Mastering the Weak Side

by Crazy Ivan

Back in April, I wrote a blog entry about using "Adds" to make your repertoire of tricks more dangerous in a game of MYACH.  The list included variations like moves where you have to keep your foot off the ground or moves where your arm can't go above your head; things that make moves tougher but don't actually change the move that you're doing.

The most common, most effective and most important of these is the "weak side" variation.  It is a commonality in almost all skill toys that what you master on the right side, you must then master on the left.

There are a ton of reasons for this, of course.  The most important is that being able to do moves on both sides open you up to new moves.  If you can do a 720 on the right hand but not on the left hand, you're going to have a lot of trouble hitting a Double Wolverine.  If you can Clipper Delay on your right foot but not your left, good luck mastering the River Dance.

Mastering moves on the weak side is also a great strategy in MYACH.  Something as simple or common as a Mantis might not be worth much in a MYACH game, but if you shift that over to the weakside elbow you may have just earned yourself a letter.  Even people who are pretty good at weakside Mantis probably aren't 100% on it or even as close to 100% as they are on their strongside.

There are other benefits to mastering moves on both sides, of course.  One is the simple fact that it doubles the number of challenges that face you as a fan of Myachi.  We all know how fun it is to master a trick that once seemed out of reach and doubling the number of such potential successes is probably reason enough to justify the effort by itself.

But if that's not enough for you, consider just how physically beneficial it is to have equal use of both sides of your body.  Sure, you might not find a lot of day to day situations that require a left-armed Mantis, but you'll constantly find yourself in situations where it would be nice to be as good at catching with your weak hand as your strong.

If you want to dig a little deeper, we can talk about the mental benefits of ambidexterity as well.  As I'm sure you know, the left half of your brain (essentially) controls the right side of your body and the right side of your brain (essentially) controls the left side of your body.  By doing activities like Myachi, juggling or playing an instrument; activities that require engaging both sides of your body; are vastly superior mental exercises than those that favor or exclusively use only one side of your body.

This might seem inconsequential to you know, but emerging research keeps showing this huge and undeniable association between juggling and having a healthy brain late in life.  It's easy to take your brain for granted when you're young, but the older you get (trust me on this one), the more you start to worry about your hardware going obsolete.  The primary mechanism that juggling uses to keep your brain limber (it is currently believed) is the manner in which the exercise crosses the midline of the brain.

On a less important and more practical note, mastering your weak side will also make it easier to teach Myachi to others.  I find that if I'm teaching a right handed person, they learn much easier if I do all my tricks switch.  It makes sense if you think about it; this way I'm mirroring what they should do.  They don't have to look at my right hand and reverse the image in their minds before trying it.

A good Myachi player should strive to be ambidextrous.  Back when I was earning my living as a juggler I used to spend about 20 minutes a night practicing writing with my left hand.  I kept all my practice sheets so I could see how I improved over time.  To many this seemed like a wasted effort, but I've always been of the mind that learning something new is a benefit all by itself.

So as soon as you finish reading this (and you're close), try this out.  Do a 360 with your strong hand.  Then do a 720 and if you've got it, do a 1080.  Keep going to whatever level you top out at (1440, 1800, etc).  Now do the same thing on your weak hand.  You'll see right away that you've been neglecting it.  Even if you can pull the 1080 on the weakside, it will be clumsy and uncomfortable.

And then get to work fixing that.

The Value of Practice

by Crazy Ivan


4 weeks ago to the day Maverick and I put up a little video of us messing around on the Slack Line.  It was only my 2nd day on it and Mav's 3rd so we were understandably terrible at it.  We were still having fun, of course, which is all that really matters when it comes to toys.

But since then we've been hard at work practicing.  Of course, Slack Line isn't like Myachi.  You can't practice slack-lining every day because you have to wait for good enough weather (kind of hard to do in the snow and/or rain) and it takes a lot of physical effort.  You can practice Myachi even if you're bed ridden, but if you're so much as a bit under the weather, slack lining is out.

So over the past 4 weeks me and Mav have taken every chance we can to get some practice in.  We'll come home sore after a day's work and spend an hour or more walking back and forth on that thing, missing new tricks and occasionally hitting them.  With Kid out of the country and all the craziness we've had going on at the schools we haven't gotten anywhere near the practice that we were hoping for.

But all that being said, practice pays off.  We're walking at a slightly longer distance now and we have way more control of what we can do.  We're probably building all kinds of weird stabilizer muscles along the way as well.

I wanted to post this video because I know a lot of you saw the first video we did and I want to point out what a little bit of practice can do for you.  Between the two of us we've put in maybe 12 or 13 hours actually on the slack line over the last month (that works out to an average of about thirteen and a half minutes a day each) and that's been enough to make a marked improvement.



Obviously we both still have a long way to go before we've mastered this thing but every day we get closer to it.  I'll be posting another video around the 22nd of April (weather permitting) and hopefully we'll have gotten better by then.  I don't know about you, but I'm dying to see Maverick pull a Crypto on that thing.

When You Run Out of Tricks

by Crazy Ivan

Ask an aficionado of any skill toy how many tricks there are that one could learn with that skill toy and they'll tell you the number is infinite.  It doesn't matter if they're into yo-yo, juggling, fingerboards, footbag, poi spinning, frisbee, kendema or skateboarding; they'll all offer the same answer: "There's no limit to what you can learn."

Technically this is true, of course.  There are an infinite number of tricks that can be done with any of these skill toys.  There's no end to the possibilities with any of them and yet despite that, pretty much everybody eventually stops learning new stuff.

The same is true, in a sense, with Myachi.  We jokingly say that the trick possibilities with Myachi are even more infinite than they are with other skill toys.  Obviously that's a ridiculous statement; one thing can't be more infinite than another.  Despite that, the statement still has meaning.  To explain, I'll need about 8 more paragraphs and some bullet points.

I'll use juggling as my example here because other than Myachi, it's the skill toy I'm most familiar with.  When you first learn to juggle there are a ton of tricks in front of you.  Some are easy and you learn those one's pretty quick.  Others are harder so it takes you longer to master those.  Others are so hard that you never learn them.  So no matter how good you get, you will always be somewhere along this line of possible tricks.  There will be the tricks that you've learned behind you and the ones that you haven't learned in front of you.  When you first get into juggling (or any skill toy), you move pretty fast down the line of tricks,  but as the tricks get harder you move slower and slower.

Regardless of the skill toy, almost everybody eventually stops at some point on this line.  They get to a point where the tricks that are still in front of them are too hard.  And when I say too hard, I don't mean that they're too hard for them to do.  Nothing is too hard for anyone to do if you practice enough.  What I mean here is that they're so hard that they are never going to put enough practice in to learn them.

Some people, of course, never reach this point.  There are professional and competitive skill toy enthusiasts who dedicate their lives to juggling ever more balls or doing ever more consecutive 720s with a footbag.  There are plenty of examples of this in the world of extreme sports if you, like me, look at a skateboard as a skill toy.

But the vast majority of people who skate are never going to the X-Games.  The vast majority of people who play hackey sack are never going to compete in a pro footbag tournament.  Most of them will eventually find the point along the line where they are comfortable and settle in there.  They'll probably still learn a new trick here and there but by and large they'll spend their time polishing up the stuff they already know and working it in combos.

Now like I said, Myachi is no different than all these other skill toys, but the possibilities in our world are just a little bit more infinite.  The reason is that there are ultimately more tricks at every skill level with Myachi.  There are an infinite number of tricks with every skill toy, but their aren't an infinite number of "beginner" tricks.  With yo-yo or footbag there may be some 12 to 20 tricks a beginner can learn within a few days of dedicated practice.  With Myachi that number is over 100.

What's more is that Myachi branches out into so many different skill sets.  When you get to the really advanced levels of Myachi and start finding your wall you can always turn to a different type of trick.  A lot of people get great at hand tricks before they even start mastering the foot tricks.  Once they reach their wall with foot tricks they'll move on to juggling tricks.

In footbag, all the tricks are foot tricks.  In juggling all the moves are juggling tricks.  In yo-yo all the moves are yo-yo tricks.  Myachi combines elements of so many skill toys that there's always another type of trick to move to when one starts to frustrate you.

So after the long convoluted answer, let me give you a few simple answers to the basic question here.  "What do you do when all the tricks in front of you seem too hard and you feel like you've hit your wall with Myachi?"

• Get with a friend and learn some tandem tricks.  Sure, you can do an Under the Leg toss and an Under the Leg Catch, but can you catch UtL from somebody else's UtL throw?
• Get balanced and start learning the stuff you know on your strong hand and foot with your weak hand and foot.  If you can do a Toe Stall equally well on both feet, that opens up a world of tricks on its own.
• Bring another Myachi in and see what you can do.  Doesn't matter how many you're using.  If you're already doing 2 Myachi tricks start looking for 3 Myachi tricks (hint: they don't all include juggling).
• Subscribe to the Myachi You-Tube channel and learn the Trick of the Day everyday.  Then look for ways to use it in combos with the moves you already know.
• Get creative and try to come up with something new.  With all the possibilities out there, hundred or even thousands of tricks still wait to be discovered.
• Bring another prop in with your Myachi.  Monk does some awesome stuff with a Myachi and a Cup.  I like doing Myachi with a ring or a basketball.  Any additional prop will add a ton of new tricks.
• Do Myachi on something.  Animal and Mav do a lot of tricks while longboarding.  Monk does tricks while he's on his bike and I often shred while on stilts or a unicycle.  Learning to Myachi on something like that can add tons of new challenges to the game.
• Hit up the Wednesday Night Brawls online and challenge somebody to a game of MYACH.  Either you'll win and feel awesome or you'll lose and find some weaknesses you need to work on.
• Try something you've never tried before.  Focus in on a really tough trick that you thought was too hard for you and surprise yourself when you master it.
• Play some Myachi Fu or some Myachi Golf and focus on something other than tricks for a while.
• Focus on teaching other people instead of learning new stuff.  It's a much more interesting challenge and sometimes it's also a much more rewarding one.

If you feel like you have anything to add to the list, please leave it in the comment section below.