Slacklining

by Alan Cole · Published Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 · Updated Thursday, September 17th, 2020

Morgan Slacklining

One of Morgan’s birthday resents from us was a Slackline set. If you don’t know what slacklining is then it’s a little like tight-rope walking, but the line isn’t tight! It’s actually a practice in balance that typically uses nylon or polyester webbing tensioned between two anchor points. The slackness of the line provides a dynamic point of contact with the webbing stretching and bouncing like a long and narrow trampoline. The line’s tension can be adjusted to suit the user and different types of webbing can be used to achieve a variety of feats. The line itself is usually flat, due to the nature of webbing, thus keeping the slackerliners footing from rolling as would be the case with an ordinary rope. The dynamic nature of the line allows for tricks and stunts.

It’s good fun, a good workout too and is supposed to be good for injury rehabiliation. It has to improve your balance skills for other sports such as mountain-biking and surfing which will hopefully help Morgan with such things as well. As with all these things there is plenty of progression to be made and I’m sure we’ll improve with time. There is of course also plenty of potential for scrapes, cuts, bruises and injury and there are plenty of people out there who take it to another level – A quick look on YouTube for slacklining will bring up plenty of videos of slacklining skills that we’re very likely to ever attain. Take a look at this for example.

The slackline itself wasn’t that expensive really – we got ours from a sale on SportPursuit – They always have some good sales on so it’s worth signing up. They one we got was a Gibbon slackline which seems to be the main ones in use. They are also available from Amazon – see the links at the bottom of this post.

We’ve given it a go a few times now and it has to be said that ‘tricks and stunts’ are far from our aspirations at the moment. It is surprisingly difficult and to start with just getting on it and staying there for more than a second or two is virtually impossible. Uncontrollable wobbling and knee shaking was about all we could do to start with! We’ve tried setting it up in the garden a few times but have yet managed to construct an anchor point of sufficient strength to hold it. We did have it attached to the back of the car at one point but the attachment point was then too low for me to use it.

: Car attachement

: Garden Slackline

We had a good go on Sunday afternoon though. The weather was gorgeous so we headed over to the beach and set up the slackline between two uprights on one of the groynes. These were of course more than strong enough for it and the sand underneath was ideal for getting to grips with it. Still no tricks or stunts from any of use of course but all of us had a go and Morgan and I were taking a few steps on it after a while.