Best way to progress

Ive been using the yotricks level up app to learn 1A tricks and keep a list of what I can do. Its such a great tool. What ive been doing is trying to quickly learn a trick and move on to the next over and over. Basically if I can bomb through it even if its super sloppy and unrefined ill count it and move on to the next. My thinking is that if the trick registers in my brain and is possible to do at my current stage Ill move to the next one. Some tricks tho straight break my brain and are impossible since Im still fairly new. And obviously for those I ignore for now. Was wondering what yall are doing and if this is a good method. Or if I should just drill one trick a million times until its perfect?

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I personally donā€™t move on to the next trick untill I can land it 3 times without fault in a row.

Usually that also makes sure it is fairly smooth. Landing something once or maybe twice is easy. 3 times in a row usually requires something close to mastery in my experience.

Then I keep mixing in that trick with the new tricks I learn after that. Drilling them until they become close to pure muscle memory and I donā€™t really have to think about the movements anymore.

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Ok awesome! Some tricks I technically know how to do but would struggle to even land once. I guess its easy to want to jump ahead and feel like you are just learning a bunch of tricks haha

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I mean this way works for me. But in my experience landing a trick once in no means you can ā€œdo itā€ when asked to.

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I think only being able to DO the trick counts as an achievement.

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Repetition is key. I think cleanliness and style is more important than how many tricks you know.

Iā€™d rather be able to do one trick flawlessly than to fumble through 10 tricks.

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That method will only work in the beginning. When tricks get more complicated you have to learn them in chunks. Some tricks will take weeks or months to get down.

Thereā€™s also a difference between knowing a trick and being proficient at a trick. Eventually youā€™ll reach a ā€˜wallā€™ and feel like youā€™re not getting anywhere. Then youā€™ll have to go back and get proficient at things and even relearn things. Itā€™s all about muscle memory and that takes time.

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Use the elements of a trick combined with something else you can already do.
I came to the conclusion Moves/elements beats set tricks. Tricks are the vehicle to learn the move.

Other opinions will vary.

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He said heā€™s fairly new, Iā€™m pretty sure heā€™s still learning the very basic tricks. Thatā€™s also not really an opinion, combining stuff together is literally what yoyoing is.

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Yes, but we can still isolate the components. I still do after all this time, even the simplest moves, I discover something Iā€™ve never done.

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You need to get some basics down before you start recognising individual elements and movements. Once you do that part progresses pretty quickly though.

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personally Iā€™ve always tried to not stall on a single element or trick for too long. Once I can land it I move to another one, and if I canā€™t land it I just quit and move to the next one before I lose my patience. This was true when I was a beginner and itā€™s true now that Iā€™m sort of an advanced player (I learned the magic drop and boingy boing after two years of yoyoing). The downside to that is that Iā€™m not over precise and consistent with super advanced tricks, because I just didnā€™t practice them to perfection. What I believe is that when youā€™re a beginner you donā€™t have to be super consistent with each trick, because youā€™ll eventually come back to them while learning new elements. That said, everyone has their method and pace and thereā€™s no bad way to progress.

For this, I realized that for some tricks you may want to check out multiple tutorials from different people, everyone will explain the trick in their own way and it really helps to see the trick from different perspectives.
In my channel I have a playlist of easy tricks, I tried not to overlap to other channels so you wonā€™t find well known tricks, except for the magic drop:
EASY TRICK TUTORIAL PLAYLIST

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For me the fun of yoyo is doing a move/trick smoothly. Itā€™s like asking someone to draw a picture. There are stick figures and there are masterpieces. If it feels good and I enjoy doing the trick and feel like I can do it pretty much at least half the time I attempt it, Iā€™d consider that ā€œlearnedā€ and mark it off the list. Iā€™m at the end of the first block of ā€œadvancedā€ tricks on the YYE ladder so - also as a relative beginner of about a year and a half - a lot of these tricks take me a few weeks to learn and then a few more weeks to smooth out and actually enjoy.

In the early trick ladder there were quite a few tricks that I didnā€™t really care about, so once I could land them well enough, I pretty much just checked the box and forgot about them knowing that I might need to go back at some point and re-learn if they were elements in other tricks later.

But to answer your question, the way youā€™re doing it might actually be a better way to progress since youā€™re getting to the harder stuff faster. No way to know though without access to parallel universes to check and see how youā€™re doing with other methods. :nerd_face:

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Also just for clarification here is the end of my trick list. This is as far as Ive advanced. Black hops I can barely do. Everything else shown here I can do with some level of efficiency. But eli hops Ive got nailed. I can do them in different directions too and make then super long meaning bring my hands fully together. I can do a few fancy binds also.

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I used this tool to get started and it was great. I did the first 50 and then progressed through a lot of the 1 A stuff. Keep at it and go through as many as you can. Youā€™ll find that one element from one trick will help with others. Once I had enough tricks and mounts I started to just freestyle. Listen to some of your favorite music and make up little combos. link them together and before you know it your skill level gets way better.

Ps. I still canā€™t get all the way through black hops. :). I have trouble with the 3rd brother mount.

Either way, keep it fun. Youā€™ll find out what core tricks click and become your favorite. I feel like the mounts are more important than the actual tricks themselves. Finding different ways from mount to mount can be fun.

Iā€™ve progressed away from this tool into trick a week here on this forum. There are a ton of other YouTube tutorials that can be more advanced too. So many good resources out there itā€™s ridiculous.

For reference, I made it to level 59 with 37K XP.

Good luck!!

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The final hop in that trick is my actual Nemesis.

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I recently took a lesson with Lucas Decker and we were working on putting together combos and he asked me to show him something I had put together. I have been throwing for a little under a year and consider myself beginner/ intermediate. After watching my combo, he talked about the difference between ā€œknowing the trickā€ and ā€œmastering the trickā€ and that mastery was obviously the goal if you want to progress. He isolated 1 trick from my combo (Matrix) and told me to practice that trick until I could do it nearly flawlessly and without thinking, almost so it was autonomic. He gave me another trick to practice (Esickaā€“which he didnā€™t know the name, but thereā€™s a tutorial for it on YouTube by Slusny). I can drop Matrix into anything now almost without thinking, itā€™s like a reflexive trick. Esicka is still in progress, but I can land it, so I ā€œknowā€ it, but havenā€™t mastered it. Long response to say that learning tricks is awesome and I use Level Up on YoTricks as well, but Iā€™ve tried to work on adding mastery to the learning process to really lock it in so it becomes a reflex. Iā€™ve been watching a lot of yoyo docs and Brandon Vu/ Gentry Stein videos and when you hear them talk about getting to world champ level (which is not my goal), you see the dedication and time they put into their art and thatā€™s why they are amazing. Keep up the good work and happy throwing!

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Thanks for the input everyone!