Kind of random, I know, but I've spent the past few months working out all the different same direction phasings for antispin pentagrams. The end goal here is to get them down in toroids, but I figured starting here might be the low hanging fruit :) The funny thing is that all these phasings are really reflections of each other. If you think of each point skipped has having a number value to it, then 1 and 4 are identical save for the hand that is leading through the pattern. Likewise, 2 and 3 are the same except that the positions of the hands are reversed in each increment.

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CAPs are a great transitional move that can be used to spice up hybrids or even just on their own. They used to be considered pretty technical, but I've seen a lot of people nail them within their first year of spinning. This is the method I've seen most often succeed for teaching beginner or intermediate spinners how to do them and it's inspired by a method for teaching triquetras I saw in an old Alien Jon video.

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Back at FLAME Festival in Georgia, Kory San and I had an interesting conversation after watching some of Ted Petrosky's body tracers. We realized that many of the body tracers he was performing could also be considered hybrids and we wondered then whether all hybrids that mashed up inspin and antispin flowers would have body tracer corollaries.

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Back at FLAME Festival in Georgia, Kory San and I had an interesting conversation after watching some of Ted Petrosky's body tracers. We realized that many of the body tracers he was performing could also be considered hybrids and we wondered then whether all hybrids that mashed up inspin and antispin flowers would have body tracer corollaries.

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By request! How to turn with antispin flowers! It's not as hard as you'd think--if you've done my tutorials on basic turns with poi you'll be right at home as you work up to this type of trick. You're basically looking to execute a tic-tac and then perform a petal in between each one. Expand out the size of your hand path and voila! You get turns with antispins :)

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H/T to Thomas Johannson for this one, too! Thomas took the snaking fountain I'd worked up a few weeks ago and took it into a split opposites place. Cool as this was, I also realized it bore some strong similarities to a pattern I've seen Alien Jon do on occasion as well.

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This comes from a FLAME challenge: Gina McGrath wanted to see a pentagram vs 2-petal inspin hybrid and Mike Parisi was the first to come up with a solution. I at first thought it was cheating because the hands oscillated between split and same time opposites but then realized what was actually happening was that both the patterns were completing simultaneously. Because the pentagram is a 1.5 downbeat move, it forces the pattern into this type of polyrhythm hand use. That set up a whole lot of exploration for different approaches to polyrhythms.

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The follow-up to my vid on Zan's diamond in all the different timing and direction combinations and polyrhythm hybrids. Here I demo all the monorhythm/even beat hybrids for Zan's diamond and discuss third-order CAPs, including the S-CAP and how it can work inside the Zan's diamond algorithm.

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Do all even beat hybrids have an accompanying body tracer? That's the question I posed after playing around with some of the body tracers Ted Petrosky taught in his workshop on the same topic at FLAME Festival. After tweaking one of the tracers he'd taught just slightly, I realized it was very similar to a body tracer I'd learned from Thomas "Nevisoul" Johansson. The original tracer he'd taught me turned out to also function as a 4-petal antispin vs 2-petal inspin hybrid.

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Starting with a crosser that unwraps and rewraps via antispin and extension, this trick involves essentially freezing one of the hands on the non-native shoulder to force the other hand to do all the work. In keeping the timing and direction consistent, the result is a body tracer that actually cycles through different positions of an archer weave.

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