Under the legs tricks tend to pass in and out of vogue, but the underlying concept has a lot in common with the reel turns we've played with before. Here are a couple basic exercises to get the basic elements down.

utltutorial.mp4

In the final installment of this behind the back series, we'll tackle the meltdown! Meltdowns are a move in which one rapidly wraps the poi around their back, unwraps them, and then rewraps them going the other direction to create a rapid and exciting move. Here's how to build them up piece by piece.

btbpart3.mp4

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.

btbpart2.mp4

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.

btbpart1.mp4

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.

tutorialccaps.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

This week we're following on the heels of last week's lesson on split-time same direction flowers with some split-time opposite flowers. The good news is that if you got the split-time same direction flower down, this one is considerably easier.

flowerspt4.mp4

Over the weekend, my beloved Flip was stolen from me, so I took it as an opportunity to go try out other cameras in its class to find out which was the best for a poi video blogger to play with. The cameras I compared were the Kodak Playsport (I goofed in the video and referred to it as a Playshare), the Flip HD, and the Sony Bloggie. There's a lot of reviews of these cameras out there, but I thought it would be interesting to approach them from the perspective of a poi spinner rather than the average reviewer.

techblog186.mp4

I realized I had failed to mark a milestone in April and the opportunity came up today to shoot some video. Nothing fancy here--just a single take of tech flow with a hilarious mashup in the background. Here's to 4 years of doing what I love :)

A couple people have asked about the song. It's from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kspPE9E1yGM

4years.mp4

Here is a nifty tunneling round Noel and Jonah from Ohio did on the last night of FLAME Festival. Jonah is rocking out some mini doubles and doing some wicked cool stuff with them. I so wanted to see more of this :)

noeljonahflamefestival2011.mp4