Using a cane: aim, wrap-around and spacing

There is a lot on this site about what a cane does. This page is about what you do with your arm, and it is written for the person holding it. The part I most want you to read is where I describe wrapping one round a hip in a bedroom that was too small for the cane I had bought.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here concerns consenting adults over 18.

A paddle spreads the energy of a stroke across an area the size of your palm. A cane puts the same energy into a strip eight millimetres wide. It cuts where other things bruise, and the gap between a hard stroke and one that opened somebody up is too small to see from where you stand. Rattan and buying one are on the cane. This page is the arm.

Where the strokes go

The fuller lower half of the buttocks. Not the top half, not angled down across the crease, and never above the line where the buttock stops and the back begins. That leaves a band about the depth of your hand.

Clear of the tailbone, clear of the hip bone either side, nowhere near the kidneys. Backs of the knees never. Thighs only if agreed and at a fraction of the force, because the sciatic nerve runs down the back of the leg. The anatomy is on where it is safe to strike.

The wrap-around, which is how most people get hurt

A cane swings in an arc, so the last few centimetres travel fastest. If the cane is longer than the target, that fast end carries past the far edge of the backside and onto the hip, where bone sits under thin skin with nothing in between. Most cane injuries I have heard of came from a stroke of moderate force whose tip finished somewhere it had no business being.

Four things fix it, and they work together.

• Stand so the tip is the part arriving at the far edge of the target. Setting up with the middle of the cane on the mark leaves a third of its length over the far hip before you have swung.
• Use less than the full length. A stroke covering three quarters of the width is a perfectly good stroke.
• Aim at the near buttock rather than across both. Two strokes on alternate sides do the same job with none of the risk.
• Do not drift closer as your arm tires. That is the mechanism nearly every time.

That last one deserves more than a bullet. You start at a sensible distance and creep in, an inch at a time, over a set of ten, because holding your arm out is tiring and shortening up feels like nothing. By the ninth stroke you are a foot closer and the tip is going somewhere new. I put masking tape on the carpet where my front foot goes and look down at it every few strokes.

The stroke, and practising it on a cushion

From the elbow and the wrist. Not the shoulder, and not the whole body turning into it: a shoulder swing cannot be corrected once it is moving and cannot be stopped if she shifts halfway through. Short strokes land where you looked. Long ones land in the vicinity. Anybody can hit hard, and putting six strokes inside a hand-sized area is the difficult skill.

This is the opposite of the advice for heavier implements on the top's body, because a cane is light enough that the risk is a misplaced stroke rather than a strained arm.

So practise on a cushion. An old one, a stick of chalk, a cross drawn on the cover. Rub chalk along the cane and it leaves a line on the fabric wherever it lands, including the part you did not mean to deliver. Work at it until six strokes in a row fall inside a hand-sized area without you thinking about it. Twenty minutes a night for a fortnight gets most people there.

I did none of that before my first caning, which is why the section below is here.

Spacing a set

Strokes go horizontally, parallel to the floor, and each one goes somewhere new. A finger width between lines is the working rule. A stroke landing on an existing weal is the normal way skin splits: that tissue is swollen already and has no give left, so what would have bruised ordinary skin opens this instead.

A set of six starts low, on the fullest part just above the crease. The second sits a finger width above it and the third above that. You work up towards the middle and stop before the upper half. Beyond six, come back down and fill the gaps rather than starting a second layer.

Make the first stroke of the evening a quarter of what you intend to finish at, then check between strokes rather than counting your way to a number. A raised pale line with red either side is ordinary. One going dark purple, or shiny, or showing a break anywhere along it, means that area is done whatever either of you agreed earlier.

And wait. Ten to twenty seconds, because a cane stroke keeps building for several seconds after it arrives, so somebody who has just taken one will tell you she is fine and mean it. Six in fifteen seconds is four strokes delivered to a person who could not yet have told you to stop.

Tramlines

Two raised parallel lines with a pale channel between them, which alarms people the first time. The cane compresses the tissue under it and pushes it outwards, so the small vessels break along the edges of the strike rather than beneath it. Ordinary, and close to universal. The raised part settles within hours and the bruise stays a week or more.

The one I wrapped

Sixth or seventh time I had ever used a cane. A metre of rattan, bought because it looked like the ones in the photographs, in a bedroom three and a half metres across. Somewhere around the ninth stroke the noise she made was a completely different noise, one syllable, followed by the word we had agreed.

The first four landed where I meant them. By the ninth I was standing a good foot closer, because my arm had tired and I had shortened up with no idea I was doing it. That stroke crossed the backside and carried on round onto her right hip, and left a mark in two parts: a normal weal over the muscle, then a separate darker line about an inch long over the bone at the side.

On the night it was undramatic. We stopped, and she said the useful thing, which was that it had hurt in a way nothing else that evening had. The muscle marks went within a week. The hip was still there at eleven days, a yellow-green colour over a small hard lump you could feel through the skin. Bruising of the periosteum, as I found out later. She was fine about it long before I was.

What changed has stayed changed. I bought a seventy centimetre cane and have never put the metre one on a person again. I stopped aiming across both cheeks and started aiming at the near one. The masking tape went down. And the whole thing moved out of that bedroom into the front room, where there are four feet of floor behind me instead of two.

Which cane, and warming up

Three sorts turn up in ordinary use: a light cane of 8–9 millimetres, whippy and mostly surface sting; a heavier one that flexes less and bruises deeper; and a dragon cane, sold to people who want the most severe object available. A beginner has no business owning the third.

Warming up is not optional with a cane. Cold skin holds less blood and less elasticity, and splits at a force warm skin absorbs. Twenty minutes of hand and strap before any rattan, which is on warm-up.

Marks, scarring and two questions

Cane marks outlast everything else on this site. One to two weeks is normal for the bruising, and heavy tramlines are sometimes faintly readable at three. Some people scar. So ask two things during negotiation, since there is no good moment afterwards: do you scar, and are you taking anything that thins your blood? Warfarin, apixaban, aspirin and long-term steroids all change what a cane stroke does. See health conditions and medication.

If a stroke splits the skin

It looks like a line that has opened rather than a graze, usually a centimetre or two, often with very little blood. Stop, say out loud that you are stopping, and wash your hands before you touch it. The rest is on when the skin breaks, worth reading now rather than at eleven at night with a tea towel in your hand.