I've done a lot of tutorials now on moves for beginners, but this is something that I think is equally if not more important: developing plane control. You'll never learn a move that doesn't require it and there will never come a time when you don't need to practice them. Here are three drills to help you get down your plane control and make your tricks that much prettier.

planecontroltutorial.mp4

These are just a few fun pendulum-based moves I was working with over the weekend, including two based on patterns learned from Ronan at the Tahoe Flow Festival in September.

techblog299.mp4

Following up on last week's video of the pentagram inversion, here's a similar move that's Zan's Diamond as a toroid and a couple fun combos that can be used with it. Plus which I'm playing around a bit with my format--tell me what you think!

techblog298.mp4

It took me a very long time to learn airwraps--the usual wisdom, that when you wrap up a pair poi and they automatically unwrap never really worked for me. Even more confusing to me was how some folks could wrap their poi both ways. I'd tried doing it in an introverted kind of place and had an epically hard time of it.

techblog297.mp4

Following up on some of the threads from #293, here's a few weave-based moves switched into an atomic context with vertical vs horizontal planes. Funny thing: the inversion in atomics utilizes a tangle arrangement whereas these weaves utilize an atom arrangement--in other words, they possess opposite polarities, to borrow a term from Tracy Wilhelm.

techblog295.mp4

Any time two planes overlap (read: are not parallel), they overlap in one of four different ways: cranes, butterflies, atoms, or tangles. In the first three arrangements, it's possible to keep the poi rotating without interfering with each other. I'm pretty sure that any and all tangles result from the final atom shape. Here's a handy-dandy diagram that breaks this down in an easy-to-read fashion: http://www.drexfactor.com/sites/default/files/atomicclashes.jpg

techblog294.mp4

After learning both the split opposites and split same direction inversions, it dawned on me that a body could think of these as being different projections of a split-L 3D shape. If this is the case, one could open up into a horizontal versus vertical atomic shape and produce the shape in this video above--there are many more a-coming! :)

techblog293.mp4

Isolations are an essential ingredient for hybrids and just plain look cool. Here's a couple of my favorite drills for getting isolations down.

isolationstutorial.mp4

This is a meteor-inspired move from the glowsticking community. Marvin Ong was the first to show it to me and both Kate McCoy and Noel Yee have done some cool expansions on this idea. I'd had a rough time learning how to do it because my one-handed poi isn't terribly good, but I'd come up with at least one trick that had made it easier. Here's how I made it work for myself.

techblog292.mp4

Corkscrews are usually the first floor plane move that many poi spinners learn. It's fundamentally a chase move with the hands moving up and down the body while the poi rotate in a horizontal plane. Here are a few tricks on how to get down this trick.

corkscrewtutorial.mp4