Position training

What is position training?

Position training is learning a small number of fixed postures that are taken on a single word or gesture, without anything more needing to be said. Kneeling, waiting, presenting. The training isn’t in the posture itself but in the repetition: only once the body knows it does the head no longer have to be involved.

What position training looks like in practice

Like a few postures with a name attached, and a word that calls them up.

A common set with me is four. Waiting: kneeling, hands on the thighs, gaze down. Presenting: kneeling with the knees apart and the hands behind the back. Attention: standing, feet together, hands loose along the body. And resting: sitting on the heels or on a cushion, where talking is allowed again. Each posture has one word, and that word doesn’t change.

The learning goes in small steps: first showing and steering with the hand, then on command with all the time in the world, then with the time taken out and the tension put in. That’s the point where you notice what position training is about. The posture is easy; the switch isn’t.

Where position training comes from

From two sources that influenced each other more than the scene long admitted.

One is the leather tradition, where postures belong to the formal protocol. That origin stands on shaky ground. The English-language encyclopedia notes, about the handbook John Weal used in 2010 to try to set those protocols down, the criticism that it isn’t historically accurate, and that the submissive postures in it were taken over from the heterosexual Gorean scene.

The other source is exactly that scene. Tjarda Sixma described in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research how new slaves in the Gorean community go through an intensive training phase in which they learn the basics of the submissive role: how you address a free person, how you do the ritual pouring, which household tasks belong to it. Anyone who completes a phase earns visible clothing for it, and the level of a slave girl is marked in that scene with a color of silk.

What a posture does to you

More than showing it. A posture steers the person holding it.

Shwetha Nair and colleagues had 74 people in Health Psychology do a stress task while their backs were fixed with physiotherapy tape in either an upright or a slumped sitting posture. The upright participants reported more self-confidence, a better mood, and less fear. In their speech, the slumped participants used more negative emotion words, more sadness words, and the word “I” more often. That study is about upright versus slumped sitting and not about kneeling; the leap to position training is my own inference, not a finding of Nair’s.

The physical side is less poetic. Kneeling puts weight on the kneecap and on the instep of the foot, and a hard floor makes that difference big. More important is the end: when getting up from a low posture, according to StatPearls, some 300 to 800 milliliters of blood sink into the legs under gravity, and the body has to catch that with the baroreflex. Getting dizzy after a long posture comes from there, and it happens to healthy people.

Why people want position training

Because a posture works faster than a sentence.

The appeal is in the falling away of words. Anyone who knows the posture doesn’t have to work out how she’s supposed to behave, and that spares exactly the self-conscious layer that makes an evening stiff. What it delivers is different for everyone:

• For you, position training gives a clear place to go the moment you no longer know what to do with yourself. That’s why many women call it soothing rather than exciting.
• For the other, it gives an answer you can read straight off. From a posture you see within two seconds how much is still in there.
• For the two of you together, it saves time: the start of an evening no longer costs fifteen minutes of talking.

Position training makes no one more submissive than they are. A posture you take while not standing behind it stays a posture, and that shows in the shoulders. And the body has the last word. Knees, back, and hips decide how long a posture can last, however good the intention.

How you build up position training

In steps, and with fewer postures than you’d want.

1. Pick three to five postures and give each one word. No one remembers more the moment it gets exciting.
2. Practice them outside a scene, dressed, with the light on. This is the boring part and it’s the part that works.
3. Only add time once the form is right, and start with half a minute instead of ten.
4. Put something visible on it when a posture is set: a word, a sign, a piece of jewelry. That’s exactly what the Gorean community does with silk colors.
5. Agree on how you come out of it. Getting up is the moment someone gets dizzy, and that deserves practicing just as much as the kneeling.

Misconceptions about position training

“Position training is the same as protocol.” Protocol is the whole way of interacting: titles, the order of speaking, rituals. Position training is one part of it, and the only part you can’t just agree on but have to practice.

“A posture is symbolic.” With Nair and colleagues, a fixed posture measurably changed the participants’ mood, self-confidence, and even word choice. So a posture isn’t only a sign for the other; it does something to the one holding it.

“The longer the better.” No. Standing or kneeling still for a long time isn’t impressive but risky, because the blood pressure drops and getting up becomes the most dangerous moment of the evening.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years active in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Women who bring this up almost always ask about the most beautiful posture. They never ask how long they have to hold it.

Three postures work better than eight, and the third posture is almost never used. What sticks is the first, from the start of the evening, and it gets a charge the others don’t reach.

And the pattern I see most: the kneeling is fine, the waiting isn’t. Sitting in the same posture for a minute without anything happening is, for most people, the hardest stretch of a whole evening. That’s also where it works.

More reading on position training

On this site, high protocol explains within which way of interacting those postures belong, discipline is about the rules and corrections around them, and the article on the power of crawling describes how one specific posture feels from the inside.

Beyond this site, the study by Nair and colleagues is the shortest way into what a posture does to a person, and Sixma’s field research gives a level-headed picture of how such a training phase is set up.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to experience once how such a posture feels without taking on a whole dynamic for it, that fits inside a single evening. The page on the BDSM date sets out what we go over beforehand about time, pace, and the signal you use to step out of it.

Sources

• Do slumped and upright postures affect stress responses? A randomized trial. Shwetha Nair, Mark Sagar, John Sollers, Nathan Consedine & Elizabeth Broadbent, Health Psychology 34(6), 632–641, 2015 (DOI 10.1037/hea0000146; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref, abstract read via Europe PMC because the publisher blocks automated access). Randomized experiment with 74 participants whose backs were fixed with physiotherapy tape in an upright or slumped sitting posture during the Trier Social Stress Test. Provides that the upright participants reported more self-confidence, more arousal, a better mood, and less fear, and that the slumped participants used more negative emotion words, more sadness words, and the first person singular more often in their speech.
• Orthostatic Hypotension. Matthew Ringer, Muhammad F. Hashmi & Sarah L. Lappin, StatPearls, updated 17 January 2025. Provides that on getting up from a lying or sitting posture about 300 to 800 milliliters of blood sink into the legs under gravity, that this lowers venous return and so cardiac output, and that the body normally catches it with the baroreflex.
• The Gorean Community in Second Life: Rules of Sexual Inspired Role-Play. Tjarda Sixma, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1(3), 2009. Field research in the Gorean community. Provides the intensive training phase new slaves go through, with etiquette, the ritual pouring, mandatory household tasks and tours, the symbolic garment a player earns after a completed phase, and the training levels for female slaves marked with silk colors.
• Leather subculture. English Wikipedia, chapter “The myth of the Old Guard”. Provides the criticism of The Leatherman’s Protocol Handbook by John Weal (2010) that it isn’t historically accurate and takes over submissive postures from the heterosexual Gorean scene.

Related terms

• High protocol. The formal way of interacting the trained postures belong to.
• Low protocol. The loose stance, in which the same postures aren’t asked for.
• Discipline. The rules and corrections position training is a part of.
• D/s. The dynamic within which a posture first means something.
• M/s. The ongoing variant, in which postures also apply outside a scene.
• Submissive. The one who takes the postures, and what that asks of her.
• House rules. The written side of the same idea, but for a whole room.
• Inspection. The scene in which a learned posture is looked at and judged.
• Praise kink. What happens the moment the posture is right and that’s said out loud.
• Service-oriented submission. The acts that are often in the same protocol agreement.
• Training. The broader term, with what learning psychology says about repetition and spacing.