A couple months ago I was sent a request for more intermediate-level tutorials via Facebook and I had kind of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I knew I could provide the content, but I also knew that I considered intermediate spinning to have slightly different qualities than the person requesting the tutorials may have had in mind. To me, intermediates begin seeing poi as being composed of smaller and more fundamental pieces of movement.

This is one of those moves I've had on the "to-do" list now for a year or two. In the early days of my tech blog, I spent several videos getting the reverse isolated weave down. This is the forwards version. The helpful piece of this puzzle came from Ronan last summer, when he suggested I think of it as being similar to a five-beat weave.

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Following up from last week's video on waistwraps, here is how you can accomplish waist wraps behind the back. It helps to have the behind the back weave under your belt, but if you've got that piece of the puzzle, this isn't that big a leap.

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Based upon the toroids I uploaded the previous Monday (http://youtu.be/XA5d4yoS97w), here's a long how-to on how you can perform each of them and integrate these toroid triangles into your spinning.

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As promised: here is a breakdown of how to perform a split-opposites inversion in wheel plane. It's helpful to think of it as the path of the inversion being tilted up and around so that the rules we're used to get reversed for the hand that is going backwards.

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Here's a fun game I came up with the other day to help solidify one's command of timing and direction: put on your favorite piece of music and alternate 8-counts. On the odd 8-counts, you do whatever moves in that timing and direction suit you and on the even 8-counts you freeze in place and maintain timing and direction no matter where your hands land. Fun challenge!

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This is an update on a previous video. Originally I thought that inversions differed from tangles in that they could be entered into from either a tangle or an atom (clash or mesh), but it turns out they can be entered into from any atom. There are stack and crane atom-based inversions as well.

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This is one of those tricks I've seen and lusted after for the past year--I finally had the chance to put in some concerted work on it and it wound up not being as hard as I feared. The most important insight when it comes to this move is realizing that it's essentially a body tracer performed as a contact trick. Once you've got that part down, the rest fits together easily.

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 It was requested over a year ago, but here is a video of some good ways to warm up and condition oneself before spinning. A lot of this is full-body intensive but the shoulder exercise at the end really will help develop the ability to perform flowers for long periods without fatigue.

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The confluence of a lot of work in the past few months--here is a systematized method for learning and drilling inversions that covers all wall and wheel plane inversions as well as all the atomic orientations you can get out of a base-8 system of orientation.

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