hooks, three per knee. My usual placement for these is two alongside the kneecap in a V shape, and one horizontally above the kneecap. This distributes the person’s weight across all six points fairly well, although care must be taken to not overload the top hooks before they go up as the tension on that one will increase more than the others.

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Once again, the hooks all held just fine and the suspension was a roaring success!

Third up to bat for the day was Jesse, and this was his first knee suspension. He’d spent the day waffling between knees and vertical back, but finally knees won out, with a little peer pressure encouragement from Kelsie. He was more confident in his knees and trusted us completely when we said that 4 hooks would be great for someone of his build. Hooks went in great and before long Jesse joined the ranks of people who have had awesome knee suspensions. His hook placement was identical to Kelsie’s, aside from no hooks across the tops of the kneecaps.

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This post is by no means meant as any sort of instruction on where to place hooks, it’s merely to show that there’s no “right” spot for hooks. The location of the hooks depends on many different factors, and although most of us go based on what worked last time (ie recursion), it’s sometimes nice to step outside of our comfort zone to see how someone else works.