I thought it’d be cool to discuss the various tricks and elements that have gone in and out of style over the years.
It seems like we’ve just passed the point where finger spins were a big deal. Horizontal stuff I think will remain a staple of competitive for a long time.
I remember grinds being a huge deal when JD won Worlds and Andre was competing.
Around the mid to late 2000s, it seemed like every freestyle at smaller competitions had a big follow/whip combo. Around the same time there was a trend of “tunnels,” tricks where you would fold the string into tunnels/doorways and move them over the yo-yo. And tech 5A was pretty big around that time. 5A now is a lot more homogeneous than it used to be. It’s still impressive but less diverse.
Tech and slack started becoming more popular after Janos’s 2013 performance. What used to be popular in Japan and Asia before then, the kind of speedy and rail type styles started not doing as well in competition and has since faded out for the most part. Pure speed is less popular nowadays and even the speedsters like Yuki and Shion do it at a much higher level with advanced tech and horizontal.
Soloham became a thing I think in 2013 when Rei started doing it in competition
3a was a lot more nonsynchronous, slower, less smooth and just less structured pre-2011. Smooth, faster paced, symmetrical, and just good 3a started happening after hanks 2011 performance. Daisuke Shimada might’ve started 3a but Hank is the father of the modern 3a model.
Asymmetrical 3a became more popular around 2017 when Thawhir started to become more well known.
Hiroyuki Suzuki invented the speed combo
I’d say Gentry is responsible for a lot of the horizontal hop combos
More recently, Connor Seals started the neck trick trend and Shion started the around the head tricks.
His frontstyle was very strong and is still modern to this day but a lot of his sidestyle wouldn’t be very good nowadays. Long set up time for a lot of tricks for little reward and a lot of one yoyo moving, one yoyo stationary stuff. Pretty sure he’s one of the pioneers of the advanced corocoro combo tho so there’s that.
Hank kind of adopted and improved upon Kentaros frontstyle while also perfecting the modern sidestyle. Constant movement, structured and dense tricks for better scoring and presentation.
Nah just in general. Like I don’t think tunnels were ever in freestyles and tech 5A didn’t really show up in 5A freestyles either. There were some light tech elements but mostly video only dudes did tech 5A.
Something else that has emerged in a big way is 360 over the head tricks.
Back in the day I only really saw Harold Owens doing anything over head at all, and since last February when I started yoyoing again I’ve been seeing it everywhere.
Rejections and advanced laceration combos seem to be more prominent. Not that people didn’t used to do those, but they seemed to have expanded in a really huge way.
