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

A couple updates from moves of the past week: a quarter-time float out of the now-familiar stall-switch pattern and learning how to plane-shift in same direction. This leads to an atomic weave performed in diagonal planes, which I demo a variant of the Notcoleman3 in here. Finally, a couple thoughts on "hard" versus "soft" transitions based upon charlicopter's 9-square poi theory videos. There is definitely some potential here and I like the idea of moving between grids as well as adding pendulums into the mix.

techblog57.mp4

So I know there's been comparatively few updates recently and this has been especially frustrating given that some updates have disappeared in the past couple days as I've tried to work out why my blogger account has stopped feeding videos to my iTunes feed.

At Wildfire, Charlie and I worked through all the four compass points of a cateye and worked out the stalls that transitioned out of each point--there is some crossover here with the Yuta stalls I was playing with two weeks ago. The thing that's got my brain burning (and unfortunately I haven't had shit for time to play with them) is elliptical CAP patterns of the type Zan is showing off in the Encyclo-Poi-Dia 2. My initial breakdown of this move turned out to be incorrect, so I'll be working out the proper iterations of it in the coming week.

techblog39.mp4

More fun with Yuta stalls! Specifically, it turns out that they work just as well with floats as they do with top and bottom stalls, opening the door to doing them in tandem with isolations, extensions, hybrids and cateyes. Also, some more footwork and danciness inspired by nightanddaydance's excellent response to my last blog. Had to trim a couple tricks out to keep it under 10 minutes, but they should be making an appearance in a later blog.

techblog37.mp4