This is the rope question that comes up more than any other. And the answer is “whatever works for you!”

But most people want more than that, so...

Do you tie mainly in the Western style? Then you will probably want shorter ropes and more of them. But you will probably prefer cotton or synthetic rope to natural fibre...

Do you mainly tie in the Japanese style, or Japanese-influenced? If so you are likely to want longer ropes and maybe not so many (until you get hooked!)

Do you tie the same person all the time, or lots of different people of different shapes and sizes?

Do you get annoyed if your ropes aren’t exactly the right length for whatever you want to do, or are you happy to adapt and improvise to solve rope-length problems?

Let’s deal with the Western style first. Many of the ropes you can get from hardware stores etc. and that are suitable for this way of tying come pre-packaged in 15m lengths. That’s about 48ft, generally too long for this style but you might want to keep one or two around. Halving the length gives you two 24ft ropes, halving again gives you 12ft, and yet again gives 6ft. All those are generally handy lengths, and you get zero wastage. We also like 18ft, and you can get that by cutting 6ft off one of your 24ft ropes!

The traditional length for “purist” Japanese technique is 7m, or about 23ft - but that is for very small Japanese women! There’s a general acceptance that in the western world 8m or 26ft is a sensible standard. Many people also like to have some double-length ropes, which would come to 50ft., give or take.

We’ve recently come across a new theory about the 7m Japanese length - click HERE to read about it.

Then there’s personal style. We prefer ropes a bit longer than standard, and usually cut our natural-fibre ropes to either 27ft or 30ft - giving double-lengths of 54ft or 60ft.

We’ve decided to standardise on 30ft and 60ft for our Flax Rope because those should be long enough for just about anybody and if you find they’re too long for you it’s easy enough to cut a bit off. We’ll even do it for you to special order. We’re also offering 15ft lengths because we find them useful even if they aren’t terribly authentic.