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

One of those things that came out of the final days of the Spring festival tour, a funny little curiosity that Keith promptly pronounced his favorite trick I'd done in the past few months. It's actually Mel's old stacking trick, but made out of 2-petal inspin flowers rather than repeated stalls. Part of the benefit there is that it's easy to switch directions with it.

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Mashing up the isobend-4 toroid with all the even-petalled flowers, here are all timing and direction combinations, including both wheel and wall plane together opposites. For the background on isobend toroids and how they relate to antibend and probend, check out this video here: http://youtu.be/IrS-NdpnEHo

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If you've got your basic reel turns down, tuck turns are an easy next step that can add an additional level of visual immediacy to your turns. They're also the first example many of us encounter of a type of movement that plays a huge part in later moves called body tracing.

tuckturnstutorial.mp4

The tradition continues! Got outside to get some flow on and try out some new ideas on MLK Day in Dupont Circle here in DC.

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Branching out a little bit! Learning antispin flowers with a hoop is similar to how one can learn them with poi. Here's a way to learn both 3 and 4-petal antispin flowers while doing off the body hoop.

antispinhooptutorial.mp4

I'm wrapping up the poi flower series with this vid on antispin. Antispin could really be its own video series entirely, so I'm just giving a couple different approaches to creating antispin petals in this video and letting people take the exercises used in the previous videos in this series to extrapolate the different timing and direction combinations. If you'd like to see a full series on antispin, please let me know!

flowerspt5.mp4

This week we're following on the heels of last week's lesson on split-time same direction flowers with some split-time opposite flowers. The good news is that if you got the split-time same direction flower down, this one is considerably easier.

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Last week we covered how to train your muscle memory for proper petal placement in 4-petal inspin flowers. This week we're covering how to then perform 4-petal inspin flowers with both hands in same time same direction and same time opposites. The procedure here is very similar to the one we used last week, but we will have to resort to a couple tricks to achieve proper poi and hand placement.

flowerspt2.mp4

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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