Giants are one of those moves that take you out of keeping your hands still and your poi moving and set you up for extensions and flowers, which are essential to many intermediate moves. Here are a few basic exercises that can help these moves make a little more sense. That and they take up quite a lot of room, so they look really cool :)

giantstutorial.mp4

In editing Keith Marshall's portion of the Top 10 of 2012 video, I spotted him performing this nifty variant on a no-beat throw weave that utilizes antispin to get the toss from point A to point B and thought it would make for an excellent tech blog! The key to getting this down is to flick the handle up like it's an isolated toss when the under hand comes around to make its throw.

techblog314.mp4

The archer weave is a fun embellishment for the three-beat weave that leads directly into body tracing and a number of other fun techniques. When I first tried to learn it, I was baffled at how it could work. Here is an easy way to break it down so that you can see what makes this move tick.

archerweavetutorial.mp4

An interesting property of wall plane insides that Alien Jon showed to me while I was in Boulder for Christmas: the arms analog to an airwrap is a 4-beat windmill or watermill and in theory this is just a truncated version of a hyperloop/inversion. Jon pointed out to me, though, that when spinning clockwise with the crosspoint pointed down (as it would be in an airwrap), the only watermill one has access to in wall plane has the left hand leading.

techblog313.mp4

Performing an introverted weave forces the planes into an atomic configuration, but it got me to wonder if one had the option of choosing what the atomic configuration would be. I went ahead and tried to produce a weave analogous to an introverted weave but in a H vs V  (horizontal versus verticale) arrangement rather than V vs V (vertical versus vertical). The result not only worked wonderfully, but also demonstrated there are two variants on this move: one for each direction the horizontal poi can rotate.

techblog312.mp4

While on the surface not terribly different from a thread the needle in same time, a thread the needle in split-time (also called split-time opposites) produces a small problem for the performer in that it doesn't present a dominant hand until one hand is crossed over the other. Thus, to perform this move successfully is to switch between positions in which the hands are crossed over each other rather than simply on top of each other as in same time.

stttntutorial.mp4

The past few weeks I've played around with a lot of toroids and inversions on this tech blog--here are some ways to work between some of the patterns we've played with. Arashi likes to think of there being harmonics that share specific points within a circle. You can simplify this concept slightly more and just say that there are some vertical planes and horizontal planes and each represent opportunities to bend between each other.

techblog311.mp4

Charlie had a nifty way of looking at what we do in weaves and inversions in terms of creating a series of three lanes and how they interact with the body. You can see his full breakdown on Poi Theory, but this is my own interpretation inspired by it: namely I think you have to see the body as a static object around which you move the lanes. Here are a couple concrete examples of this idea in action.

techblog309.mp4

Wraps are a nifty tool for switching directions and all-around looking cool that poi borrows from the glowsticking and nunchukus worlds. Here are some basics as to how they can be performed and what they can be wrapped around to create nifty effects your audience will dig!

wrapstutorial.mp4

Graph theory is surprisingly integral to a lot of patterns that we play with--essentially any time you're dealing with a number of points you're trying to hit in a given sequence and repeat them, you're using graph theory to solve the problem. Here's a little bit of history as to how graph theory came to be and some helpful hints that may help you solve those pesky poi patterns. :)

techblog308.mp4