You’ve had a great lunch and now it is time for a nap.

The wind is coming in from the ocean, and the sun is shining down warming the sand under your feet. You’ve been enjoying the surf, sand, and sea in equal measure. In fact, you just finished a mouth-watering lunch of succulent oysters, some sea bass, and a salad with a nice wine to go with it.

Now, it is time for a siesta. You got you your favorite spot on the beach where you can watch the surf come crashing in, and there is an obliging hammock hung waiting for you, hung by the hotel’s staff. You carefully sit on it like a swing and rotate your hips to lie down.

Blinding light from the sun flashes through your eyes as the hammock flips you into a spin and you come to a smashing crash on your face into the sand. For a moment, you are too stunned to wonder what had happened. You have forgotten the basic rules of sleeping in a hammock.

But Something You Need To Know

Today, you are going to learn how to sleep in a hammock without having to worry about ending flat on your face or your backside. Hammocks are quite easy to sleep in if you follow some simple steps and take precautions to check things out before you get into the hammock in the first place.

We will use videos and pictures with three of the most common hammock types out there, so you can see what the differences are. When you are through with our little tutorial, you will be an expert in sleeping in a hammock no matter what kind it is, simply and safely. Even a cat can sleep in a hammock, as you can see here. But a cat has nine lives.

Timo spent four months learning how to get into his hammock. Timo can afford to make a few mistakes. You, on the other hand, do not land on your feet when you fall. So let us start out with the most difficult hammock and the easiest way to get into it and be able to sleep comfortably.

How To Sleep In A Hammock

Diagonal Style Of Sleeping

The flat hammock is the one most people have the most problems with. This hammock you see at most beaches, resorts, and in people’s backyards. IT is a rectangular piece of fabric, woven matting, and even netting. You can see what we are talking about here.

You see two bars with many lines that feed down to the bar and then loop on the other side to form the hammock’s body and what holds it all together is what is called the clew knot, and that lets everything spread out nice and balances the hammock for stability. Except… People hang their hammocks to taunt.

The Secret Is In The Hanging

The person who did the endo at the beginning of the piece did not check that the hammock was hung properly. Whether by accident or intent most hammocks are hung as if they were flat surfaces. This is not the case. You want a quarter moon arc in your hammock at the same height as you can sit down in comfortably.

Think of the hammock as one of those playground swings that had that piece of rubber that hung between the chains that you swung in when you were a kid. This is what you want in your hammock to look like.

Getting In Is Half The Battle

Sit back holding the near edge with your left hand and use your right to grasp the outside edge. Lift the right leg into the hammock and then lie back with your head in the upper right corner of the hammock toward the bar. Bring your left leg into the hammock last. The secret is to lie diagonally, and you will get that restful nap without flipping yourself over.

In this way, your weight is distributed evenly across the surface of the hammock, and you will remain level. Therefore, you see the secret of sleeping a hammock is to sleep diagonally and to hang the hammock properly.

But, if you want to lay flat on your back, you need to sleep in a different kind of hammock. That one is called the Brazilian style hammock, and it works a bit differently and lets you cocoon inside so you can sleep in a sleeping bag outdoors at night.

Brazilian Style Hammocks

There are many variants of the South American Hammock that look like a piece of fabric tied off at both ends, and you get inside. Also called a Parachute Hammock you have a deep bow in the middle, and you can lie diagonally as in our earlier example or more conservatively end to end.

Getting in is the same. Now you have the option of lying in the hammock in two ways and the bigger the hammock the more comfortable it becomes. Eagles Nest Outfitters is the big name in this type of hammock and others are moving up fast to challenge them with a similar design.

Now you need to add a Mosquito net and a Weather Fly to make these hammocks ready for camping but for the beach and the backyard they are becoming the standard replacing the flat and net style hammocks.

Now if you are tired of sleeping on the beach and you want a little more excitement then you will want to continue reading about our third style of the hammock, and that is the tent/camping hammock. While it has much in common with the previous two, it has some features that at first make it tricky to get into and sleep in.

Hennessy Hammocks

Hennessy Hammocks are asymmetrical, and you get into it from the bottom. This gives the hammock more stability and the mosquito net and weather flap prevent you from getting in from the sides.

In an asymmetrical hammock, you open the Velcro at the bottom and then slide inside. Once your backend is supported, you lift one leg at a time to the side and left the other leg inside. You finally, then seal the Velcro at the bottom.

You can then sleep on your back or side and withstand a monsoon rain in Thailand and stay snug and dry for months. Individuals who trekked both India and Thailand where torrential rains are the norm during the Monsoon Season have reported this. Here are some other tips and features for you to look at.

You see, sleeping in a hammock outdoors is not very difficult if you hang the hammock correctly and get into it in the ways we have mentioned today and once you get it down. You may want to throughout your bed and sleep outdoors in preference to sleeping inside a house. One student did just that for 18 months. You, may of course, not wish to go to these extremes, but you can get some of the most comfortable sleep you have ever had by sleeping in a hammock in your own backyard.