I still hit a few snags on the ladder…but that’s why i haven’t strayed away from it much. But i am still relatively new. I used fh2 for the first few months. And a lot of those fundamentals will still be impressive to most people because most people don’t know much outside of walk to dog and around the world. It’s not that hard to impress those outside of the subculture. time to get crackin on the ladder!
Great post indeed.
I usually only have a few minutes to yoyo a day and created a little combo that goes through parts of the latter from a trapeze and split bottom starts. When I sit down to try and learn new tricks I go through the latter as far as I can and then go on to the trick that I would like. I do most of my practicing around the ladder. Figure it is there for a reason. I do try to learn a trick here or there that is not in the ladder just for fun, but I’m wanting to try my hand at a ladder in my first competition so figured I might as well start there learning. I personally like it, but again, I’m no where near pro either 
I’ve advocated this approach for a long time. I’ve never understood how one could expect to learn advanced yoyo tricks without knowing the building blocks as a foundation. It flies in the face of the “Learn to bind” answer to a lot of beginner problems.
Great post jayyo.
Thank you, Jayyo. I’ve gotten very grumpy lately hearing about magic yoyos that will suddenly allow people to do more advanced tricks, and magic bearings that will correct tilt, and all kinds of craziness. People buy into all of this, then throw together a routine so sloppy you can’t tell what it’s supposed to be, then feel free to look down on people working on fundamentals with (gasp!) plastic “beginner’s” yoyos! Somewhere deep down inside, a small part of me sees the compulsory figures in skating, and wonders if the ladder should be made to be the same for 1A competitions. It’s just a small part of me, I’m not really that grumpy.
I couldn’t write this post, becasue it’s too easy to write me off as a grumpy old man. While you’re sometimes grumpy ::), this means a lot more coming from a young guy with real talent than it would coming from me. Well done.
I didn’t even know this ladder exsisted D: I am fairly new to yo-yoing and I’ve almost got every trickon this list down pretty well. I’m still working on like 5-7 of them. I think they’re good tricks to learn the fundamentals and then you can begin to mess around by yourself to find fun tricks 
Even if kids don’t know how to du these ladder tricks fluently, I would like them to understand how they are important.
“Important”, like they each add a tangible bit of progression to yo-yoing.
Looped string made a sleeper possible.
Then picture tricks could be done.
Then you could put a string in the gap of a spinning yo-yo, and make it do cuh-RAZY things.
Then more strings thrown in the gap.
Then an element of fighting the response that let the yo-yo return to the hand came into play.
Then we change the axis of the spin with a FLOP!
Then tricks can be composed and balanced in composition, like Kamakazi.
Then we can just touch the yo-yo.
Then Black Hops is incredibly hard to hit perfectly more than once in your life.
I like starting kids out with a looping yo-yo. Adults, I let them explore a wide, unresponsive yo-yo. But I try to push both tug-response, and looping on every new player.
-Jacob