3a Starter Guide :)

Hey guys I just wanted to write about the 3a yoyo style.
It is a very fun, yet difficult style to learn.
These are just my tips from my experiance, so they may or may not work for you.

The biggest step to learning 3a is to become comfortable with your undominant hand.
You should never have a Throwhand or Non Throwhand when you are playing 3a.

There are not a lot of tutorials out there on this.  The majority of them are the basic mounts and tricks that you should learn very first.

If you are just starting 3a you should look at Duncan’s How to Be a Yoyo Ninja for this style. There is also a couple tutorials by Slusny as well as some other site.com

For a good beginners pair you should look for a pair of good plastics or budget metals.
For me a Pair of YYF Protostars are very good, as well as YYJ Classics.
If you want to step up to a pair of metals than Cyphers are a very good choice.
They were Designed by YoyoFactory with the help of legendary 3a player Kentaro Kimura.
You can find a pair on the BST for a pretty reasonable price.  Duncan Echo 2’s are also a very good choice.

These are a couple tricks that you should learn first:
Check out the tutorials on this page!

Velvet Rolls
Blue Line Rolls
Double Trapeze
Koro Koro
Kink Mount
Assisted Braintwister

If you have any other tips or questions feel free to post them on here!

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Hey great post man! Just maybe a suggestion to make it better! maybe you can add tutorial video links for all those beginners tricks? :slight_smile:

Will do! Thank you very much!

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For me when I was trying to learn some 3A tricks it was as tho I became mentally challenged as soon as I tied a string to my non-dominate hand. I figured once I got my throw down, I already knew the tricks right handed so I should have no problem left, boy was I wrong. What I ended up doing to become more comfortable was using a yoyo with a counterweight “so I could pass between left and right hand freely”, I would do a trick with my dominate hand, and then mirror it with my non-dominate hand. I literally had to reteach myself everything, well, more so I had to let my right hand teach my left. I am still awful at 3A, but I can now do a few tricks with my non-dominate hand. I don’t know how much trouble you guys have with non dominate handed string tricks, but I feel this counterweight method is a pretty solid way to get comfortable with it.

This is a nice guide for 3a :slight_smile:
When I was a beginner at 3a, I found it difficult to start off since there were hardly any tutorials for those fancy tricks.
I now know that if you want to learn faster, you can slow down youtube videos of players.
For beginners, I suggest looking at thawhir iqbal AP2014 3a finals. If slowed down you can learn each element easily.
For something slower, Hank Freeman is the master of mounts so you should check out his videos in slow motion too, you might learn something.

I noticed this as well, many 5a players find it easier to learn 3a. For example, Naoya takeuchi made it to the WYYC 3a finals and Ian Loh made it to the 3a AP finals in 2013 as well.

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Yeah the fancy tricks are a little harder to learn, since there are very few tutorials. Slowing down youtube videos is a great choice! Thank you Live Wire!

Dangit I wanna learn 3a now.

Do it! It is super fun!

Bumping