Thumbs and 3/4 point back of hand balances

Okay I have returned to the net and as a result to HOP, for those of you who don't know me I used to be a ninja but I have evolved into a purely hip based lifeform

I thought I would finally put some stuff up about some of the weirdness that takes up most of my time when I play

one of the main things that I use when I play are my thumbs its a way of locking the staff and bringing it back over your arm for an extra spin
there are many different applications of this particular lock some of them pretty most of them ugly and only really fun for geeky value

the easiest thumb takes place when doing a continous hand to hand in front of you rather than grabbing it with the free hand as the staff rolls over the back of the full hand roll you hand backwards and lock the staff between the forearm and the thumb by placing the thumb on the outside of the staff and using the leverage to spin the staff around your forearm again.

basically by placing your thumb on the outside of the staff and locking it against your arm you can get further spins

note: yes I do have double jointed thumbs and yes it does help, but it doesn't mean that these locks are impossible only a bit harder, if you have unstrechy thumbs then you need to really curve your hand backwards and float the staff across the inside of your wrist rather than to lock it

thumbs are good for many things including 2 and four beat fishtails
it's a lock just go and play many things with it are hideous and will just make other geeks giggle

another fun thing is back of hand balances, start by just balncing a staff on the back of your hand then try to bounce out to the 3/4 point if you pop it right it sould hang there for a sec

now place both hands under the 3/4 points with one hand give a good push up and turn your hand so that the fingers are facing inward the staff should turn 180 degrees if you have enough inertia it will hang there for a weirdly long time pass out by reversing, practice with both hands and possibilites open up

readng back these are pretty crappy descriptions and I can't be arsed to write out tricks the tricks that go with these concetps so sometime I guess I'll have to put up a video sometime

I Thumbs

Nice one steve.........

i missed the thumbs workshop at Uberstaff

& your thumb is definatley alien, but at least now ive got something to work on

(getting and alien thumb that is)

Thanks for the post

I just happen to have the entire thumbs workshop on film....

Can a copy come to Dublin

can a copy come to edinburgh as well? either on tape or digitized I'm about halfway through all of the tapes that I shot and I can safely say that there is some really really cool stuff and anything you could add would be great

YAY!

Are you busy hips? I will pm you...

no worries

you have one of my tapes alrady.


if i send you the one i have here will you send both back?

pm me your addy.

strugz, i'll copy a big giant .avi for you.

if you dont remind me. I will forget.... in fact Fear-Tine has the cd at the mo and is copying it forme. Maybe he could run a copy off for you too.

anywho

THUMBS!!!

i got a thumby type figure of eight

a thumby fishtail

and some thumby rotors

i cant for the life of me bend my arm enough to get a extended confusatron though. never realised i could use my double jointed thumbs though, so must try that.

MyHIPS, how far to/from the center are you hooking that thumb in?

almost all the way out to the 3/4 point to give enough space so that when it spins back around the center is on your arm if that makes any sense

i can't make anything out of those descriptions, except it sounds nice i dont have any possibilities to send VHS/DVD to england either. in other words, i'd love to see a video on the net including A) the moves and B) the THUMBS!!

it does, and was what i was thinking. it helps with the symmetry too.

those confusatrons also make tasty entrys to windmills too....