Declining popularity of this hobby?

Damn dude!!! You got freakin ROCKED!!

Ouch!!!

Do you have multiple videos getting thumped? I thought I remembered this one but that was wayyy worse than what I remember. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.

Dude. That sound was crazy.

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Lol, nope, that’s the one you remember. The General yo Amplitude has a pretty sharp angle.

I have cracked my head with 4A as seen below. No scars. My daughter shot the below video lol.

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Maybe I’m not big risky enough with my YoYo’s I don’t get hit hard very often at all.

Back to original topic of this thread I feel like YoYo comes in waves but right now it’s moving up in popularity due to covid and work from home and TikTok/social
Media exposure

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Also my knuckles when the yo-yo bashes my face

(They know it should’ve been their job)

This is the one! Now I remember :joy::joy::joy:

Your poor melon, man!

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In any case, it really hurts when the yo-yo hits your hand.

To return to the main question:

In Germany there was only a yo-yo hype at the end of the 90s; since the beginning of the 2000s the hype has been over.
I also have the feeling that Germans in general have a hard time with hobbies and if they do, you don’t get to hear much about them here.

There are no shops in Germany where you can buy high-quality yo-yos. The same goes for speedcubing. If you want to buy high-quality yo-yos or cubes, you can only do so online and usually from overseas, often with high customs fees.

I have the feeling that the Yoyo hype is currently only coming back in the USA and Japan, but here in the EU it somehow doesn’t happen. It doesn’t really catch on here anymore. The same with Speedcubing.

On Instagram, I often see that in the USA and Japan there are even shops specifically for yoyoing or speedcubing, where you can actually shop locally. We can only dream of that here. In Japan there are even schools or clubs for various hobbies, where you can learn yoyo tricks together with others. I see this with skateboarding or BMXing too; in Japan there are proper lessons where people learn BMX tricks from a young age, for example. There is nothing like that in Germany.

You get the feeling that Germans are only concerned with making money. They hardly have any time for their families. In this country, people hardly have any time for leisure and family.

At the Olympic Games, I often notice that there are no Germans taking part in certain sports. The commentators then say that it is because there is a lack of young talent. This year and four years ago, for example, this was the case with skateboarding and BMXing. Leisure activities are hardly encouraged in Germany. In school, the students are busy studying and after school, they spend most of their time working. And there is no solidarity here either. Everyone is somehow more on their own. If there are hobbies, they seem to be more private, behind closed doors. As if they were ashamed of them. In any case, you don’t get to hear much about it in public.

At least that’s how I feel. It’s hard to find like-minded people in this country.

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This topic made me laugh quite a bit, never in my life I thought to hear someone “scared” of a trapeze which is literally just slide a finger on the string and the trick is done.

In the yoyo world I never heard about someone that get injuried playing, is basically impossible, worst can happen is hit your face during horizontal but is a pain that last literally 2 minutes.

It can happen that the yoyo hit your hands but is incredibly rare, I see people around binding literally after throw at the speed of light (never understood why) and then yes that the yoyo come back hard, but you looking for pain if you do that. Yoyo snagging can be easily fixed with thinner strings or silicone pads and then is even more rare that happen.

I play from very long time and never injuried with the yoyo, I did other sports like aggressive inline and with that I broke the bones in my leg, even in that case is not pain, or better probably the pain is so high that you do not really feel it, same breakdancing I broke my fingers.

If we were talking about x-sports then I can understand this topic but with yoyo it just sounds a bit funny if not ridicolous.

I write this in case new people see this topic and get “scared”, there is nothing to tame about yoyoing if not get frustrated a bit in the beginning, but a bit of practicing solve that.

In the case of the OP, I wonder which yoyo start with, some people start playing buying immediately expensive bimetal and unresponsive yoyos, this doesn’t help at all the new player as is not able to perform a bind. It is always better to start and proceed at the beginning with responsive yoyo so if you do a mistake (miss a trapeze) you can call the yoyo back simply with a tug of the wrist and it become much less frustrating than wind the string again around the yoyo.

Also I would like to debunk another urban legend, yoyoing it can be tricky and hard but not as much as people think, my brother wasn’t interested in yoyoing at all but being bored at home I taught him trapeze and bind in 2 days with a bit of practice, I think yoyoing is seriously accessible to everyone it just require a little effort and the strenght to do not leave it after 2 throw or 2 hours of playing.

Yoyo and every single thing that require skills it require time, you not gonna kickflip on your first day of skateboarding, you not gonna play Recuerdos de la Alhambra on your first day of guitar, you not gonna speedcube in one day, you not gonna do double backflip on your first day of rollerblade and so on…

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Mhmm… Don’t really agree with the injury statement :smile: yoyos made me bleed twice in the past 6 months and I don’t play as much as pros. :smile: Also one more thing I noticed is that I developed chronic shoulder dysfunction with the constant throw and whip motions. Yup, can be avoided by compensating these moves but I don’t think people outside the medical field know about this stuff.
But it’s still fun, better than to do nothing and playing just for fun clears your head so well I can forget about my irl problems for a moment.

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So i started about a year and a half ago and from my experiance it looked like it absolutely blew up on the internet (like on tiktok or yt shorts especially), though it does seem to have died down and i have a sort of guess to why that is. That being that its REALLY hard to get into yoyoing nowadays, like every video u want to learn of an essential trick is like 10-15 years old, often in poor quality and poorly explained imo. Not to mention that intermediate tutorials basically dont explain much and just do the trick slowly :skull:. So ive talked to a few people who came from the big spike a while back and get really demotivated since learning is so much harder than it needs to be

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you just started that recently and you’re already banging out tutorials like the one you posted? that’s awesome yo!

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Thanks man appreciate it!

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Lol and every trick has some crucial subtlety that they never explain in the tutorial.

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BRO LITERALLY, its like they did 2 crucial things in one step, but u only notice a single one and spend 3 hours wondering why its not working :skull:

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i think that has to come from ppl being so fluent in a trick they kinda forget everything they are doing and they dont convey all the tweaks one notices as they work on a trick. maybe that will work in your favor since you are somewhat newer, those subtleties are fresher in your mind

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I never drilled into my hand either, and all that took was me saying “I will never drill into my hand” for me to drill into my hand. There’s always time to get too comfortable with something.

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I 100000% agree, i used to complain that tutorials are awful and literally id get flamed on for “being bad” (who do they think tutorials are for?) And its literally because whats obvious for pro players isnt nearly as obvious to new players, and its VERY easy to take all that knowledge for granted. And yeah thankfully those fustrations are fresh in my mind so thats why I started my channel, its literally out of spite haha

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For what concern Yoyoexpert old tutorial:

This is actually a good point, it seems like while yoyoing changed sooo much during the years the basics are still the basics, in all those combos and tricks you find pretty much most of the elements you will use to create your tricks (than with experience you will create your own elements).
I started with the old Andre tutorials but now, you right! There is need to new videos with good quality, I think the basics are the basics even if old those combos and tricks give you a grasp of what to do and then when you finish them you can proceed to learn various combos online and in various channels.

The only issue in all of this is someone that take the courage and the insane amount of work to record every single trick of the ladder and do a tutorial of them.

About those tutorials being poorly explained I do not agree, when I learnt those combos I did not even knew how to speak in english and I learnt just watching the images and the videos it was clear enough for me (plus adding a bit of try and error).

What it will probably be helpful is to record all those tricks again with a modern quality.

Anyway, you can find all the basic tricks in another youtube channel where are divided by playlist and is a well done job, filmed properly even for 10 years ago, the quality is fine and are clear. Also just knowing the names of the tricks in the ladder (Yoyoexpert gift a little leaflet with all the names) is possible to search on Youtube the name of the trick and find various tutorials

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Learning tricks is kind of like a snowball rolling down a hill and at a certain point of trick complexity, it becomes literally impossible to explain or point out everything. I think the more beginner tricks should explain more bc they’re for newer players. If a trick is for more advanced players, I definitely think a lot less explanation is needed. Just point out the things that people might not notice or are crucial.

An example might be transitioning from trapeze to brother. If that element is done for a newer player, it makes sense to point out how you can stick out the nth middle when you dismount. If that is one tiny bit of a longer and more advanced trick. It doesn’t seem necessary to say transition to brother by sticking out the middle finger like it’s okay to assume that everyone doing the advanced trick will have already learned the simple versions and can see that the yoyo is dismounted over the middle.

I used to totally suck at learning tricks from videos but then I did it a ton of times and learned a ton of tricks and it’s a lot easier now. Learning from tutorials is a skill and people can improve at it because I know I certainly did. It’s easier to learn yoyo now than ever before and I think it’s great that there is an initiative to create even more tutorials. I just want to also thank and be grateful to the content creators that have made a lot of tutorials for tricks. Even if they’re not the best for everyone, seeing a trick POV in slowmo is good enough for a lot of yoyo players to learn from and I’m very glad that tutorials like that exist.

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