Archives for April 19, 2013

Happy Fixed Friday! Are you ready for the weekend? That’s a dumb question, everybody is ready for the weekend. The bigger question is whether or not you’re ready for a bunch of crazy fresh new yo-yo tricks all up in yo’ face. Roll the tape!

Another question you might have after watching this video is “what connects these tricks?” That’s something that I’ve been wondering myself! Actually, this week we’re running a few unconnected original combos rather than a suite of tricks built up from a foundational concept, but there is still a lot to learn. Let’s start, shall we?

The first trick in the series is based off of the sidestyle mach-5 mount, something you may know from such classic tricks as Kamikaze. This mount has a ton of possibilities and is a staple in modern 1A, but the sheer amount of string in the gap often causes responsive yo-yos to choke. The most obvious way to integrate it into fixed axle play, of course, is to adapt it to a stall trick. In the video, I perform the simplest entrance into the mount that I know, which is to stall the yo-yo after throwing a houdini mount and then hop it back into the string held by the thumb, but a more exciting way to get there is to whip the yo-yo with your throwhand as it is coming up into a trapeze stall. If you’d like to see this version, it’s in a few of Ed’s videos, and also in Kyle Nation’s phenomenal “Sting Like A Butterfly” at 1:10. For me, the exit of the mach-5 stall is the real fun part. By popping the yo-yo up and crossing your hands (throwhand on top) you can dismount with enough force to propel the yo-yo into another stall, an extra stylish catch, or even more string tricks.

The second combo is a fairly long stall sequence, and you may have picked up some of the moves from previous lessons, so I’ll try to break it down without being too indulgent. It opens with a trapeze stall, which dismounts and moves inside your arms into a frontstyle braintwister stall, which you somersault out of and into a cross-armed 1.5 stall. This is one of my favorite bread and butter transition moves; the segue from trapeze to braintwister is immensely useful for going from sidestyle to frontstyle, and x-arm 1.5 is easily one of the most versatile stall mounts. From the 1.5, you’ll dismount and uncross your arms as though you were going to catch it in a trapeze-bro, but instead turn your throwhand in towards your body and catch the yo-yo “gorilla style”. Don’t psyche yourself out about this mount being inverted! It’s really just a funky split-bottom anyways.

The next step is the tricky part, but it also just feels really awesome, so whatever! Try your best, you can totally do it. It’s based heavily on this smooth double-or-nothing move by Charles Haycock, so I recommend learning that on a bearing yo-yo if you feel more comfortable with that. My best advice is to try and follow the path of the yo-yo with your hand and really focus on the chop, but it’s a tricky one to teach, so just keep practicing. Totally worth it! As you can see from this video, I usually like to finish this combo with a really sketchy shoot the moon. Trust me, sometimes it’s better to play a little crazy.

The next move is sort of thematically similar to the mach-5 in that it’s based on dismounting the stalled yo-yo by bouncing it against a string. This one is a little bit more difficult because it doesn’t have extra strings locking it in, but has that similar feeling of a really “powerful” dismount with extra spin, AND it’s totally a string hit! You’re basically going to want to throw a double or nothing stall, pop the yo-yo up into the top string and then pull your hands apart and use the string to bounce the yo-yo downwards. In this case I did a trap-bro stall back into 2or0 to demonstrate it as a repeater, but it is infinitely useful in many places.

The next trick is definitely the most conceptual of the batch: rollbacks. The basic concept behind it is a z-axis transition between strings, something that would not be possible with a spinning yo-yo. In this example, the yo-yo starts stalled in a double or nothing, but you flip your hands back (as though you were performing dumptrucks) and let the yo-yo fall back onto what used to be the top string. In the video, I follow it up with a simple rollout in order to repeat it, but the implications of the concept behind the trick could be pretty heavy. Imagine dismounting from a wrist mount by simply turning the entire formation upside down and letting the yo-yo fall out, or undoing a knot by swinging a stalled yo-yo through a “hole” in the string formation – or just imagine lots of crazy back and forth gorilla style “raise the roof” antics, y’know, either way.

The last trick in the video… I’m not really gonna talk about the last trick in the video, I think it speaks for itself. Big shout out to Team Chubby Lovin’ on that one.

Anyways, that should be enough to keep you busy for the weekend. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and maybe your axles never burn out.