On a road trip recently my buddy and I were listening to the TED podcast and heard the extremely brief talk by Terry Moore on the right and wrong way to tie your shoes.

With a very little bit of digging I found this great post from Starts With a Bang on ScienceBlogs.com which gets to the difference between these two methods of knot tying that Terry Moore does not mention.

It turns out that what’s going on, in terms of the two sides, is the difference between a Reef Knot and a Granny Knot. And all I had to do, all these years, was switch any one of the steps I took, and I would have been tying my shoes in nice, well-tied Reef Knots instead of these lousy, impossible-to-stay-tied Granny Knots! [Starts With a Bang]

Reef Knot FTW!

Reef Knot vs Granny Knot
Reef Knot vs Granny Knot

 

The shoe lace knot is what’s called a doubly slipped reef knot where two ends on one side are looped back through so that you can easily pull one end to unravel the whole knot.

double slipped reef knot
double slipped reef knot

How To Tie Your Shoes

The tricky thing is that how you finish the knot depends on how you start it. If you cross left over right to make the initial knot you have to finish one way or the other. This video from Runner’s World should help:

Who knew tying your shoes was so complicated?!?!?

-Mike

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