Hi everyone. Hope somebody can help me here…
I cannot snap start. As far as I can tell, I am doing exactly the same as André does, but instead of spinning round really really fast ready for a bind, mine limps round and is as wobbly as anything to the point where I find it almost impossible to find the gap with my string. I´m using a Dark Magic II, so there should be no reason why I cannot get this to work. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong???
Work on making it smooth first. Don’t worry about the speed at the beginning. Get the motion and smoothness down consistently. Then, once you’ve got the motion right, start doing it a little harder. You’ll eventually get it, don’t worry.
Thanks for the tip Shaun,
I´ll try this when I get home. Hopefully this is just the pointer I´ve been looking for.
I consider myself really good, and have been throwing for years, but snap starts, for some reason, gave me fits for quite a while. I have no idea why. I got ladder escape, hourglass, crazy chopsticks combos, and no end of difficult, elaborate stuff down in a matter of hours. But fairly simple things like snap starts and Brent stoles just didn’t click for me immediately. You’ll know when you get the right motions down because something will just click in your head. Are you learning purely from video, or do you have people you can yo-yo with?
I would suggest to not snap fast, but instead, try snapping as slowly as possible while creating a true spin. Once you get the hang of how to keep the edges of the rim aligned, do it faster.
And have fun.
-Jacob
Sadly, I have no yo-yo chums. I successfully got my girlfriend into juggling, but then she dropped the old “yo-yos just ain´t my thing!” bombshell, and nobody at my juggling club or in my circle of friends yo either, so I´m stuck with vide-tutors. I know I´ll get this eventually, but it´s just taking an annoyingly large amount of time.
I feel your pain, my friend. I was the only yo-yo’er i knew for a long time, then I got a few people into it, but only one of them got better than me (I slacked off and didn’t have the time, and he just passed me up). I got full on back into it in the last year, but i moved away, and now I don’t have anyone to learn from. My friend and I kind of fed off of each other, but other than that, I was purely self taught. I learn as much as possible from video, but you learn so much more, so much faster, if you’re around people. Where are you from? I taught my girlfriend how to yo-yo, and she’s super into it, which is awesome, but I wish there were more locals to throw with. Community is important in the learning process.
I want to learn to juggle so badly! Any suggestions to teach myself?
I´m hoping once I get better at this whole yo-yo lark that she´ll pick up one of my old ones and start having a play, and then she´ll get into it. I reckon a juggling convention next year might be a good place to start persuading her that yo is good.
As for tips for yourself to learn to juggle, I´d suggest trying to find a local regular juggling meet and joining in. The beauty of juggling is that there is a mind-bogglingly large amount of self-teach material available on the web, and a lot of it is really very good indeed, both in video format, and text pages. Be prepared to drop a helluva lot of balls though. 
Hope that´s given you some decent food for thought.
And finally caught one. Now to work on the speed issue.
try snapping your wrist in the same direction that the yoyo’s spinning when you snap (simultaneously)
Well it took me around four months of practicing snap start about ten minutes a day to figure it out. So if you cant get it right away just keep trying and you will eventually get it down. By the way i just figured snap start out like 3 days ago.
Try with a smaller yoyo first. It helps.
