The Mullen - Page:1

The basic idea behind this trick is to catch a vertically spinning staff on your foot, turn it horizontal for one full rotation, then turn it back vertical and flick it back into your hand.

To do this you need to be able to do a few things...
1) Balance on one leg for a long time
2) Foot stalls and general foot balancage. If you can catch and throw a horizontal staff without making it spin, it makes learning the transition easier.
3) Foot helicopters. ie, continuous throwing and catching a horizontally spinning staff on your foot. Anticlockwise for the purpose of this description, because it’s easier on the right foot.
4) Foot fishtails are useful, but not essential. If you can do them, you’ll already know most of the foot positions needed

I’ll start by describing the slightly easier half-Mullen.

Start with the staff spinning forwards in the right hand, side plane.
Let the staff roll off your right hand, and stall it on your right foot. Aim to catch it so the centre of the staff lands on your ankle.
Twist your right foot a little to the left, and the staff should rotate horizontally, balanced on your foot. At the same time turn your hips to the left.
When the staff has rotated 180’ and you’ve turned a little, the staff should be against your right calf. Kick the staff up with your right foot, and it should crank around your calf, and come up spinning vertically. Finish turning to the left so you’ve turned your body 180’ , and the staff should be spinning forwards, in your right hand.

Variations: Don’t turn all the way around, and catch in the left hand instead, or do it wall plane, so you start with the staff behind you, horizontal spin to the side, kick up in front. (or kick in such a way that it jumps up behind you again into your right hand

A Mullen is this same move, but with a foot helicopter in to get the full 360’ horizontal spin. There’s two ways of doing the foot helicopter kick, one where the staff is kicked up to spin over the thigh (easier), and one where you let the staff stay under your thigh and whip your foot around to catch it (much harder…)

A swap-Mullen is where you catch the foot heli on your other foot, which means if you start wall plane with the staff behind you in your right hand, you come out facing the other way, with the staff behind you in your left hand.

The hard part to make look good is the plane change… It’s easy enough to stall the staff and then spin it sideways, but it’s much nicer to catch it earlier and use your toes to start the horizontal spin, so there’s no pause.

Next, there’s the Inverted Mullen entry, so called because you enter the move from an inverted foot stall, and have to use the hard helicopter kick, which I reckon ought to be called inverted as well.

First of all: An inverted stall is a stall under a body part, such as your arm or leg. I’m using inverted to mean that the staff passes between the controlling hand (or foot) and your body (or the ground), like in inverted poi moves.
To do one on your hand, stall an anticlockwise spinning staff on your right hand, then turn the staff 180’ anticlockwise, while remaining in contact with the staff. You have to reach over and around the staff to do it. You could also do one by rolling forwards over your bicep and stalling on your hand, but the description of the first one is needed, because you have to do that on your foot. You end up with the staff horizontal, between your legs, pointing front to back.

Right, so an inverted Mullen entry starts like that, then to get it spinning horizontally, I currently just manoeuvre the staff against my left leg and push, but the smooth toe curl is getting there… Once it’s spinning horizontally, you need to do an inverted helicopter kick, and catch on the same foot. After that, it’s back to the normal Mullen exit. I’m sure an inverted exit is possible, but inverted kick to inverted catch is not going to be easy.

You ought to be able to get an inverted horizontal spin to roll up onto your ankle and uninvert, like you can with inverted fishtails on your wrist, and then do the normal heli kick, for super sickness. Then you could catch and invert, rather than trying to catch inverted. Hmmm.

So basicly, the Mullen is the entry and the exit, and there’s room to insert other horizontal moves in the heli. A palm spin looks good… Head spin’d look better. Swap Mullen with a headspin. Mmm…

Have fun,

--Ben

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