Pretty sure I saw that on a Brandon Vu video and he talked about doing it, too. I’m sure no one else does it, as it would be pointless.
ok lets approach this from your angle then. how do you know a narrow yoyo helped you vs just the time that you played?
I don’t feel compelled to explain it any further. If you don’t see any value in it, that’s how you’re going to see it and that’s fine. 
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actually I’m always 100% open to being wrong and corrected. id rather get to the facts rather than be right. i don’t have an ego that prevents me from changing my mind in the face of new/better information. that just needs to be objective factual information. 2 players giving a subjective opinion in a world of yoyo players is just a comical sample size to form an opinion based on. especially when neither of them would be able to answer the same very basic question; how do you know it was the size of the yoyo that made a difference? if you’re going to make a claim something is true, i would think it would be easy to explain how one arrived at that conclusion
we’ll just pretend you didn’t try to use Brandon’s mini outlier sales pitch as proof of concept…
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Then go talk to Gentry or Evan about it, because they actually have the experience. I’m just a lowly less than intermediate yoyoer that probably shouldn’t be talking about anything.
Didn’t know we had to present thoughts and experiences with a thorough study on the forum. Get off my ■■■.
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In my experience, which is extremely limited and amateur, if I’m trying to learn a trick I will reach for one of my wider, more powerful yo-yos, and as I am trying to refine the trick once I have the elements down, I go for a more casually shaped “weaker” narrower throw to really dial it in, without the aide of an extremely performative YoYo.
Beater, BrExia, TopDeck, Kamuraiju, Loadout, Fulvia : generally forgiving of poor technique, good for me to learn with
Freehand One, Pano, Yeti 2 + Metal Yeti, modified Whip: Less forgiving (some borderline punishing), good for making sure I can do it clean and stay on plane.
All I feel have different reasons, like the Pano I can generally hit everything on and is stable, but the narrow-ish gap means I have to be more accurate with my catches for example. Yeti 2 has honestly pretty weak spin, so if I goof up a bit it’s done, metal yeti… kinda unstable and weak imo, but it’s super satisfying to hit a combo on because I know my technique is improving.
I try to make it through as many throws a session as I can tbh, I didn’t collect them for nothin’!
None of this should be consider legal or financial advice.
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woa dude! you literally started this whole conversation by replying directly to me with an idea counter to what i said. forgive me for thinking you wanted to debate the two ideas 
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Well I was just pointing out that your statement about it being pointless was maybe unfounded. I wasn’t trying to get into a debate with rules and whatnot. I figured you might just say, “Oh, cool. I never thought about that. The more you know, huh?”
no i get it. you wanted to “correct me”. I’m just confused that you would find my claim unfounded while presenting a counterclaim that’s equally unfounded. and when i ask you to provide the foundation for your claim, you throw up your hands and act like I’m harassing you and being unreasonable, or whatever you meant by your “rules comment”
i would have thought if you were going to try to correct someone you would do so with counter facts, not just some other person’s opinion, but i guess we have different conversational standards
i mean did you really? based on what, “Gentry said so”? sorry it wasn’t that easy i guess 
look, i don’t want this to just degenerate into an argument. if you would like to continue to have a good faith debate on the subject I’m totally willing to discuss. otherwise, we can agree to disagree and move on
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(long post, sorry) I think there’s (at least) two different things being discussed here.
First is “does it feel as if there’s value in working on a trick with multiple yoyos”. For me, at least, if I compare
- practise trick X on “optimal” yoyo for 15 minutes, then rotate practising it on other yoyos for 15 minutes, then go back to “optimal” yoyo
- practise trick X on “optimal” yoyo for 30 minutes, then practise some more on that yoyo
then it feels as if in case 1, I’m better than I am in case 2. This is at least partly because it helps to keep things interesting so I’ll practise more attentively in general. But it also shakes me out of whatever rut I might be in, because other yoyos will handle differently so I’ll have to deal with that, and in the process of doing that I tend to notice “oh, if I go a bit faster here, it’s easier” or “I need to move my finger out of the way more at this point” because the other yoyos have a different speed/size/etc. Then, when I get back to the first yoyo, I’ve learned some techniques along the way that help with that one, whereas if I’d just stayed with the same yoyo the whole time it’s easier to just work on one specific detail the whole time, and that might not even be the right detail to be working on.
Secondly is “is there value in working on a trick with a ‘bad’ yoyo rather than a ‘good’ one”. This is harder because it’s more of an objective question, and I think it partly comes down to “when you get better at yoyoing, what is it about you that changes”?
There’s some activities where you pretty much have to “make things harder for yourself” to improve; weight lifting is the obvious one, where you have to increase the weights you’re using as you get stronger to avoid plateauing. There’s also things like high altitude training for athletics, though that’s more of a temporary improvement.
But both of these are changes to your physiology, whereas yoyoing doesn’t need the same sort of ‘more red blood cells’ or ‘larger muscles’ changes, so progressive overload / adaptation to adverse conditions doesn’t apply.
Taking the “what if I used a bad yoyo” to an extreme, what if I stuck my hands in the snow for 10 minutes until they got really numb, and then tried to practise tricks? That would certainly make things harder, but I don’t know that it’s a useful technique. Or what if I, say, used really worn-out string, or messed up response pads, or other things that make the yoyo perform worse – I don’t think those would help a lot, if anything there’s a risk of learning bad technique as a result.
Buti n the middle, with, say, small yoyos, it’s a bit less clear-cut. The question there is “overall during a given practise session, do I come out ahead by using a smaller yoyo”, and that depends on what i’m working on. If I’m using a normal-sized yoyo, then I will spend less time dealing with tangles and having to restart after missing things, so I potentially get more practising done overall, so I can spend more time working on skills that don’t involve catching the yoyo on the string. On the other hand, larger yoyos are more forgiving when I do have to catch it, so I can get away with less accuracy than if I were using a smaller yoyo. Maybe I’d have shorter runs before something goes wrong, but if i just worked on plain old trapeze with a miniature yoyo, I’m fairly confident I’d get more accurate after 10 minutes than if I worked on the same trick with a really wide yoyo.
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what metric are you basing this on? self reporting can be SO biased you have to have an objective metric by which to measure any difference. that’s the inherent problem here, it’s impossible to control for the variables necessary to be sure what is causing any gains. you’d have to be able to have the same person learn the same trick fresh on 2 different yoyos which is obv physically impossible
those are bad comparisons because those are strength and conditioning exercises which are fundamentally different from building muscle memory, which you acknowledge. a more apt analogy would be skateboarding or juggling but again you run into the same problem of being able to control variables in a way that you can objectively ascribe gains to one specific detail like yoyo size/skateboard size/juggling object
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Well, if you’re what looking for is “an objective way to tell what’s best”, then I guess the discussion is over, because, as you pointed out we can’t split the universe in two and have two otherwise-identical people practise with one yoyo / multiple yoyos to see what happens while isolating every single other variable. Even if we could do that, this isn’t like, say, archery, where we could actually measure “who can get their arrow closest to the target” to see who did best – in yoyoing, “who is better” is, itself, at least a partly subjective thing.
(ironically, even trying to think about yoyo skills that could be objectively measured and compared to one another, I can only come up with a couple; longest sleeper, and (perhaps) longest fingerspin – and both of those are incredibly dependent on the yoyo you’re using, of course, to a point that drowns out any improvements based on practise techniques. And, heck, longest sleeper is one of the few yoyo skills where physical strength might actually make a difference, at least until you snap the string)
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I don’t really have a system. I do have yoyos that I enjoy more than others and sometimes I just feel like throwing something different. Sometimes that means a trick will be harder with one throw vr.s another, and whether this helps you improve I can’t say for sure. I enjoy playing with undersize and so far it hasn’t suddenly made me improve a trick. But that’s just IMO.
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that’s an interesting point about the subjective nature of it to begin with. itd be interesting to see what results would be if we could come even close to controlling factors
understanding there’s still subjectivity involved i bet 2 tricks could be chosen that are similar in the elements they use as well as time to execute, at which point someone could learn one trick with one yoyo and the other trick with another yoyo. obv far from perfect but time to learn would be a metric i would say be at least in the ballpark and also be useful info
i dunno though, time to learn was as close as I’ve come so far to any useful and remotely measureable metric. that involves factors mentioned like restarts
The tricky part about saying “how long did it take someone to learn a trick” is that you have to define what “learn a trick” means, because even if A and B can both get through all the steps without a mistake, A could still be doing it more quickly/accurately/smoothly than B.
One “objective” measure could be to (somehow) define what “the perfect version of a trick” is, film someone doing that, motion track where their hands/fingers are, where the string is, where the yoyo is, etc. Then do the same thing for A and B and see who’s closest to exactly matching “the perfect version”. (with some adjustments for A and B not necessarily having the same length of arms, also needing to have camera positioned perfectly, etc, ec).
That’s a lot of work, though UV string and high-speed cameras and modern vision technology mean it’s probably not completely impossible, but also is “ability to perfectly replicate a trick” the right thing to be measuring either?
And, to go back to what some other people have said earlier in this thread, “does [doing X] make my practise more effective” for any X is something that’ll depend on the person. Maybe X is “listening to music”, and some people find it helps with rhythm, but other people find it’s distracting, or X is “doing exercises to warm up first” so that your body isn’t stiff, but some people just want to get on with throwing, etc. Maybe for some people using (say) a small yoyo does help, but for other people it doesn’t, and I suspect everyone needs to try different things to see what works for them.
For me personally, by far the biggest advantage of practising with multiple yoyos is that I’ll do more practising that way, completely separately from “am i using the optimal yoyo for a given trick”.
If I work on just “learning trick XYZ with the monarch”, then I can do that for probably 30 minutes at most, at which point I tend to start to get bored/tune out, and my practise becomes less effective, or I just give up. But if, instead, I switch to other yoyos to see what the trick feels like with different speed/weight/size/etc, I’ll keep on working on the trick because the variety helps keep me interested, so overall that’s a win because I’m doing more practise on that trick, and I’m still practising with attention, rather than stopping/practising badly.
(or switch to a different-but-related trick to work on some of the elements, though weirdly, I don’t find that’s mentally “as much of a change” as doing the same trick with a different yoyo even though it arguably is a bigger difference)
this is exactly what I was trying to get at. the benefit isnt in the “thing” or else everyone would practice/play the same way with the same yoyos, same string, etc. down the line if they wanted to be “fully optimized”. but there are way too many factors at play. the best anyone can hope for is to create the ideal play scenario, including gear, for them as a player. how a player interacts with their tool and frankly how much/frequently they interact with it, will have a greater impact by far than any singular quality of any yoyo
I only own a few yoyos, and there are only three I actually play with a lot. For new tricks I will start with my Shooting Star, but if I find down the line that I need more power or a slimmer throw, then I will pick up my Canon. If I feel like I need a wider yoyo to catch strings easier then I’ll pick up my Summer Solstice. Just depends on what I think I need and/or what I’m feeling