Having problems getting your stalls down? Here's the first part of a workout, that if you can master it will give you access to nearly any stall you could possibly want to play with. It bears some resemblance to Yuta's 8 stall theory but applies to every timing and direction combination.

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Here's a move I demoed in an Odds and Ends video a couple months ago, but was also a huge hit at Burning Man. The idea is to take something that is like a stall chaser and introduce both right angles and pendulum stalls into the mix. This essentially turns the move into a series of stalls done in staggered timing and theoretically also offers a great transition between horizontal stacks and vertical stacks.

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At Burning Man, Noel showed me this nifty combo that included elements of a number of different tricks that have showed up on this blog in the past few months and filled in a couple of the gaps between them in some very creative ways. This combo involves doing a pair of inspin vs antispin stalls that one then transforms into a hybrid before using the resulting alignment to create a horizontal stack. Tricky, but fun!

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Sorry about the audio quality! Last week Poiboi uploaded a video of a performance he did in Israel that was pretty kickass and also seemed to be a kind of an update on a performance he did earlier in the year at EJC. One of the changes he did was changing a switch from CAP vs pendulum to quarter-time stalls to CAP vs pendulum going the other way to using quarter-time floats as the transition.

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 First up, a tip last week from a commenter on this blog gave me a critical piece of the puzzle for the isolated weave. It's not perfect, but it's at least recognizable as what it is now. Next, based upon the concept of doing a plane-bent "asterisk" like G does, at a recent spin jam it was suggested that one could think of the radiating spokes as behaving like the petals in flowers, so here are examples of two timing and direction combinations of this idea.

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 First up, the first hoop trick to make it into my tech blog! My friend Katie/Surprise showed my a funky isolation trick that I dug that seemed to have this odd stopping point. Remembering some bits learned from a recent Hoop Path workshop, I realized a body can keep the hoop constantly in motion by jumping one's grip. The demo here is terrible--it's with my old hoop, which weighs a ton. Nonetheless, I swear this one is doable (incidentally, if any hoopers out there know what it's called, please drop a line in my comment box).

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This past week, Zan posted a great video on diagonal planes that included an exercise that does an amazing job of cleaning up diagonals--seriously, well done :) Playing with diagonals has me thinking about having planes offset by degree differences other than 0, 90 or 180, and here is an example of plane switching between planes at are offset by degrees based in 3 or 5 rather than 4. Next, over the weekend, Chris Rovo showed me a pattern he'd been working on wherein an atomic flower switches to atomic weave and over to another atomic flower.

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This past week, Alien Jon posted a tech blog featuring a funky approach to creating compound circles that bears some similarities to Nick Woolsey's concept of no-beat windmills and how they relate to poi. As I've been playing with it, I've found it's also a funky way to create polyrhythm hybrids.

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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.

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A quick break from the past two weeks' theory-heavy blogs. Here are a couple random moves I've been working on in the interrim that I wanted to show off. First is drilling my way through a type of plane-bending that G is now famous for--switching between inswing linear isolations (they could also be CAPs) and horizontal linear isolations. Next are some exotic pendulum stalls I picked up from watching a recent Ronan video. I'm a huge fan of these types of stalls and keep finding new applications for them.

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