My Experiences with Nerve Armor

I was hesitant to write this due to a lot of our community culture around nerve damage and weakness in bottoms but I think that it's important that I share these experiences.

I recently purchased Nerve Armor from Fantasies in Leather. For those of you unfamiliar with this product, it is an arm guard that made of hardened leather that covers they upper arm in an attempt to prevent nerve compression (and to a lesser degree, circulation issues). I have only good things to say about the company and their customer service. They were very communicative throughout the process and took very good care to make sure that I got my armor made to my specifications.

Each set of nerve armor is custom made to the bottom ordering it. This is both great and terrible at the same time. It's great because the nerve armor is mine and fits my body like a glove. It's annoying because I can't lend it to friends to have them test it out for themselves or put it on my bottoms that have frequent arm issues. But overall, I think I'm happy that it's custom to me.

So the point of this post is to record my experiences with tips and tricks and things that I have learned as I've used it.

The first night did not go well. The armor pinched my inner arm in a terrible way, to the point where I stopped the scene and ended up sobbing out of anger and frustration that it didn't seem to work. After talking with Nothrin, we decided that there might be a learning curve to figure out how to best make they work with my body. I can say that even with this terrible feeling, it was an immediate difference in how my nerves and circulation felt. So even that night, we concluded that the nerve armor did its job. Really the problem that needed to be solved was the pinching. It wasn't just a little pinch either. I had bruises for almost a week because of the pinching. That night we tried putting bondage tape around the part where the leather overlapped. It was somewhat successful but very ugly and we had the problem of it moving around.

The second night was better. We decided to try pre-wrap underneath the nerve armor. That's the stuff that athletic trainers put under athletic tape to keep it from sticking to the arm hair. This 100% solved the pinching problem. And it solved a problem that I didn't even notice was happening, the armor was moving on my arm. The pre-wrap added enough friction to the inside of the nerve armor and it stopped moving around (also helping to stop the pinching). We also discovered that the orientation of the armor is very important. There is a lip on the top of each piece that is designed to keep the rope from slipping off. I had been putting the lip on the direct outside of my arm. Having solved the pinching problem, we started loading my arms and found that with the lip pointing out from my arm, the rope slid up on the from part of the armor onto my skin. While not uncomfortable, this was disconcerting because the armor functions by keeping the rope off the arms entirely. I was also having a problem with the nerve armor digging into my ribs from the inside of my arms while in the TK position. It was unbearable but it definitely was uncomfortable. By moving the lip from pointing outward on my arm to pointing forward, we seem to have solved both of these problems with one adjustment.