Very short blog this week...DJ pointed out to me last week that the CAP, flower, and isolation patterns I've been playing with constitute a variant on unit circles wherein the direction of the poi change with the direction of the hand, thus creating a grid with extensions and isolations overlapping each other rather than extensions, cateyes, and isos overlapping each other. Also, I've started playing with 1.5 patterns that use cateye rather than static spin patterns. The first one resembles a hybrid I've seen Alien Jon do.

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A student asked me to post online the arm warmups I have people do at the beginning of every class, so I've taken their advice and posted a tutorial on it here on YouTube. Due to limitations in the length of videos, this covers only two direction combinations: opposites split-time and opposites same-time. I'll be adding same direction same-time and same direction split-time soon. Enjoy!

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Based upon responses from Insignia and Alien Jon, here are some additional tricks to add to the opposite timing CAPs I have in my repertoire. Needless to say, I am still loving all the possibilities these tricks open up for playing with butterflies...they're close to being in flow but not 100% there yet. I'm also realizing these patterns lead back to some of the butterfly extensions Zan was playing with in the Arizona transmission video.

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Some more ways in and out of the CAP pattern from last week, courtesy my friend DJ and a little tinkering of my own. I'm totally amazed at how many transitions this movement opens up. Plus my antispin flowers are getting close to being ready for showtime and finally me copying some of Insignia's great CAP patterns from his last vid.

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My laptop was in the shop last week and I wish I could show an astonishing amount of progress for the past two weeks, but I'm still slowly trudging through my isolation drills in the hopes of eventually mastering them. The mercedes/CAP combo from two weeks ago has also been at the forefront of my tinkering with turns for the CAP pattern now being a major emphasis. Finally, I continue to practice my buzzsaw flowers to be able to master switching between my dominant and non-dominant hands leading.

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I've come down with Bronchitis this week, so I've been unable to practice much...what I have been able to practice has primarily been expanding my isolation drills to be able to move around in every position I can think of wanting to do an isolation from. Aside from that I've been working on doing split-time butterfly flowers in inverted planes and discovered that a great side effect of practicing them is that my antispin buzzsaw flowers on my non-dominant side are finally starting to shape-up.

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Whoops! Camera ran out of batteries! Fortunately I think I got everything I wanted to capture before it died. Contained herein is a cool switch from the Mercedes to a CAP pattern, last week's 1.5 mutated into an anti-spin butterfly flower, playing with extensions, and a funky idea for a trifoil 1.5 flower...needs to be cleaned up, however.

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More isolation exercises this week--mostly in wallplane. Also a more in-depth examination of the 1.5 pattern from last week and how to turn it into a turn.

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One cold January afternoon, Drex and Thomas took to Malcolm X park in Washington DC to play poi and meteor and Mount Pleasant will never be the same again ;)

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I've officially gotten fed-up with my sloppy isolations and have begun what I'm sure will be a very long process of cleaning them up properly. I've dug up every iso exercise I could find, invented a couple of my own, and have been practicing them daily. Beyond that I've been working on getting both hands to do cateyes in all the different primary motion categories--this one, too, is going to take a while. The one thing I do have that looks pretty is an interesting 1.5 combo Lucas from Richmond cooked up that is inspired by double-staff spinning.

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