This was totally one of those "duh" moments where I spotted other folks doing a particular trick and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get my hands to do it. But going the long way round actually turned out to be the better option because it helped me conceptualize how one could approach--here's how you can stagger stalls in a split-time place to produce a variety of nifty moves, including some that strongly resemble stall chasers and horizontal stacks.

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Some of my earliest tech blogs were on 1.5s and figuring out all the different types of them. A recent class from Ronan reminded me of some of this work and specifically a few ideas in them that I'd gotten wrong ;) Here is Ronan's approach to thinking about 1.5s and how timing direction work with them.

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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.

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At the Tahoe Flow Festival, Leo showed me this nifty vertical stack that I quickly realized could be used to stack up and down each side of the body. It requires some deft timing, but has a really unique effect.

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A few months back, Alex Powell from the Vulcan published an interesting treatise on his approach to toroids. There's been a second school of thought that's come out of meetings at Wildfire and other East Coast fire events and this is my best attempt to consolidate a lot of the thinking on this type of spinning and make it ready for the masses.

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At Burning Man this year, Arashi took me through his approach to spinning in atomics. It took a couple hours, but ultimately I came to understand it was a system with significant differences to other 3D systems I was familiar with--most notably with Maiki Nope's 3D timing and direction system. Here's a brief encapsulation of the idea.

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A few weeks ago, Alex Powell uploaded a great video of some interesting hybrids utilizing toroids in an atomic configuration. I started working on these same hybrids in other timing and direction combinations as well as some pendulum-based toroid hybrids after taking a pendulums class from Ronan in Tahoe. Here are the results.

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At long last--I know how to lovelace! Lovelacing is an trick related to inversions that Ky Lee from Atlanta specializes in. Several times I've tried to learn it from him, but what finally made it click was a video Kory San posted on the topic. Here is an explanation of how it works and how to go about getting into it.

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Based upon a debate currently going on on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook, here are some ruminations on weaves and inversions. If we think of weaves as being specific shapes that can be divorced from the movements of the body, there are a lot of expressions of a three-beat weave. Here I demonstrate one that shares some characteristics with inversions.

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The first bit of Burning Man wrap up! This is a nifty no-beat throw Ted Petrosky was playing with one day in Vulcantown that sets up a hand switch.

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