The Official HOP "I just learned a new move" thread

A lot of really good spinners fail to get out of orbitals, so that probably means you're getting worse. Sorry to bear the bad news!

I fail at getting out of orbitals! Woohoo! Does this mean I'm good now?

I have not even bothered learning them, so technically cannot get out of them either.

i am just now learning how to get out o orbitals its a very tricky thing but the easiest way i have found so far is turn to where its on the wall plane and treat it like a air wrap

Took me forever to get anywhere with releasing orbitals. After seeing Nick Woosley do it a long time ago I had to learn. Nowadays I get it probably 75% of the time. Takes some focus and time thats for sure. Still screw it up though, its just something you can't get every time.

Yeah it's kind of a luck thing considering that if it's dark and it's chain and you can't see it well or if it's just dark out and you can't see your cord. You have a 50% chance of getting out flawlessly or making a tangled mess. I tend to get the tangle mess pretty much half the time.

I go with how it feels, and hope I'm right. Works nicely when I need it to

Yeah, I can do it in pitch dark, I tend to be able to feel where it is much better than I can see it.

I have been learning so many new moves lately, but I'll start from the beginning.

I got into poi because I wanted to do fire poi. I am very comfortable with fire and have a lot of fun with it. Because of my comfort level, it is very easy to transfer new moves to fire very quickly. I've been spinning fire for 4 or 5 years now, but I never did much complicated stuff.

In fact for a very long time, I could do a forwards 5b weave, but still couldn't even do a backwards 3b.

I think my move list for a long time was:

forward 3b weave (I am very comfortable with this move and I bring it all over the place.... around my sides, low, over my head while bending backwards, kneeling down, laying down, etc)
forward 5b weave
butterflies (both directions)
forward thread the needle
corkscrew
Then a series of body wraps that I quite enjoy doing. (this was almost entirely my focus while spinning for a long time. Let me try to list them all: around my thighs (both directions), corkscrews to torso wraps, leg wraps, around my arm wraps, shoulder wraps, arm wraps, corkscrew to individual leg wraps, and all kinds of transitions to and from these wraps while doing the above list.... this is the kinda of fire spinning that I absolutely love).

I'm pretty sure that that set of moves was the entirety of what I could do with my fire poi.

Then I restarted the juggling club at my university and met two great poi spinners/teachers.

Through there help I have recently learned:

Backwards 3b weave
Backwards thread the needle
Doing a 3b weave (both directions) while occasionally throwing the right poi in the air (I have done this on fire and I don't use a counter weight)
Rope Dart style under the leg moves.
My friend calls the move "the atom"
Butterflies over my head
Thread the needle over my head

Things that I "sorta" have down, but don't have perfectly to infinite muscle memory yet, but I would still say I "have them"

A lot of stuff with stalls as direction changes.
Reels (all kinds, but I can't seem to remember how to do all of them, so it needs a lot more work)
Windmill (I can do it occasionally, but I can't quite seem to work it into the fountain yet).
Fountain (if I can just sort out my windmill problem, I should have this down)
Wheel Plane Flowers (3 and 4 petal ones) - These need a lot of work, but I have the basic idea down now.
Pendulums (need tons of work, but I have the idea down)
Neck Wraps (very similar to rope dart neck wraps, but they are much more difficult with the shorter poi)
I guess I should include buzz saw here as I have learned how to do it, but I am not comfortable with it yet.
Corkscrew with one poi going under both legs as I spin in the direction the poi is spinning.

Now this brings me to now and my reason for looking for this thread to post in.

I thought I was very far away from btb weaves, but my friend/teacher told me a great exercise for getting comfortable with accessing my wheel planes while my hands are behind me. I started playing around with those 3 days ago and have worked on it a bit each day since.

Tonight I went outside for an hour and planned to just get btb weaves down. I think it took me about 45 minutes, but I can say that I have reverse btb 3b weave down almost perfectly now. With another 40 minute session I think I can get the other direction down.

Once I finished that I worked on my windmill, fountain, crossers, under the legs, btb crossers, and some butterfly stuff.

I now also have solid:
Btb Butterflies (well technically they are behind my head), some thread the needle transfers with occasional movements behind my head, forward front crossers.

All and all tonight was very successful. Sorry for the long post, but I have made SO much progress in the last couple months.

Have fun with learning! You are in the funnest part of poi, the time where you are learning a barrage of new movements and concepts I'm starting to get same time butterfly extension pirouettes down. But after like the 3rd turn they fall apart. Actually it was the one and only Pali Endi that helped me with that one in person as it is the only flower/extension pirouette combination that I can't do and it angers me.

i just started today. after much practice, and many hits to many places i don't wanna talk about... i finally got it!
i love you, poi

Congrats Zephyrr!
Getting past the initial awkwardness is a big step it seems. After that there's a long and rewarding road ahead with new cool-ness at every corner!

I'm new here (Been doing poi for 4 months) so I guess I'll try to skim over what I know so far and sum up what I'm learning.

I've got a great handle on all the basics (or at least what I know as the basics)

Can do all these both ways, in time, split time, and with turns -
Butterfly
Crossover
3 beat Weave
5 beat weave
2 beat Corkscrew
Wheel
Windmill

Learning and/or perfecting
BTB backwards 3 beat weave (Pretty well got this mastered)
BTB forwards 3 beat weave (Pretty well suck at this)
Every butterfly/TTN/turn/crossover I can try. LOVING butterfly moves.
REALLY working on (Not sure of the proper name) Butterfly with one hand across the back and crossing over to the other side in split time. Cutting down the number of rotations it takes me to get comfortable enough to do this fluently.
4 beat corkscrew (I just recorded a video of myself and man... I make this look soooooo awkward)

I think it's safe to sum it up with... as I saw someone post earlier... I'm at that super fun and interesting part where I can start turning anything into anything else and it's a whole fluid world of.... make S*&T up as you go and enjoy the heck out of it. Now all I need to do is move to a part of the world where there's more than just me and my g/f that spin poi within a 400 km radius so that we can learn with and from others!

mew!

Yeah. Exactly that....

Color me embarrassed, so I can add meltdowns to my list. Ive apparently been doing them for about a month not realizing it. I had gotten my names confused. The move I've been wracking my brain on is the btb crossers, which I've still had no luck on.

Btb crossers are a bitch to learn.

I did my btb weave on fire last night, so I think it is safe to say that I am comfortable with it now!

I also learned this fun move where you just do butterflies, and then separate them a bit so you make two circles that dont intersect, than do a butterfly with full arm extensions, then go back to the two circles, then the full arm extension.... repeat.

Pretty fun!

You can also alternate that, with one giant and one static spin, switching from one to the other.

And then into basic polyrhythms!

I have no idea what you two mean

So, doing a butterfly, keep one still and do a big circle with the other (Full arm extension)

When you get back to your starting position, keep the one that was doing the extension still and do an extension with the other.

A polyrhythm is if you then speed up the one thats staying still to being twice or more the speed of the other.

ohhh, sounds good. i has to try this

Do you have to speed it up? I found it was a natural polyrhythm with the smaller poi doing two revolutions while the extension did one. You can keep that going indefinitely, but the switch from one hand to the other doing the extension is cool.

I can try get a video up over the weekend if you are still lost.

Yeah, you're quite right, aston, since the larger one has to travel further, the smaller one will naturally do extra revolutions to the larger one.

I tend to explain it through "speeding it up" since thats what it feels like and tends to click with people, but I should have included both descriptions, to help people who would grasp it better that way.

Though, there will need to be a timing alteration if you're going to be doing a 2/3 alternating pattern.

Is that video coleman made still bouncing around???

Not sure I ever saw a video on polyrhythms. Never really gotten the hang of them, apart from a few natural ones.

polyrhythms are kinda difficult it took me a week to learn how to dow a 3 petal antispin with a 2 petal spin polyrhythm flower but it looks pretty gnarly but the main problem i had was arm timing you just really have to pay lots of attention to the timing of your arms and poi

kk I believe I found a better way to ask my question about what the name of what I'm trying to do is, if it is anything at all. Describing stuff in text is a little difficult when you don't know the names of half the stuff to start with
Link to Youtube Poi Question

mew!

Charlie's 9 square stuff was all about polyrhythms, but sadly he seems to have taken down his 9 square content in favor of his "quantum field theory" (which I think is actually more a graph-theoretic representation of poi movement).

Pretty much. The idea there is to write a simulator.

Thanks! I'll give that a try. I never even thought of trying to play around with that!

Also very nice is doing that with both poi going in the same direction. Altering where the static spin is also gives very different feelings. Not sure they look much different though.