Ok so this isn’t the first time this happened to me. I threw regularly from 2010-12 when I reached Kwijibo and felt like everything beyond that was just out of reach for me. As a result I ended up not really yoyoing at all for the next 3 years.
Over the weekend I was at my yoyo club when I felt like the same thing was happening, repeating the same old tricks over which got tiresome. Had a friend there show me Jensen Kimmit’s combo “yoyos are stupid and I hate them” which I got 1/3 of the way through the trick when I decided that I just couldn’t do the rest of the trick if my life depended on it. Moving on, tried to pick up Rancid Milk which again feel like I’m struggling with the very first few steps (I understand the mechanics of the trick). In general, I feel like as though I reached my peak and feeling like I can’t seem to execute even some of the tricks I do know. Some of the tricks I’m seeing seem to not make sense to me as of lately either (even if a trick is stupid simple).
What I’m trying to avoid is hitting a rut that’s going to make me put the yoyo down for another 3+ years and then be even worse when I pick a yoyo back up. Any tips on what to do?
I thought you’ve been working on your own tricks/combos? This is one of those things, sort of like growing pains when you’ve completed the traditional trick ladder but the routines players do on stage at competition still look light-years ahead in terms of difficulty for the most part. In the beginning, making progress is usually pretty simple, but progress becomes less easily quantifiable as you go. I think it’s helpful to work on your own material as well as collecting cool elements from other players and their combos to add to your own repertoire. Getting 1/3 of the way through someone’s combo isn’t a failure. It’s something new you learned you can add to another trick or a combo of your own. You may have the pieces already learned that you can put together, build on, and make something cool out of.
Watching other people learn and teach tricks is a great inspiration, I’m sure you know. Here’s a tutorial for a Hiroyuki Suzuki tech combo mrmatio did a tutorial on from Youtube. Worth learning and not too difficult. Sometimes finding inspiration is as simple as searching Youtube.
What I find helps me from falling into a rut is learning tricks that I’m interested in rather than slogging through tough tricks that I feel I should know as a yoyoer, but are not really interested in.
For instance, I don’t know ladder escape. I’ve never bothered to learn it because I don’t like it. It looks lumpy and awkward to me.
Also, keep a bunch of yoyo tricks in the works so if one is frustrating to learn, you always have others to go on with to keep it fresh.
Hang in there, Gumball!! We’d be sad if you left our little throwing community!
I Know how you feel man. I too have been having some trouble progressing. And I feel like when learning something new and difficult, all it does is make me mad. But then you take it slow, One piece at a time and slowly build up on the trick as you go. Then I feel like I am able to do the actual trick and I feel happy. But then you feel like that’s just not good enough and I’m right back where I started. Rancid Milk made me so angry and mad I just wanted to put the yoyo away forever. But taking it slow, I am now half way through the trick. WHoo. Almost there. I wish there was something more I could tell you to help you out. But I’m in the same bucket you are. Meeting up at contest will maybe help us progress and we can learn a lot from each other in person then over the computer, phone, or even on video. A in person to in Person throw session would allow us to teach each other a lot more.
I think that everyone hits ruts at one point or another in their yoyo journey. I know I’ve hit them myself, with one in particular that lasted for weeks. :-X
My best tip would be do whatever you can to inject enjoyment/fun back into your yoyoing.
For me, I find that whenever I get a bit stuck-in-a-rut, the best thing I can do it watch a few awesome videos to get me fired up:
(Here’s a fantastic one from recently)
Then, I grab the yoyo I enjoy playing with the most (in this case that’ll be my trusty Spring Rain Rally ‘Malcolm’), grab my ipod, put on a playlist of songs that I love, and then just throw without worrying about creating or hitting tricks perfectly. Just go with the throw.
I think its too easy to get disheartened when you start thinking in terms how good/innovative you “should” be, rather than enjoy how good you currently are. Heck I’m sure that even if you asked guys like Gentry and Zach they would be able to point out things that they wish to improve on, and we know that even the pros get disheartened at times and even stop throwing for long periods (Yuuki, Jensen and Augie being a few prime examples).
Sometimes you just need to let things flow and just enjoy throwing… and ironically that’s when I find I improve the most. The more you just take critical thinking out of it and just enjoy it, the less “ruts” will bother you.
Also, as Glenacius said, we enjoy having you around. I follow your trickcircles regularly, and I’ve definately seen you improve greatly over the time you’ve been throwing. It’d be a real shame to lose you.
Do you yoyo for fun or just to goof around? because some people seems to think having fun in yoyoing means goofing around and practicing like hours a day is not considered ‘fun’, which is not accurate. I learned this kinda the hard way. I’ve hit the plateau like few years ago, and always feels like I can’t go further much. Then I got hooked up with kendamas, which since I was still a beginner, it feels more rewarding since there are so much to explore… until I hit the plateau again in kendamas.
Then from kendamas one day I discovered my ‘mistake’, which is once I reach certain level, I just goof around all the time not really trying, BUT in my mind I felt like I was working hard, which is a completely delusional of me. I got into a comfort zone and not willing to go from there.
So I stepped up and started doing kendama sessions by myself, in public. Surprisingly it’s one of the best feeling going alone outside, because I get to focus on what I’m doing and not get distracted. I started hitting tricks I’ve never thought I could possibly do. I’ve learned a lot faster just in a few weeks.
And I know yoyoing is the same.
To put things into perspective, now think about what have you been doing (in yoyoing) in the last few weeks, like how many hours have you put into it? and in each hour, do you play non stop or you just have like 15 minutes session and 45 minutes sitting down? do you try making or learning new tricks or just kept doing the same thing over and over? etc. Learn your habit, see where the problem is, and tackle it.
Oh for me personally, it’s a lot harder learning other people tricks. It’s easier and even better if I just take a few elements from others, then try to make something out of it. I mean from a yoyo and a string there is practically limitless possibilities, the limit is simply what you make out of your mind.
One more thing, I heard this from two times AP champ Kharis when asked about his yoyoing habit. He said he likes ‘trying to find more tricks’ every time he yoyos alone, and usually not stopping until he got at least a new trick. Let’s say he was being lazy and yoyo once a week, at least he can still get about 50 tricks in a year, which is a lot. Once you find a new trick, you’re kinda forced to do things differently next time, hence different tricks, and so on.
I too have been throwing for many years, and I have seen people pick it up and surpass me in what seems to me no time at all. Yoyo clubs do speed up your learning curve, but they can also make you feel like you aren’t learning fast enough.
When I hit a rut, I just focus on the elements that I enjoy practicing. If you have fun throwing I don’t know how you could do any better than that.
Thanks guys, strangely enough I pick up my trusty firrox yesterday evening and just started revisiting things I knew and next thing I knew, I had an idea in the works.
Not a complete trick but it’s a start. I swear that Firrox does wonders as it’s not the first time that yoyo’s gotten me out of a situation similar to this.
With this said, I’m going to probably set Rancid aside, though there is one element that does interest me that I might still try to learn.
A lot of my learning technique lately has been learning just portions of tricks, especially the Cabin tutorials. Haven’t learned the entire tricks but have picked out since of the parts that interested me and went from there.
I guess in the end a lot of us can be hard on ourselves, at least at times I seem to be. I look at these others that has thrown for a couple years and are ‘better’ than me and tell myself that this is not a race and everyone learns differently. I feel like the past 10 months have actually been far stronger and meaningful than the past other 2 years I spent in the ladder tricks.
We’ve talked before about my philosophy on plateauing, so I’ll keep it short: if you abandon the premise of finding joy only in progression, and start finding joy only in playing (regardless and independently of progression) you will never have to worry about it. I learn new tricks only when I think, “a new trick would be fun!” or when someone has challenged me to it. And then I just get joy out of getting incrementally better and smoother at those tricks.
Taking a cue from yoyodoc: I learned to walk about 40 years ago. I got better at it for a few years, and then I kinda plateaued. But man, I still love me a good walk!
Boy can I relate to that. And I can’t even do the full trick ladder.
I’ve been playing music all my life, playing guitar for over 40 years, and I’ve been teaching music lessons once a week for over 10 years. The practice, advancement, plateau cycle of yoyo mimics the same cycle in music.
Howard Roberts is a great jazz guitar player who founded an amazing school in Los Angeles which is now called M.I. or Musician’s Institute. In one of his books he talks about the plateau cycle. That cycle looks like a staircase. You practice and practice and you’re on the flat part of the staircase. No matter what you do you don’t seem to be getting any better. Then you reach the part of the staircase where in goes straight up. This is where you THINK you’ve made progress because your playing really does get better. It feels like nothing happened for a long time, and then you suddenly got noticeably better in a short time, then you plateau again.
The important thing to remember is that the jump in ability didn’t come from the practice you were doing during that jump. It came from all that practice you did during the previous plateau. Even though it felt like you weren’t improving, you were. It just took particular amount of practice to cause this “improvement event” where you suddenly really were better. But it really isn’t sudden at all, it was caused by that previous plateau.
I’m stuck in the trick ladder at the Hidemasa Hook. I can do some of the higher tricks like Spirit Bomb (although I miss the last hop more often than not) but I’ve been stuck at the same point for months. I can’t to the hook or suicide. I can’t seem to do Eli hops which is an earlier trick even though I can do Boingy Boingy, Gyroscope and Kwijibo which are after Eli Hops. So I just took a break and started learning other tricks.
The “Impressive Intermediate Tricks” thread was an inspiration for me. From that I learned Gondola, Lotus Bloom, and Candy Slack. That inspired me to learn And Whut. Now that I can do those tricks I’m starting to get Iron Whip which has frustrated me for months. So taking a break from a specific trick to work on other tricks really worked for me.
But believe me, we’ve all been there. We all have somebody we look up to and think “I can never be that good”. And everybody has that feeling. I’m sure that even world champions like Gentry and Zack see tricks that make them think “What the heck was that? Holy Cow!”.
Went through a 4 year plateau’d phase, if anything I got a little worse.
For me I just had to practice a lot, been playing 1-2 hours every night and the past 3 months I’ve gotten back to where I was at my ‘peak’ and then some. Watching freestyles inspired me to push a little harder.
