DrexFactor Poi Blog

Drex and Thomas spin poi in the park

One cold January afternoon, Drex and Thomas took to Malcolm X park in Washington DC to play poi and meteor and Mount Pleasant will never be the same again ;)

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Video Tech Blog #17: Isolation intensive

I've officially gotten fed-up with my sloppy isolations and have begun what I'm sure will be a very long process of cleaning them up properly. I've dug up every iso exercise I could find, invented a couple of my own, and have been practicing them daily. Beyond that I've been working on getting both hands to do cateyes in all the different primary motion categories--this one, too, is going to take a while. The one thing I do have that looks pretty is an interesting 1.5 combo Lucas from Richmond cooked up that is inspired by double-staff spinning.

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Sean, Tash, and Deb spin in the park

New Year's Day! We celebrate by going to the park and spinning toys in negative-degree weather.

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Tash Kouri hooping at Taboo on New Year's Eve

Tash Kouri doing a fire hoop routine at a New Year's Eve party at Taboo in Brooklyn.

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Video Tech Blog #16: Polishing cateye, buzzsaw flower

Nothing new this week, just polishing tricks I've shown in previous video blogs. I'm trying harder to get the nice circular pattern with the hand in the horizontal cateye and working on being able to do it both directions. Plus I've put a lot of practice into the unit circle grid--it's flowing better but still needs work. Finally, my buzzsaw fountains are getting cleaner and I'm getting better at switching between standard, antispin, and split-time butterfly variants. Happy holidays, all!

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Video Tech Blog #15: Horizontal Cateye

Finally! After months of practice I can demo a horizontal cateye! At least, I think I can. At points it looks suspiciously like a linear extension, though when I practiced it in the mirror I could definitely see my hand trace a circle. Maybe it's a function of the low angle? At any rate, here's some work with unit circles inspired by a video made by Noel based upon Alien Jon and Arashi's unit circle concepts. View the vid that helped me crack this here:

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Video Tech Blog #14: unit circle hybrid turns

I've spent most of the past week doing turning drills with unit circle hybrids, mapping out all four combinations of iso vs extension hybrids. Also--my hyperloops are still ugly, but I'm getting the exit on some of them now.

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Video Tech Blog #13: more 1.5 theory, buzzsaw flowers

I think I was mistaken on my categorization of the 1.5 pattern from last week--nonetheless here are some interesting patterns that came from it. Plus: more buzzsaw flower patterns--this time with hands going split-time opposites, more hybrid practice, and patterns with both hands doing trifoil flowers.

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Video Tech Blog #12: 1.5 theory, hybrid practice, buzzsaw flower inversion

The 1.5 pattern in Mireneye's video a few weeks ago gave me a devil of a time and now I think I know why--I think it's a different type of circle-pendulum combo. Here's some theory as to what I think the difference is as well as demonstrating the two in a variety of positions and a couple really odd patterns this experimentation led me to. Plus an update on the hybrid practice technique from last week and I start to play with inversions.

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Video Tech Blog #11: Buzzsaw flowers, hybrids, 1.5s

Playing around with asymmetrical buzzsaw flower variations, tips from Alien Jon on how to practice unit circle hybrids, and a 1.5 variation from Mireneye's recent tech poi vid.

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