What are you working on now?

Trying to learn behind the back and under the leg stuff. Can't seem to grasp it for whatever reason.

Yeah, that stuff takes quite a while to get. Btb will take a while and wheelplane btb will take a much longer while.

And utl things take a lot of practice, but what happened to me was at one point it just came to me and I could do it no problem, I think utl is a kind of hit or miss when doing moves.

So keep hangin in there, and when practicing btb, for a long time, if you don't stretch first, you'll hurt your shoulder like I did. And trust me it's painful, stretch please, I can't stress it enough, I couldn't practice for about a week. Especially waistwraps.

I would also suggest learn btb well before doing utl because your hands will be back there.

Polishing plane control on BTB weave, forward weave, pendulum vs. C-CAP hybrid for the hell of it (trickier than it looks), UTL stuffs.

Working on making my btb weave not suck so much and to be able to sustain it for longer. After that I think I'm going to learn some different wraps this weekend. Those are fun!

Going to start recording myself doing stuff to see what I can't see and to compile the kind of things I can do or the problems I'm having with certain tricks.

Working on BTB forwards weave myself. I've known it backwards for ages, but I put off learning it the other way due to it being a pain in the arse. Also improving my inversions so that I can get into doing different variations.

And everytime I have a flow session, I try to do a lot of plane changing in the 4 basic planes and especially have the two poi in different ones. I suspect doing this will not only gain me more flow and confidence in my spinning, I'm hoping it'll help me get into the idea of "open spinning" which ahs been talked about around here.

In addition to working on pretty much everything from my last post here (btb weaves are hell on my shoulders), I realized I haven't really been using horizontal planes, so now I'm playing around with that, fixing my plane control there (which is bollocks), working on some plane switches involving the horizontal with plenty of inspiration from G.

Antispin 4x4 fountain continues to confound me. I just can't find a way to break it down that makes sense. I can do a 4x4 antispin something, but it doesn't look or feel much like a fountain.

I still am not good at it because i have no room to practice it thanks to ceiling For me, it's still really awkward. And I think Nick actually does have a video that mentions it. He doesn't go into any detail, but it does show him do it like once, so you can see some of the awkwardness that I'm talking about.

Ok I found it. He does it at about 6:30

Aha! I'll get back to you after the spin jam today...

Also: D'oh! for my not seeing sooner the similarities between the several motions (all actually THE SAME BLOODY THING) I've been trying for this move.

That's one of my favourite things about Nick's vids: the way he helps me understand how the different moves fit together, and how variants relate, rather than presenting them all as isolated tricks.

I think we can all agree on that

I can't I like Nick's enthusiasm, and some of his tutorials are decent, but for the most part I find his presentation kind of scattered. I'll take any of Derek's videos first. As for that video, all I watched is the fifteen seconds around when he did that move, without sound. I just needed to actually see it done.

(I just have to say this out loud to let other people know that there are others who just don't think Nick is the greatest teacher in the world ever.)

Fair enough: people learn in different ways.

Yeah, I prefer to see more Nick's style learning. But for some things I have used Derek's videos as they are very helpful for learning a single move. I have also gone back and looked at Nick's version afterwards to see its relation to other moves.

I loved Scales of Poi (good fundamentals are always the key to pretty much everything else), and one of his videos is what got me playing with stalls and plane switches. So I'm not saying he's bad by any stretch. I'm kind of theory-driven, so the stuff I find most helpful in the long run is Alien Jon, Drex, Charlie, that sort of thing.

Finally managed to get the 3bt weave this morning, it's still sloppy and not very pretty looking but at least now I get it and know what I'm doing.

Otherwise: Isolation, stalls, and general movement while spinning.

If that's where you are now, stalls and especially isolations will take you a long time. I'd consider it a good thing you're starting those so early on. And as for moving while spinning, whenever you learn something new, also learn to explore you're space with it and learn it in both directions as for me, I didn't always and it's coming back and biting me in the ass with it's frustration of restricting my movement.

I've been playing with stalls for a while and I'm ok at them. I can do them, they just don't seem to have the same flair that I see when other people do them (could just be me though).

I've had some small successes with isolations, but nothing major (and I can't always do them).

Since this morning, I've been able to get the 3bt weave much prettier looking and have definitely gotten used to how it feels.

As for movement, I need to actually watch some videos on turning and just practice those. I can move around, I just can't flow like I would like to.

Don't worry, your stalls will get better over time. And for me isolations took me about a month to really get decent looking, and I think about a month and a half for an isolated buzzsaw which I still could not hold very long and the time and I don't practice it enough so it still doesn't look the best. What I'm finding to be helpful is once you get them, start practicing doing them with glow sticks. That is, if you have them.

trying to get 5bt weave cant get it
and working on 3bt weave bw i really have a problem with bw spins

poi: reverse 3bt, air wraps, spiral wraps
Cj: butterfly, cradle to cradle transfer, forearm rolls
Tj: cleaning up 2 ball, 3 ball cascade