This one's been a while in the works: trying to do a polyrhythm hybrid with only one hand! The trick here is to remember which poi is closer at which point in the shape so you can aim it accordingly. Cool looking trick but requires a lot of work and accuracy!

techblog364.mp4

By popular demand! Continuing my series of interviews with fascinating people in the poi community with the one and only Marvin Ong. Here, Marvin relates how he got into spinning, what drew him to the community, and how he elected to pursue spinning full time as Master Ong. A true immigrant success story! :)

Visit Marvin on the web at:
http://www.masterongspropshop.com
http://www.facebook.com/grandmasterong

marvinonginterview.mp4

Last week I got tagged in what turned out to be an incredibly badass and informative post by Cory Oliver from Florida. He’d discovered that Amazon has added a feature wherein they will donate .5% of your purchase to the charity of your choice. Currently all the charities they have listed to donate to are those that appear on Guidestar, so regrettably some of my favorites are not there.

I've touched on this topic before, but I wanted to explore it in greater depth by applying it to all the different timing and direction combinations. Tuck turns are a great way to add an additional visual dynamic to reel turns--I highly recommend adding them to your repertoire!

tuckturns2tutorial.mp4

One of those bad habits that nearly all of us develop in our first year of spinning poi is the tendency to focus the poi's movement on the hand and wrist such that when we begin to play with flowers and the like, it becomes difficult to think of the poi being an extension of the hand rather than controlled by it. Here are a series of exercises to being with this type of movement. Most 2D tech poi is highly reliant on the mobility of the arms, so the sooner one trains themselves out of folding the arms against he body, the better!

extensionstutorial.mp4

Triquetra vs pendulum is probably my favorite poi move, but it's kind of a misnomer because the triquetra is really something more like a CAP. With that in mind, I came up with this other CAP and combined it with an extension to create a different move that in some respects inverts elements of triquetra vs pendulum while still including many if not all of the elements of this move.

techblog363.mp4

Meltdowns are a great combination of behind the back (BTB) technique and reel turns that look cool as hell. Here's how you can build up to them piece by piece.

meltdownstutorial.mp4

Man...this video totally started out as something very different indeed ;) I wanted to show off a couple ideas for contact combos I'd been working with, then I wound up with too many of them for a single tech blog...and then Tim Goddard posted his video about tapedeck toroids and it got my creative gears turning. So...here is an interesting hodgepodge of different tech ideas. Enjoy! :)

falltechcomp.mp4

A couple days ago, I posted a message on Facebook asking for suggestions on who I could do a future "Profiles in Poi" video on and Rob "Bluecat" Thorburn replied with a very intriguing breakdown. Rob cited a number of spinners whom he classified as old, middle, and new school poi spinners. I dug the idea, but thought a division into four instead of three groups made more sense.

Atomic weaves have a very intimidating name, but there are ways to perform them that won't break your brain. Here is one such weave that feels midway between a split-time thread the needle and a buzzsaw weave.

atomicweavetutorial.mp4