Floorwork

What is floorwork?

Floorwork is rope bondage where the tied person’s body keeps its weight on the floor, a bed or a chair instead of on a suspension point. In floorwork the rope carries no body weight. It stands opposite suspension, where someone does hang from ropes.

How floorwork looks in practice

Two people, a mat and a coil of rope, and nothing on the ceiling.

Sociologist Zoey Jones, who interviewed 23 rope practitioners for her doctoral research at Carleton University, describes the ordinary places where this happens without any ceremony: on a bed, on a carpet, in a chair, against railway tracks, or in a puddle of mud on a forest floor. The floor is the starting point, not the second choice.

What you see is usually static. Someone sits or lies down, the arms come behind the back or along the body, and the rope fixes the posture the person is already in. Because nothing hangs, the person tying can stay within arm’s reach the whole time and check what is happening with a hand on the skin.

Floorwork is also where people learn the craft. One of the participants in Jones’s study, a bottom with a disability who taught herself to tie because she had trouble finding partners, sums it up like this: once you have done enough floorwork, the step to suspending yourself is no longer very hard, as long as you listen carefully to what the riggers say.

Why floorwork plays out differently than suspension

Because the floor carries the weight and the rope only the shape.

As soon as someone hangs, that same rope becomes a load-bearing structure. That difference runs through all the sources. The encyclopedia on suspension states plainly that suspension carries a higher risk than other forms of bondage, backed by Anil Aggrawal’s 2008 forensic handbook. Jones records the same thing from her participants: suspension counts as more intense, riskier than floorwork, and it demands more knowledge and more gear.

The medical literature points the same way. Khodulev and colleagues catalogued sixteen nerve injuries in ten people after rope bondage in Cureus, and these all came on acutely and directly after a full suspension. In nine of the ten cases it was the radial nerve in the upper arm. Recovery ranged from a few minutes to several months.

That does not make floorwork risk-free, and that is where the most important nuance comes from. Jones notes that injury is possible in every form of rope play; one of her participants points out that even classic bedroom bondage can cause nerve damage at the wrists.

Why people stay with floorwork

Because on the ground more contact is possible and less attention goes to the rigging.

Jones asked her participants what they were after and got a strikingly broad list back: sexual, spiritual and artistic expression, social contact, a physical, psychological or athletic challenge, the need for rest, quiet, safety and meditation, simply making oneself or another motionless, and giving or receiving pain. None of those goals calls for a suspension point.

One of her participants describes rope work as a medium of communication and connection between two people, one that can express everything from safety and care to humiliation and sadomasochism. Others call it “infinite expression” and “paradoxically freeing”.

• For the person being tied, floorwork gives the quiet without asking anything of your muscles; you can lie for hours where suspension starts to count after minutes.
• For the person tying, the attention stays with the person instead of with the load on the suspension point.
• For a couple, it is the form that fits at home: a carpet and six meters of rope, without a beam that has to hold three hundred kilos.

Floorwork is not soft by default and not safe by default. It is a different distribution of risk, not an absence of risk.

What floorwork is not

“Floorwork is the practice version of suspension.” For some it is, for most it is not. The goals Jones records are largely unrelated to hanging, and suspension, by the same source, calls for a different level of knowledge and different gear. So it is more of an adjacent practice than a next rung.

“On the ground, little can go wrong.” The nerves do not know whether you are hanging. A tight wrap on the upper arm pinches just as much when you are lying on a mattress, and Jones’s participants explicitly mention wrist damage in ordinary bedroom bondage.

“Floorwork and groundwork are two different techniques.” They are two words for the same thing: rope work without suspension. Groundwork has its own entry on this site, with the learning ladder and the community side included.

What I see myself

I am Victor, gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. I tie with real hemp, and the vast majority of times rope is involved, no suspension point comes into it. Not out of caution, but because on the ground nothing has to be about anything except the person in front of me.

The question women ask beforehand is almost always about pain, and afterward the conversation is almost always about going quiet. On the floor I can take the time for that, because there is no clock of muscles that cannot hold out.

What to watch for

• Do not lay a tight wrap over the back of the upper arm at the level of the deltoid tuberosity, because the radial nerve runs just under the skin there; that is exactly the spot that was damaged in nine of the ten cases in Khodulev’s study.
• Agree on a signal that works without hands, for example tapping twice with your foot, because in floorwork the hands are often the first thing tied down.
• Stop right away at tingling, numbness or loss of strength, and do not wait to see whether it passes.
• Keep safety shears within reach and put them in the same place as last time, so you can find them in the dark. That is my own house rule, not something from the literature.
• Stay in the room, even when nothing hangs from the ceiling and the posture looks relaxed.

More about floorwork

On this site, bondage gives the wider frame that floorwork is a form of, and the article on shibari and connective kink goes into what rope does with a connection. For the first practical steps, the art of bondage is the way in.

Off this site, Zoey Jones’s dissertation is the only research that describes the rope world from the inside rather than as a curiosity, and the article by Khodulev and colleagues lays out which nerve injuries actually occur.

Where this fits on this site

Want to know how rope feels without a suspension point coming into it right away? Then a conversation beforehand is the first step. The page on the BDSM date sets out what gets agreed in that pre-talk and how an evening with rope is built up.

Sources

• Pleasure, Community, and Marginalization in Rope Bondage: A qualitative investigation into a BDSM subculture. Zoey Jones, dissertation in Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2020 (23 in-depth interviews with rope practitioners in Canada and the United States). Provides the list of ordinary, non-hanging play spots, the finding that suspension counts as more intense and riskier than floorwork and demands more knowledge and gear, the definition of the partial as an in-between form, the broad list of goals practitioners name themselves, the description of rope as a medium of communication and connection, and the caveat that injury is possible in every form of rope play, down to wrist damage in ordinary bedroom bondage.
• Acute Radial Compressive Neuropathy: The Most Common Injury Induced by Japanese Rope Bondage. Khodulev, Klimko, Charnenka, Zharko & Khoduleva, Cureus 15(5): e39588, 28 May 2023. Provides the sixteen nerve injuries in ten people, the fact that these all came on acutely and directly after a full suspension, the 90 percent share for the radial nerve, the anatomical location at the back at the level of the deltoid tuberosity as the point to work from for prevention, and the recovery picture ranging from a few minutes to several months.
• Suspension bondage. Wikipedia. Provides the definition of partial and full suspension and the finding, on the authority of Anil Aggrawal’s Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (CRC Press, 2008), that suspension carries a higher risk than other forms of bondage. Since 2020 the article itself carries the notices that it reads too much like a manual and needs more sources; it is used here only for those two points.

Related terms

• Bondage. The wider concept that floorwork is one form of, with the other forms included.
• Asanawa. The hemp rope this work is usually done with.
• Bight. The loop at the start of nearly every tie on the ground.
• Double column tie. The tie that binds two limbs together, and is used most often on the floor.
• Chest bondage. The upper-body tie that starts on the ground and only then needs load-bearing capacity.
• Futomomo. The leg tie that fixes the posture on the ground and becomes the lift point in a partial.
• Partial suspension. The step after, where part of the weight does come to hang in the rope.
• Peer rope. The evening where most floorwork is practiced.
• Friction. The lock that holds each of these ties together.
• Groundwork. The same rope work under the other name, with the learning ladder and the reason to stay on the ground.
• Gote shibari. The hands-behind-the-back tie that most rope work on the ground arrives at.
• Shibari. The Japanese rope tradition that floorwork is the ground floor of.
• Rigger. The one who lays the rope work, and where the word comes from. Suspension is the counterpart of floorwork and has its own page.