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As a follow up to our Halloween Suspensions post, here’s another video, this time shot by our good friend and suspension cohort, Jared.

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.

A few months back, during the APP conference, a few of us led a class about suspension rigging. We broke it down such that Allen handled the introduction and the physics of rigging, I went into details of structural rigging, and Emrys gave a great talk on planning outdoor suspensions, with S2B wrapping it all up with professional entertainment rigging stories and images. Overall the class went exceptionally well, and we our instructors worked great together. Em’s piece in particular was sort of thrown together, out of left field and ended up being immensely useful and his presence was heartfelt and sincere.


All that talking about planning brought up a couple of memories of times when ihung forgot some crucial piece and had to improvise, which is not something you want to have to do with suspensions. Like one time I went out into the woods in Michigan to hang myself from my knees and forgot to bring gloves… but that’s an entirely different story. Recently, one of ihung’s very own submitted a pair of images from a knee suspension we did a few years back. It wasn’t until we were at the location, had all the structural rigging in place, and had inserted the hooks that we realized we didn’t have any rigs with us. Uh oh. Here, we had Nate with 6 hooks in his knees and no rig to put him on. Nate and I discussed options and decided to just rig through a carabiner (possibly one per knee) and leave the rigging lines long enough to relax the angles of the hooks and he’d be fine. I’d had a little experience with rigging suspensions without a rigging plate, but was not terribly confident in doing it at this point in time, at least not with knees (notoriously finicky) or with more than four hooks, but Nate and I share a mutual trust and respect and so we went with it.

Despite being boneheads and forgetting the rigging plate, the night was a roaring success for Nate. To bring this back to the APP class though, Emrys’ recommendations were very common sense, but still needed to be said. If you missed the class, I’m sorry as it was a good one, but the parts that stuck with me were as follows:

• Scout the location beforehand
• Plan what to take in and double check it before heading in
• Don’t bring too much, but don’t come up short either
• Remember that the people who suspend probably won’t be in the best of shape for carrying stuff out, or even climbing out, depending on what sort of location you use
• Test the location a few days before you plan to use it. Better to hit snags with plenty of time to rethink or replan it than to hit them the day of

Those are some of the many useful hints for outdoor suspensions that Emrys gave. If you ever have a chance to take any of the various suspension classes/lectures that are offered, even if you aren’t actively involved in suspensions, they are generally very informative, as well as help to solidify the bonds in our suspension community. With that, here’s another picture of Nate from that night.