Behind the head tricks come in a couple flavors: those that are standard tricks with a behind the head flavor and those that are only meant to be behind the head. Here is a series of drills that start to build up this capability and a couple moves to begin practicing once they begin to feel normal. Lots of great stuff that comes out of this!

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Something I spotted in a video of Ted Petrosky made me think of this--he did a cool body tracer around his shoulders (if memory serves, I've seen Michael Parisi doing the same tracer) and it occurred to me that the top part could be combined with a C-CAP faced downward to create a cool variant on BTH static vs CAP.

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A nifty idea picked up from Conway Jennings when he was last in DC--switching the direction of a CAP vs static spin BTH to get different antibrid combinations. It creates the same sort of relationship between hand and poi that CAP vs pendulum does, but with a cool BTH element.

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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.

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Kind of a fun brain/kinesthetic workout that came out of a trick I've seen G and Ronan do wherein they play 4-petal antispin against a static spin to create hybrid moments at either side of the body. I took that same idea to a vertical place to start, and then placed the top position behind the head to add a body tracer flavor to the overall movement. Don't know if it has any good performance applications but it definitely gives the brain something to chew on :)

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Kris Valles sent me a request a couple months ago for a tutorial on how to do this move out of a Nicky Evers video. It's not terribly hard, but it does teach some nifty body mechanics. It also results in one hell of a shitty night if you get motion sickness from it as I did ;)

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A bunch of random combos I've been working on in the past couple months. The stacking stuff was based upon playing with the idea of leash tracing with the head or hand--something that came out of a move Charlie showed me at Fall WF last year, as well as maintaining right angles in the orientation of the poi to each other. The second stacking combo is very similar to the first, but there's a small difference in the timing that makes the difference between the tracing and actually having a moment where the right angle is seen in full relief.

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More STSD hybridy goodness! This time I'm taking the concept of an 8-step CAP with it a little more literally and utilizing the space created by CAP vs BTH static to take the CAP hand around in an 8-step pattern while maintaining the STSD synchronization with the BTH hand.

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My last day at Firedrums I got in a one-on-one geeking session with Yuta and he showed me this lovely number. It's funky because it utilizes a type of spinning that we usually train ourselves out of very early on as poi spinners--same time same direction. Yuta's been playing with using this to create funky hybrid flowers similar to the type that Cyrille does with split-time same direction. This also evidently is where the static spin BTH vs CAP hybrid comes from. Enjoy!

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I've spent a bunch of time playing with the CAP vs BTH static spin hybrid this past week and realizing the transitions in and out of it are vastly easier than I thought. In fact, one can make a very cool and clean looking transition from either extension or antispin in the direction of the poi straight into this combo and back out. In particular, I like the way this works with opposites split-time.

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