Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Using Strikes Correctly

by Crazy Ivan


Being a good hacky-sacker helps out a ton when it comes to being a good Myachi player.  Hacky-sackers generally have some of the hardest motions in the game down before they start playing.  Not only do they take to the foot tricks quicker, but they also usually "get" the hand motions faster.  They understand the nature of the aerial and they see a lot of the possibilities right away.  So if I teach an avid hacky-sacker the 360 and the Illusion, they'll usually figure out the Wolverine, the 720, the Double Illusion and the Sonic on their own.  Moving from footbag to Myachi is like moving from piano to guitar; they're both really different, but knowledge of one helps you learn the other.

That being said, for all the advantage the hacky-sacker has, there is one disadvantage that they must overcome.  When I teach a hacky-sacker to play Myachi, the very first thing most of them do is start batting the Myachi with the back of the hand.

This is the wrong way to go, as any Myachi player can tell you.  Sure, you can bat a Myachi around on the back of your hand all day if you want but (a) it doesn't look very cool, (b) it's hard to keep under control, (c) it kind of hurts your hand and (d) it's not very fun.  That's just not the game that we play.  But that's primarily the game that most hacky sack players are used to.  There's is a game of consecutive strikes; of keeping the sack going.

Myachi is, of course, much more a game of style and control.  So one of the first things I tell people (and indeed one of the first instructions you'll read on your official Myachi playbook) is not to strike or bat the Myachi.  It's something that we're always pretty clear on at first.

But then, as you get better and better at the game the strikes find their way back into your shreds.  Usually the Trampoline is the first one to get there, but then the kicks and knee-pops show back up along with moves like the Popper or the Melon Popper.  Eventually, strikes become a pretty big part of the game.  Having a solid toe-save can be one of the most important aspects of freestyle shredding and Fu.  So that leads a lot of people to wonder why we discourage strikes so much at first.  It is, after all, a pretty substantial part of the game.

There are a few reasons that we discourage strikes and foremost of them is simply that it's really difficult to learn to control a Myachi if you're striking it.  You kind of have to learn the control first.  It's also important to control the spin of the Myachi leading into a strike, otherwise you catch a point or corner that causes the Myachi to spin out of control.  So the first and most important reason to discourage striking is that it makes the game easier to learn.  But the drawback to that is that many people never really learn to control their strikes.

Eventually this becomes a weakness.  As I already mentioned, having a good kick-save helps a ton in both freestyle and Fu, but weak striking abilities are even more detrimental in a game of MYACH.  Even novice games include multiple Trampolines, but among veteran players, marathons of kicks or alternating Poppers are not at all uncommon.  So clearly a well rounded Myachi player will need to master this element of the game as well.

The important thing to remember when you're working strikes is the angle of the Myachi.  If the Myachi is flat at the moment of the strike, you'll have maximum control of it.  The more off-angle it is, the more difficult it will be to control.  The is true of all strikes, but the tougher the strike, the more important it is.  Even a beginner can recover pretty easily from an off-angle Trampoline, but a Toe Pop or an Instep Kick to the corner of a Myachi can be a disaster.

The other thing to keep in mind as you practice is that strikes usually come in clumps.  It will do you a lot of good to master an Instep Kick, but it will do you a lot more good to master 4 in a row.  This better prepares you for MYACH games, comes in handier in kick save situations and it forces you to learn to time your kicks even with a Myachi that's spinning like crazy.

And unlike most trick types, the strikes are a breed of move that you actually want to stick together in a shred.  With almost any other type of trick, I hate to see it clumped together in a shred.  I hate it when somebody, for example, does all their centrifugals in one long sequence within a larger shred.  The same is true of aerials, traps, portals and almost all other categories of trick.  But strikes are completely different.  The visible effect of a strike is multiplied every time you add another strike to the end of that.

The reason is obvious.  Even someone unfamiliar with Myachi can tell that stringing a bunch of strikes together is difficult.  You audience can see the inherent chaos in the move.  Sprinkling a few kicks here and there in your shred is very effective; it gives you punctuation points and a good audible kick really wakes the audience up.  But offering a long chain of strikes is far more impressive.  When you start kicking, the audience is half-expecting every kick to go wild and the more you do in a row, the more tense the audience gets.  By the end of 10 or 12 consecutive strikes, you might find your audience holding their breath in anticipation of the miss that never comes.

That being said, if you go much further than 10 or 12 strikes the routine becomes predictable and starts to get boring.  Even though I encourage people to use many strikes back to back in a routine, I still endorse using strikes sparingly.  It's not a huge part of the game and it shouldn't be.  A little chaos is awesome, but this is a game of control.

So my suggestion when it comes to using strikes in a shred is to get them all out of the way in one big chunk. Poppers, kicks, arm-attacks and all in one long sequential shred and then no more strikes for the rest of the routine.  The two real exceptions to this rule are the Trampoline (which is an audience favorite and can fit in anywhere) and the Flying Fish (which can't be done in sequence and should never be used twice in the same routine).

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