The second in my transition tools series. This week we're talking about stalls--when you stop the poi's momentum and have the ability to reverse the direction of the poi if you want. Included here is a breakdown of how stalls work. Yay charts! :D

stalltutorial.mp4

Part 1 of transition tools--tricks you can use to switch between other tricks! This is on pendulums and 1.5s. Pendulums work by not allowing the poi to complete a circle and because of that they switch direction whenever they reach the height of their arc. One move that makes use of this phenomenon is the 1.5 beat weave and in this video I demo both how to learn the 1.5 beat weave and how to use it to switch to other moves.

pendulumstutorial.mp4

Taking threads from the past three weeks worth of videos: how to chain together the forwards weave, reverse weave, windmill, and weave turn together into a fountain variant that has some body tracer elements. This move can be done either inspin or antispin and sets up a lot of great moves down the line.

4beatfountain.mp4

Windmills are a fun variant on two-beat weaves that you do around your head. They're great for level-changing among other things. He's the best technique I know for learning them--it also gives you some of the basic motor skills that go into a lot of other moves around the head.

windmilltutorial.mp4

This is a tutorial on how to take some of the tricks we used last week in creating our forwards 3-beat weave and apply them to learning the same trick in reverse. As an added bonus, included are steps to learning how to turn between forwards and reverse 3-beat weaves. A friend of mine had pointed out that frequently the reverse 3-beat can be as difficult to learn as the forwards one because one has to switch around the arrangement of pieces in a way that seems almost upside-down.

rev3beatweave.mp4

There have to be a million tutorials on how to do this move, but this past weekend in Atlanta I had a breakthrough teaching a student that I wanted to share with you all. I really hate teaching the 3-beat weave because I think that for a "beginner" move it's quite complex and really requires a large amount of physical coordination. Nevertheless, here are two approaches to learning it that I've found to be effective. Incidentally, I'm sorry about the poor focus--I didn't realize there was an issue till I'd gotten the footage home to edit :-P

3beatweave.mp4

This week we're tackling the Mt. Everest of inspin flowers: split time same direction. We'll use a similar approach to building this flower that we have in the other videos, but split-time variants require a bit more kinesthetic difficulty than any of the same time variations, so the road there is likely to be a little bit longer and take a bit more work. Next week: split-time opposites!

flowerspt3.mp4

Last week we covered how to train your muscle memory for proper petal placement in 4-petal inspin flowers. This week we're covering how to then perform 4-petal inspin flowers with both hands in same time same direction and same time opposites. The procedure here is very similar to the one we used last week, but we will have to resort to a couple tricks to achieve proper poi and hand placement.

flowerspt2.mp4

The experiment continues! This is a series on how to do poi flowers. This week we're starting with basic inspin flower petal placement--how to train your body to find the four compass points of a 4-petal inspin and how to create both 2-petal and 4-petal flowers. Next week we'll talk about how to use both hands to create flowers together.

flowerspt1.mp4

This week we go through the basic hip reel turn with our poi in same time, same direction. This teaches a very important concept in poi: when we turn, it appears the direction of poi rotation changes relative to us. Next week we'll go through hip reels in other timing and direction combinations.

turnspt2.mp4