Speed tie your shoes with the Ian Knot.
gbattle says:
OK, I am going to expose some Boy Scout nerdery here. There’s an important fact about knot tying for shoes that many people have never learned even into adulthood. The basic foundation for tying shoes is the square knot as seen below:
The magic of the square knot is that it is a locking knot, most commonly used on ships and boats (also called a reef knot). Note how each of the center loops appear to be inter woven symmetrically, and, when tightened, the center loops appear to make a square shape.
If you reverse the the second loop of the knot however, you no longer have a locking knot. This is called a Granny knot (or grief knot, booby knot, false knot, etc.) and it looks so similar to the square knot, but it can have devastating results because it is made to slip, the exact opposite of the square knot.
An easy way to tell if you are tying your shoes with a square vs. a Granny knot is, post tying, simply look at the knot. A square based knot will have symmetry and will lie straight across, parallel to the holes. A Granny knot will twist either right or left and the outer loops will look lopsided. You can easily correct your Granny knot woes by reversing your second tie and voila, you are locked and loaded.
I showed this to a friend who, after 30 some-odd years of tying his shoes with a Granny knot, never knew why his shoes always became untied during the day or worse, while going out for a run. That’s the prize from using the booby knot!
You’ve been educated. Now somebody needs to show Ian in the above video (he just needs to reverse it in the last sequence).
So basically, after 35 years of tying my own shoes, boy scout knot badges, and sailing knots, I learned from Tumblr that I’m doing it wrong.
