I’ve been yoyoing for 3+ months now. I’m trying to learn new tricks, but nothing is working. each time I do breakaway yoyo tricks(skin the gerbil, trapeze), the yoyo tilts toward me. I barely land the yoyo on the string. I’ve only mastered the most basic bind needed. my finger hurts from yoyoing even 5 minutes. I’ve seriously considered quitting. please, if anyone has any tips to help me get better, please tell me.
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I don’t know if any of this will be useful to you, but I’ve gotten stuck in ruts like that before. One of my problems is that I continue to do things the wrong way, optimistically hoping that the results will magically change somehow. If I don’t change my throwing, how could it ever improve? Sometimes it really helps to get an outsider’s perspective, so you could video yourself doing a breakaway/trapeze and post it asking for help fixing the tilting problem.
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I’m 9mths in and in somewhat of a stagnant place myself, I think it’s normal for that initial burst of enthusiasm and rapid trick acquisition to wear off as time passes, tricks become more complicated and take more effort. It does make it very rewarding when you do get it though 
I’d recommend switching styles, if you’re mainly doing breakaways learn more frontstyle tricks, go outside and give 4A or 5A a try, practice looping, play responsive for a while and try to do everything you know on responsive, grab some wood, look for tricks you think are cool and learn those, look for tricks that build/“combo” off of what you know, look for people whose style you like and emulate.
When you do dedicate time to practice be intentful and think about what you’re doing, look at multiple tutorials at .25 speed, consider the minutiae that make the trick work, what hand motions or positions are involved and what can be tweaked around until something clicks. Take breaks and learn other tricks if you get too frustrated, take breaks in general, do other things you love and come back.
Finally, don’t take it too seriously, there’s no place you have to be at x months/years in and no amount of tricks you should know this is supposed to be for fun. I still throw every day and mostly just have fun doing the tricks I know, improving my hit rate on them and thinking of ways to cleanly transition to something else if I do miss. Playing around improves your skill even if you’re not always strictly dedicating time to learn new tricks. Consistency is key.
With regards to more technical advice I’ll leave that to those more experienced. This is generally what has kept me interested in yoyoing and will keep me throwing for years to come 
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Try to really focus on keep your hands steady and level, I try to learn a new trick everyday. Just keep trying until you can nail it, sometimes it takes 200 tries before I land something once. Wear a glove on your yoyo hand or a finger wrap, helps a lot.
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Kudos for posting here asking for advice. This forum helped me learn to bind and turn my unresponsive yoyo from a useless mystery toy to one of my favorite pastimes.
Advice:
- Watch tutorials from the masters geared toward your skill level
- Practice over and over til it works
- if you get really stuck ask for specific help here or from a local yoyoer, people love helping
- now it should be fun, and the better you get at that trick, the more fun it should be
- when you want even more fun, pick a new trick (or the “next” trick) and go back to 1.
Getting better takes time and we’ve all felt the frustration of trying over and over not getting the result you want as fast as you want, but the point (for me) has always been enjoyment. So if it’s becoming un-fun, take a break and try later when you feel like it. When it gets too late and I find myself saying things like “you can go to bed once you land it cleanly,” that’s usually the sign that I need to stop for the night before I get frustrated.
As for tilting, I sometimes have to steer the yoyo while it’s on the string by turning the string (e.g. with the yoyo in trapeze, I move my throw hand away from my body and my non-throw hand toward my body or vice versa will adjust the tilt of the yoyo). You lose some spin, but it’s just another part of yoyoing for me.
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I would restart, go back to square one and learn in the right order of things, do not skip. Some kids can get straight into unresponsive comp yoyos, they just “get it” while the majority of us need time to let everything sink in, and a slower learning curve that is progressive. It took me months when I came back just to get my breakaway right.
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Get a butterfly XT, it’s 54grams and $5. You need 0 energy to throw it, seriously a flick of the wrist or finger… Otherwise, Duncan FH1 and take off the caps 60grams. Put the wide unresponsive yoyos away for now, you won’t be needing them for a while.
All intermediate tricks can be done with most “basic” yoyos, you don’t need more than that as a beginner.
First trick you learn in yoyos (not modern yoyos) is the sleeper, and gravity pull. If you can’t do either of those tricks with a responsive yoyo, but you know how to bind with an unresponsive is basically skipping the first 30~ tricks.
It’s the same concept as trying to learn a pop shovit before you even learned how to ride a skateboard. Of course you’re gonna fall flat on your butt!
Go back and learn the basics and learn how to control your breakaway and your yoyo so that you can maintain it’s plane. Responsive and high wall yoyos give you this understanding that helps you apply it to the more “forgiving” low wall, big rim modern yoyos we have today.
It’s easy to shift a FH type yoyo off or onto it’s plane because of it’s shape and design. Modern yoyos want to rid that with low walls so that it’s always stable. But if you’re a beginner, you can’t even throw a stable breakaway yet, so everything is “unstable” and “uncontrollable” to you. And getting a “stable” yoyo back onto plane is obviously harder, because it wants to stay on the plane it’s already on due to it’s “stability.” So actually, the best yoyo to learn on is a high wall in my opinion. It gives you the “feel” you need to control all yoyos better - especially the light weight unstable butterfly XT. If you can hit tricks on this thing, stepping up to a wide or comp shaped yoyo is going to be a crazy experience.
I hope this concept makes sense to you.
Yes modern, low wall, competition yoyos are “easier” but they are in no way a good tool for absolute beginners to learn on. You’re learning how to drive an F1 car instead of learning how to drive a go kart first. You never learned how to push the go kart past it’s limits, then stay within them. If you’re not fast in a go kart, you’re not gonna be fast in a race car. It’s that simple. You need to spin out 500 times with a go kart to push it’s limits and understand how a car works and performs on the basic level. Without that understanding of limitations, you’ll spin out 500 times in an F1 car (not likely cause give or take 10-20 you’re gonna be dead.)
I hope that you understand, if you need anything feel free to PM me. Don’t give up.
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I’m loving all these replies about trying out responsive. It trains your brain in a way that unresponsive 1A can’t, and is still super fun.
OP get yourself an XT or FH1 and learn to shoot the moon. I ended my 6 year yoyo hiatus when I got my XT at the store last year.
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Breakaway is a lot harder of a trick than people give it credit for. Getting a strong and level breakaway is something that took me years to get. There are a lot of great youtube videos on tips to improve your breakaway and I would start there.
As for the finger pain, if its coming from the slipknot on your throwhand, some tape or a glove may be helpful to fit under the string and give it a cushion. Gloves on both hands may help you avoid things like string burn as well.
p.s.
I totally understand how plateauing feels, when i first started yoyoing I plateaued pretty hard around 2 years playing and I could not get better for the life of me. 7 years later and I pick it back up again and I am progressing at a decent rate. Always remember to stop and have fun with your yoyo and remember why you started playing with the thing in the first place.
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I wouldn’t be discouraged just keep practicing x sometimes the easy stuff can be hard. There are a lot of tricks I should be able to do easily but struggle a lot with.
I always plug this video Brandon made about breakaways
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Definitely grab some finger wrap. When you progress a little further you’ll find that maybe you don’t need it. In the beginning though it helps a ton.
I haven’t read through all of above replies but I’m sure someone has suggested going back to square one.
Good luck, stick with it and it will click one day.
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I’ve had a lot of trouble keeping my hands healthy during the winter. Dry skin has lead to a lot of papercut style injuries in my fingers. Fabric bandaids (wrapped in the correct direction) can help not just with healing, but protection as well. The fabric doesn’t stick on the string, and while it doesn’t feel exactly like having nothing on my fingers, I haven’t felt like it interfered with throwing.
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I also meant to say, you can get them from convenience stores, but they’re pretty expensive. You can find cheaper, larger boxes from the a medical brand like mckesson. Like a 100 Ct box for $7 not sure how that compares to the finger tape. Maybe fabric medical tape would give a similar feel for even less per wrap.
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Best thing you can do in my opinion is to seek for help here. Post a video of you doing a trapeze here and you’ll see that people will be more than glad to help you out.
You may also want to grab a responsive yoyo and learn as many tricks as you can with that, you will be free from the bind frustration and you will really learn how to throw a straight breakaway (which by the way, is one of the toughest thing for beginner\intermediate players). For the finger pain, a bandaid will help.
For the psycological thing of feeling stagnant I suggest to get used to it. There will be times when you’ll learn tons of tricks in a row and even create your own tricks and combos and there will be times when you’ll feel you won’t come up with anything new for ages. It’s totally normal in yoyoing and I guess in any other skillbased hobby. Sometimes going back to the basics helps to create something new.
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I will add this… of all of the techniques to deal with delayed trick progression.
This is the best and most valuable advice. It took me a while to understand, I had to develop and understand how I process, figure out and learn a trick. Now I expect the issues to come up in my process and they are almost welcome at this point.
1 watching trying to figure out how to start
2 going too slow
String tension
3 going too fast
String tension
4 wrong hand height
5 wrong hand position from side to side
String tension
6 Whip loop is too small
String tension
7 the throw is not moving in the correct position to perform trick element
8 Start to see the trick but still miss landing
String tension
9 land the trick
Practice
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I can’t believe you forgot to mention string tension.
For what it’s worth, my answer is almost always “practice more”. Almost all skills are just a matter of how much time you spend mindfully practicing.
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Attitude is everything. Do it for you. Free your mind. Put me on a poster.
Move the knot around and be a little looser with how tight it is on your finger. That should help with finger pain.
As for keeping the yoyo strait. Stay calm breath. Do some trapezes and move your hands so the throw hand sit further in front of you. Watch how the yoyo tilts. Do it again but have your non throw hand be more out front. Now it twists the other way. As your tipping you can adjust your hands to resteady the yoyo.
Your in a good spot to struggle a bit. We all have.
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Yes take your time and always practice thrs so much on youtube too to learn!!! Its awesome that the community here is responding to u back in the day we didnt have YouTube lol internet was great but i had to learn from the books. yomega had the mini paper trick book who remembers that lmao and the website i use to go on way b4 yoyoexpert was kens world on a string
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Haha its still around wow
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