I have a confession to make: I never learned airwraps when I began my journey into poi. It started out as just kind of an embarrassing secret I hoped nobody would ever notice and then I started running into guys who could do things with hyperloops that made me break into a cold sweat and run and hide inside large wooden objects.

Like isolations, they just seemed kind of silly and pointless to me. This year, as part of my New Year's resolutions I opted to go back through and learn these basic skills that I'd avoided before. Needless to say, it's been a trying year so far.

While there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do airwraps, I've unfortunately never found one that explained how to avoid many of the basic issues I kept having with them. Why did half of them become Gordian knots while the other have broke through clean? Why did I keep hitting my hands in the process of doing the wraps and how could I avoid doing it in the future? Most importantly: which of these lessons transferred to hyperloops and what skills would I have to learn from scratch for those?

While I'm nowhere near proficient in them yet, here are a few things I've managed to pick up so far that aren't in any of the videos. Here's hoping some other folks dealing with the frustration of these things finds something useful here:
 

1. Essentially an airwrap is the same thing as a weave, but done with the poi crossing over each other rather than your hands. This has a lot of implications that are not immediately clear. For one, it means that the simple, "just let them wrap and they'll automatically unwrap" is not necessarily the case. To wrap and then unwrap, the poi have to cross over on one side (outside the hands), continue to cross between the hands, and then uncross on the other side of the body (once again, outside the hands). You can think of this as being something like a double-decker sandwich--the planes where the poi can wrap and unwrap are like the slices of bread and whatever you put between them becomes the placement of your hands. You can ONLY unwrap when the poi plane, like the slice of bread, is completely outside of your hands on the other side. If this doesn't happen, you wind up with an ugly, ugly knot.
2. Timing is everything--this may sound obvious, but to me it wasn't at all. I still frequently hit my poi heads on my hands when I attempt to unwrap due to being unused to the timing of doing airwraps. The reason for this is that they don't actually move as fast as they would if you were doing a weave in the same amount of time--they move twice as fast because as the poi wrap around the middle of their leashes, they traverse half the space in the same amount of time. This means that you either need to give it half as much or one and a half times as much time as usual to cross it over to the other side of your body. Otherwise, the poi will be coming up into your hand when you anticipate it being away from your body. To get around this, I've actually been moving my hands around to follow slightly the path of the poi and make up the difference in these two timings. Sometimes it's working and sometimes it isn't.
3. When it comes to hyperloops, life gets a whole lot more complicated. The timing is even trickier being as how the poi are moving even faster yet, though the sandwich metaphor is easier to achieve here. The problem is that it's also really easy to shoot past the exit plane. For example, a significant number of the hyperloops I'm attempting wind up switching planes over completely, so I wind up with the loop going inside my arms on the exit side of my body and then, yep, you guessed it, tangles. My solution to this so far has been to pull my leading arm behind the nexus of the hyperloop to force it into the proper plane, but if my timing is at all off it tends to shoot straight over to being a reverse hyperloop rather than unwrapping.
4. It's really helpful to be able to do airwraps in both directions. This is analogous to taking the two-beat weave and learning to turn it into the three-beat weave. It not only puts your hands in the proper plane to exit, it also opens up a very basic bit of symmetry that a body should always strive for.

I'll keep on posting as I find more of these tricks. In the meantime, are there any more experienced folks out there who can point me to some additional items I should be on the lookout for?