Reversals, CAPS and Hybrids

In the past few months I’ve switched to HDPE tubing on my hoop and dropped from a 41.5″ 160 PSI irrigation tube hoop to a 38″ inch in the HDPE. This has been a sizable endeavor for me and in some ways, it feels like I’m starting all over again. My on body hooping is just starting to feel decent, though my off body hooping has been oh so much easier and doable and a lot less painful for my RSI.

One of the biggest boons for my on body hoop practice that came from the switch is the undeniable ease of reversals with the lighter hoop. Lose what feels like 5 pounds of weight and suddenly, a reversal is possible in all sorts of ways that I could never have done before. So, in a sense, the gear switch has really facilitated a big shift in my hoop practice.

As it turns out, my RSI has been very problematic in my right elbow and wrist which has made it tough for me to do extended poi practices, especially of any movements that require an extension of my arm (like flowers). Sadly, I can only practice 5-7 minutes of this sort of movement before my elbow starts hurting pretty badly, even with anti-inflammatory meds and biofreeze. Even still, over the past few months, when I can practice, I have been incredibly drawn to anti spin flowers and CAP combinations. So it has become, due to the pain, imperative that I make each spin count.

It’s been fun to see how each of these practices have been informing each other. I used to think of stalls with poi as a reversal, which, in a sense, is accurate. After considering it for longer, it isn’t really a reversal in the same sense that a CAP is. With a CAP, there is not such an explicit moment of stopping the momentum but rather a change of direction of the momentum. When I started focusing on reversing the CAP in different places (12, 3, 6 and 8), that really helped me open into a different way of thinking about reversals in poi.

Last night was a super fun practice where I was just working on some hybrid reversals in a particular sequence I hadn’t tried before. It looked something like this:

and I was also working on the underhand equivalent:

I’m surprised I never tried it before because I’ve been trying to integrate this sequence for a while:

which is essentially just a 4 petal flower alternating with a hybrid combination where I switch the hand doing the long arm in the hybrids. Even though I’ve been practicing this sequence for a while, the hybrid reversal combination from last night was actually easier for me to do in less time with more integration I think in part because I was internalizing the hand switch as a reversal. I didn’t get to apply the theory to the other combination before my elbow told me I was done practicing, but that’s up soon.