Isolations are an essential ingredient for hybrids and just plain look cool. Here's a couple of my favorite drills for getting isolations down.

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A follow-up to last week's poi math video. This one tells us how to determine the size of the hand path for poi when we're graphing out patterns using parametric equations. Includes properties of wavelength and amplitude among other nifty math concepts.

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This past week, Insignia posted a note to Facebook trying to map out all hybrids by matching up all the driving styles he knew of: isolation, extension, cateye, antispin, pendulum, and CAP and going through them one-by-one till he'd identified all the combinations possible between them. Here is a demo of all the hybrids he listed (though I just realized I forgot cateye vs. CAP--whoops). Some of these have an interesting aesthetic value to them while some are just an utter pain in the ass.

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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.

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.

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Based upon responses from Insignia and Alien Jon, here are some additional tricks to add to the opposite timing CAPs I have in my repertoire. Needless to say, I am still loving all the possibilities these tricks open up for playing with butterflies...they're close to being in flow but not 100% there yet. I'm also realizing these patterns lead back to some of the butterfly extensions Zan was playing with in the Arizona transmission video.

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My laptop was in the shop last week and I wish I could show an astonishing amount of progress for the past two weeks, but I'm still slowly trudging through my isolation drills in the hopes of eventually mastering them. The mercedes/CAP combo from two weeks ago has also been at the forefront of my tinkering with turns for the CAP pattern now being a major emphasis. Finally, I continue to practice my buzzsaw flowers to be able to master switching between my dominant and non-dominant hands leading.

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I've come down with Bronchitis this week, so I've been unable to practice much...what I have been able to practice has primarily been expanding my isolation drills to be able to move around in every position I can think of wanting to do an isolation from. Aside from that I've been working on doing split-time butterfly flowers in inverted planes and discovered that a great side effect of practicing them is that my antispin buzzsaw flowers on my non-dominant side are finally starting to shape-up.

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More isolation exercises this week--mostly in wallplane. Also a more in-depth examination of the 1.5 pattern from last week and how to turn it into a turn.

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Working my way through the four basic isolation vs. extension patterns--cateye patterns to come next. Revisiting turning with the polyrhythm trifoil hybrid, antispin buzzsaw flowers/fountains, and some sloppy attempts at hyperloops.

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