One of the best ways to prevent injury is to play within your skill level and your physical capabilities.

Learn, then Practice, then Play

When you first learn a new skill, you are not yet ready to use it in a scene. You need to practice outside of a scene first. Once you have a solid grasp on the new skill and are confident that you can use it correctly, you can begin to incorporate it into play.

One Thing at a Time. Focus

When incorporating new skills into practice, only introduce one new element at a time. This can apply to techniques, levels of risk, and positional difficulty. Doing so allows the Top to focus on executing the new skill or technique with intention and safety at the front of their mind while reducing the number of new variables that they have to keep track of. This also allows the bottom to slowly adjust to and understand the way that they react to the new element that has been introduced. This is especially important if something doesn’t work quite right. Introducing one new variable at a time makes pinpointing issues much easier.

Be Patient, Build Slowly

As a Top, you may desperately want to put your partner into a strict strappado with the elbows tied tightly together behind their back and spank them silly, or as a bottom you may crave to experience that sort of scene. But that is something you build up to, not something you start with. It is very rare for a person to be able to touch their elbows behind their back and even more rare for them to be able to stay in that position for any length of time. Doing so without serious flexibility and strength training brings a high risk of muscle and joint injury. Also, if you put the ropes in the wrong location, you could easily cause a compression injury to the nerves that run close the elbows.

As you begin and as you grow, take things slow and easy, work with you partner and practice each new technique before you incorporate it into play.

Enjoy the journey!