Nick Woolsey and G posted a video today that featured G doing a crazy kind of hybrid stall I'd never seen before. I got to playing with it and here is a fun pattern that came out of it, switching between CAP patterns with a split buzzsaw flower.

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Last week PoiBoi07 posted a great vid with some fun triquetra and cateye hybrids performed with the static/isolating hand behind the head. Here is the same hybrid as well as a couple others I've seen that utilize a similar approach, including extensions and C-CAPs.

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 This week I'm going back and revisiting a couple ideas from the past couple months to follow up on them both to show progress and where some of those ideas have taken me. First up is the isolated weave: I've had some progress on this both by practicing standing isolations in all four individual positions of my arms during the course of the weave and with a helpful piece of advice from Charlie on switching from one side of my body to the other. Next, the CAP vs static BTH hybrid poiboi07 and I had chatted about a couple months ago.

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 I'm back to drilling isolations in hopes of getting down the elusive isolated weave, but shooting for lower hanging fruit in the form of the iso to lockout combination guys like Nevisoul and Ronan have made famous. I'm specifically working on getting the isolated bit in the middle locked into the iso position like they have to make it really pop.

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Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.

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 First up, the first hoop trick to make it into my tech blog! My friend Katie/Surprise showed my a funky isolation trick that I dug that seemed to have this odd stopping point. Remembering some bits learned from a recent Hoop Path workshop, I realized a body can keep the hoop constantly in motion by jumping one's grip. The demo here is terrible--it's with my old hoop, which weighs a ton. Nonetheless, I swear this one is doable (incidentally, if any hoopers out there know what it's called, please drop a line in my comment box).

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poiboi07 posted another sweet tech blog and I'm cribbing the first trick shamelessly from him. It's a pendulum vs. CAP hybrid that one then uses to perform a Yuta-style horizontal stall around either in a complete circle or 180 degrees. I'm finding it's a fun way to do an almost weave style turn back and forth and have added a vertical stall shift to the mix, making it an easy move to switch around in all three planes.

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Thanks to Insignia's excellent post on hybrids, I've spent the past week reexamining the concept and working through some of the logical conundrums it presents. I find the idea of a hybrid being "a combination of two driving styles" problematic because I can't find a definition for driving style that isn't loose enough that potentially any type of movement could be considered a driving style. I think there is a simpler way to define them and it is presented here. Please please send me feedback on this one--let me know if this definition makes sense.

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Based upon feedback last week, includes a clarification of what constitutes a hybrid vs. an antibrid, triangle antispin flower antibrid and cateye/isolation antibrid, an atomic weave, and a cool little triangle antispin flower pattern Sean Stogner and I worked out over the weekend.

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