As promised: here is a breakdown of how to perform a split-opposites inversion in wheel plane. It's helpful to think of it as the path of the inversion being tilted up and around so that the rules we're used to get reversed for the hand that is going backwards.

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Here's a fun game I came up with the other day to help solidify one's command of timing and direction: put on your favorite piece of music and alternate 8-counts. On the odd 8-counts, you do whatever moves in that timing and direction suit you and on the even 8-counts you freeze in place and maintain timing and direction no matter where your hands land. Fun challenge!

tanddgametutorial.mp4

This is an update on a previous video. Originally I thought that inversions differed from tangles in that they could be entered into from either a tangle or an atom (clash or mesh), but it turns out they can be entered into from any atom. There are stack and crane atom-based inversions as well.

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This is one of those tricks I've seen and lusted after for the past year--I finally had the chance to put in some concerted work on it and it wound up not being as hard as I feared. The most important insight when it comes to this move is realizing that it's essentially a body tracer performed as a contact trick. Once you've got that part down, the rest fits together easily.

techblog317.mp4

 It was requested over a year ago, but here is a video of some good ways to warm up and condition oneself before spinning. A lot of this is full-body intensive but the shoulder exercise at the end really will help develop the ability to perform flowers for long periods without fatigue.

warmupstutorial.mp4

The confluence of a lot of work in the past few months--here is a systematized method for learning and drilling inversions that covers all wall and wheel plane inversions as well as all the atomic orientations you can get out of a base-8 system of orientation.

techblog316.mp4

Giants are one of those moves that take you out of keeping your hands still and your poi moving and set you up for extensions and flowers, which are essential to many intermediate moves. Here are a few basic exercises that can help these moves make a little more sense. That and they take up quite a lot of room, so they look really cool :)

giantstutorial.mp4

The culmination of a lot of work on aiming cross points (sorry about the audio!). Basically, you can think of a cross point for any given manifold move as being something like a hinge that you can move this way and that. One of the side-effects of this is that you can create weave-like movements that feature odd plane bends but overall behave the same way as the original move you're working from. Here are a couple examples of some moves derived from the good ol' 3-beat weave.

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In editing Keith Marshall's portion of the Top 10 of 2012 video, I spotted him performing this nifty variant on a no-beat throw weave that utilizes antispin to get the toss from point A to point B and thought it would make for an excellent tech blog! The key to getting this down is to flick the handle up like it's an isolated toss when the under hand comes around to make its throw.

techblog314.mp4

The archer weave is a fun embellishment for the three-beat weave that leads directly into body tracing and a number of other fun techniques. When I first tried to learn it, I was baffled at how it could work. Here is an easy way to break it down so that you can see what makes this move tick.

archerweavetutorial.mp4