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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #286: Leo's vertical stack

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #285: Toroids--the East Coast Method

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #284: Arashi's atomics

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #283: Toroid hybrids

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #282: Lovelacing

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #281: Exotic inversions and crossovers

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #280: Hand switching in 1.5 no-beat throws

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #279: Cateye stall chases

The last day of Wildfire, Richard Cranium showed me a move he was working on, integrating cateyes into a stall chaser. Upon viewing the move, I thought the cateyes were looking more like inspin petals and tried to come up with a different approach to integrating cateyes into stall chasers. The result was less a chase move and a little more like a quarter time chase, but I do like the overall effect.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #278: Right angle point isolation stacking

Last light I was playing with right-angle stalls and found a nifty way to switch which was the active side of the pattern with a point isolation held at 90 degrees. As Natan pointed out after recording, this also possesses some stacking properties.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #277: forearm roll shoulder transfer

I've been playing around with a lot of single poi manipulations of late and kept finding myself holding both ends of the poi and not knowing what to do with it. This trick came out of trying to find more options for this position. If you can do forearm transfers straight back and forth, this move is a great way to break them up.

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