Thread: 1A, I'm leaving you (sort of)

Dear 1A,
You have been my pride and joy since I first got into yo-yoing and I'm sure that most other people would say the same thing. Most people see you as the most attractive style and focus the majority of their attention on you. This is fine and you deserve the attention.

I remember the fun I had with you. I'd buy shiny new yo-yos and stay up all night playing. Now I just do the same couple of tricks without any passion. 'Innovation' feels like a joke to me. Furthermore, you seem to be obsessed with making all tricks more technical and you favor players who do their tricks as fast as possible.

It has been fun and we've had our good times, but I don't think we are seeing eye to eye anymore. We'll still hang out and have our fun, but I think it's best that I shift my focus to something else. Currently I'm in a burnt out state with no sense of creativity, but I hope to come back do great things with you in the future. Until then...

I felt that way a while back. So I started over doing 1A with my other hand.
Brought the level of challenge back up. Plus: seeing a trick backwards gives you ideas for other new things.

Add a counter weight to the string, you don't have to use it if you don't want, but it sure opens things up. 5a/1a is my favorite style of play.

I've always been horrible at 5a, but I occasionally will play around with it. My primary playing style is now 2a. I love how calm and relaxing it is. Instead of focusing on complex string manipulations, you get to focus on smoothly moving the yo-yos to keep them looping how you want them to. Your arms form one fluid motion all the way down to the tips of your fingers. Some of the tricks are silly difficult (here's looking at you tangler), but I can see myself getting better with each practice session and the feeling of finally landing that difficult trick feels so much more worthwhile than it did with 1a.

I originally decided to try 2a because it looked really hard and really impressive. I didn't expect to ever be any good at it or even enjoy it, but I haven't had this much fun with yo-yoing in a long time.