beginner

Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Wraps

Wraps are a nifty tool for switching directions and all-around looking cool that poi borrows from the glowsticking and nunchukus worlds. Here are some basics as to how they can be performed and what they can be wrapped around to create nifty effects your audience will dig!

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: The stall workout part 2

Part 2 of the stall workout series! This time we'll be going through all the antispin stalls, which wind up being different because the stall goes through your body core rather than around it.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: The stall workout part 1

Having problems getting your stalls down? Here's the first part of a workout, that if you can master it will give you access to nearly any stall you could possibly want to play with. It bears some resemblance to Yuta's 8 stall theory but applies to every timing and direction combination.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: 5-beat weaves

5-beat weaves are an occasionally-helpful tool to add to your weave belt but they do involve retraining your arms somewhat how to perform a weave. Here's a step-by-step of how you can do this.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Plane Control

I've done a lot of tutorials now on moves for beginners, but this is something that I think is equally if not more important: developing plane control. You'll never learn a move that doesn't require it and there will never come a time when you don't need to practice them. Here are three drills to help you get down your plane control and make your tricks that much prettier.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: 4-beat thread the needle

Here's two different approaches to 4-beat thread the needles. The first is to do what I'd refer to as the "reach around" 4-beat wherein you wrap your hands around each other. The second is much more akin to body tracing wherein the extra beat puts the poi behind your body.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Isolations

Isolations are an essential ingredient for hybrids and just plain look cool. Here's a couple of my favorite drills for getting isolations down.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Corkscrews

Corkscrews are usually the first floor plane move that many poi spinners learn. It's fundamentally a chase move with the hands moving up and down the body while the poi rotate in a horizontal plane. Here are a few tricks on how to get down this trick.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Behind the Back part 2

Last week we worked out some basic exercises to acclimate the body to behind the back spinning--this week we'll work on the behind the back weave. Fundamentally this weave is identical to the standard three-beat weave but requires a little bit of practice to adapt to a behind the back position. Here are a couple exercises to get you there.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Behind the Back part 1

Behind the back tricks are one of those bellwethers that can take you from basic to intermediate spinning, but it can be a huge kinesthetic challenge to get to a point where these types of tricks can feel stable and in control. This week we'll start off with some basic exercises to teach control of behind the back movements before playing with behind the back weaves next week and meltdowns the week after.

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