I've been tying Ian's "world's fastest shoelace knot" for a few years now. It took me about a week or two to get comfortable with it and it really is amazingly fast.
It's interesting to experience your brain relearning a habit that has become so ingrained. Reminds me of the Smarter Everyday backward bike episode [1]. In fact, I just tried to tie my old 2 loop knot and accidentally tied Ian's knot again.
I'm also a big Ian knot fan. Saves me two seconds per shoe, that's four seconds per day, 1460 seconds a year, so over the next 50 years that's 20 fewer hours tying my shoes. Boom, LIFEHACK!
Seriously, it's a fun knot to tie and never comes undone.
I've been using it for years too. I like deliberately boring someone by asking them if they want to see me tie my laces. Then I do it, and they're like "wait, let me see that again..."
I've just been practicing Ian's fastest knot for the last 10 minutes and I can definitely see the speed advantage already.
My only issue is in keeping the starting knot tight. I usually use the standard shoelace knot which makes it easy to keep tension on the lace at all times, and that keeps the starting knot tight. But I'm finding with Ian's fastest knot I lose tension when I'm pushing the two loops towards each other, which causes the starting knot to loosen slightly. Is that something that can be solved with more practice?
I don't know when I made this change, but apparently I use my middle finger to hold down the starting knot. I tie it exactly as pictured (left hand/yellow string behind, right hand/blue string in front), except starting at step 1 my left hand middle finger is holding down the starting knot. This keeps the tension while tying the knot.
Interesting video. I'm somewhat surprised no one has been hurt trying it out at his lectures, though. In some of the clips, the challengers seemed close enough to the edge of the raised stage that with a little bad luck it looked like they could have rolled off the stage or fallen sideways off it.
There are a couple followups that would be interesting.
1. Try this on a tricycle. On a tricycle you steer in the turn direction and do not need to lean, as opposed to a bike where your counter-steer and lean. It would be interesting to see if that less complicated steering interaction would make it easier or quicker to adapt.
2. Try on a bicycle with training wheels, adjusted so you can still lean but aren't going to actually fall over. (This is important because if you can't lean the training wheels have essentially made the bike into a trike and so the experiment has been reduced to #1).
The idea here is that in most of his videos people were failing very fast. They might not be getting a long enough ride each time to provide enough examples of control actions and responses for their brain to learn much.
Perhaps the training wheels would provide longer trials, giving the brain a lot more to work with.
I use that knot as well. Not really much of a time saver to me, but it is a better knot than the standard way I was taught as a kid. It rarely comes untied while the old way did several times a day with recent advancements in shoe laces.
I also taught the knot to my 10-year-old just to see what she would make of it. Took her three tries to understand and now that's how she ties her shoes. It seemed much easier to explain than the standard.
Yep, I've always found shoelaces incredibly... I don't know how to put it, but it's incredible how the existence of elastics is overlooked in the production of shoe fasteners!
I use elastic shoelaces that are always tied. I can put my shoes on in half a second and run out the door and there's no way they're coming off even when I'm running.
And don't miss the Lacing Shoes part of the site. http://fieggen.com/shoelace/lacing.htm There's a section at the bottom of the comparison page for solving shoe problems by lacing them differently.
As a teacher of 250 3-5 year old students every week I tie 25+ knots a week. This knot has saved all my fellow teachers a ton of time. Seems like they make shoe laces that are slick and won't hold a knot no matter what. Now I tie this once and that is it for the rest of the day.
This knot is one of the top 10 things I learned online that I share with people. And they share it with their friends, teach their kids, who tell their friends, and so on.
It still comes up as a random topic of conversation at every conference I go to where I see someone retying their slippery laces.
It took me until my mid twenties to discover that the reason my shoelaces would sometimes come undone, is because there is a "right" and "wrong" way to do the Standard Shoelace Knot. Doing it wrong results in the "Granny Knot": http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
I taught Ian's Fast Shoelace Knot to my 91-year-old grandmother a while back, when I first ran into this site. She liked it well enough that she still ties her shoes that way. It's a nifty knot.
I never managed to learn that method. My father tried to teach me, and I just never could memorize it. He's also left-handed, which I think complicated it.
The square knot is basic knot tied between two rope ends; the first half of it is much like the first half of the shoe's knot. You then repeat the first half, but swapping which end is on top. Like the shoelace knot, if you do it right, it stays inline (and remains symmetrical and pretty); if you do it wrong, it gets ugly.
Really (at least to me) this is because the shoelaces knot is a square knot; the "bunny ears" are simply added slipknots to make it easier to untie your shoe. But I've never seen the "standard" method taught to tie a square knot, likely because I've never seen the square knot taught with slip knots; those just being something you add if you want them.
Which is how I tie my shoes; I use what the article calls the "two loop knot"[1]. Two methods, same knot, though I always thought my way was the standard, not my dad's. Oh well.
I really appreciate this guy's devotion to shoelace tying, and I especially appreciate that this is the website where I figured out how to tie my shoes so that the laces lay horizontally rather than heel to toe. All my life nobody had ever explained to me that there was an order to tying shoelaces that would result in one or the other.
I was a Boy Scout and was (still am) a big fan of knots. But it never dawned on me until this site that the "bunny ears" method is just a square knot with ripcords.
We often teach Boy Scouts that tying their shoelaces correctly (a square knot) leaves the laces across the shoes, but if they go lengthwise along the shoe, it's a granny...
Ugh, I was so mad when I found that out! I still have to stop and think about it because I learned it the wrong way when I was little. (Just reverse the first part of the knot left-over-right or right-over-left and you will get tight, flat laces or floppy laces that point heel-to-toe.)
As it hasn't been mentioned yet, I thought I'd point out Ian's book "Laces"[1]. I bought it for a friend of mine who collects sneakers and ended up re-lacing most of my shoes before giving the book to him.
>"Laces" comes with color-coded laces that match the lacing diagrams, and has an "interactive" front cover that can be used as a practice shoe. The pages are filled with trendy looking shoes laced in amazing patterns.
Out of print, but worth it if you can get hold of a copy![2]
I'm honestly not trying to take anything away from Ian, but he didn't "invent" the "Ian knot", just renamed the handcuff knot: http://www.animatedknots.com/handcuff/
You should take a closer look. The so-called "Ian knot" is not a distinct knot; it is just a different way of tying the standard bowknot. It is definitely not the handcuff knot.
http://fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm will hold your laces ties where a standard knot will work itself undone. This is particularly useful for round, synthetic laces.
I use this knot once every few years - when I get new shoes or new laces. This knot is so amazingly strong that I only ever tie it once, then I just slip my shoes on and off.
Late to the party ... but this is really one of the things that makes the little things in life a little easier.
Found Ians site about a year ago and spend some time after that convincing people that they have been tying their shoes wrong their whole lifes.
Was met with much skepticism, but ultimately most of them tried and never looked back. There is still one guy who "praises" me for showing him how to tie his shoes because before he had to retie his shoes several times a day.
I followed Ians suggestions and use the "fastest knot" on a daily basis. For hiking and sometimes also for running I use the secure knot, mostly because the fast one actually can become undone on very slippy laces.
TL;DR: Knots are great, rethink your habits from time to time
I think that learning of (and avoiding) the Granny Knot [1] is the best I ever learned about shoelace knots. If your shoelaces occasionally get loose while walking, check it.
Wish he would also put how easy they are to untie. I've realized that the ideal knot is optimizing not just how secure the knot is and how fast to tie it. But also how fast to untie it, which is often anti-correlated with how secure it is.
It's interesting to experience your brain relearning a habit that has become so ingrained. Reminds me of the Smarter Everyday backward bike episode [1]. In fact, I just tried to tie my old 2 loop knot and accidentally tied Ian's knot again.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0