How To Do A Grinding Yo-Yo Trick

The history of the Yo-Yo is a long and sordid tale, beginning in the Philippines sometime before 500 B.C. Once possibly used as a weapon, the Yo-Yo developed into its modern form in 1866 when it was patented under the name “whirligig”. With a ridiculous name like whirligig, it's no wonder the dizzying disks didn't take. Finally given the respectable name of Yo-Yo, the children's toy achieved ridiculous heights of popularity in the 1920's and then again in the 1960's. Advances in Yo-Yo technology in the 1990's saw yet another resurgence of Yo-Yo culture, sparking the World Yo-Yo competition held annually in Florida to showcase a variety of Yo-Yo tricks. Yo-Yo's can also be seen in film and television, though most often as weapons for small, animated children.

In this free instructional video, our expert will demonstrate more advanced Yo-Yo tricks for the advanced Yo-Yoer. Our expert will show step-by-step instructions for advanced Yo-Yo tricks, like the iron whip trick, the shockwave, and the magic drop trick. If you've been looking for a challenge to update your Yo-Yo skills you'll find them here with tips and techniques from a Yo-Yo expert.

"Next thing, this is advanced part two. We're going to deal with something called Grinding. It's cool looking. It involves getting the yoyo to land on your body itself, get it to spin on your body. There are lots of different moves. We're going to teach you a bunch of variations as we go through it. It's really good to have a yoyo that has some metal to it. I can grind pretty well with plastic yoyos too, but the metal really helps the length of the grind, the duration, helps the overall spin of the yoyo itself. It helps cut down the friction too. You want a really really strong throw. When I throw I snap my yoyo as hard as I can to get it to really go. It's really important because the faster it's going the longer it's going to go and it's going to look better. So this is what a grind looks like. I throw it and I pop it up. That goes, walks, it's kind of like walking the dog right across your arm. Let me show you that again. It looks like this. It's a cool looking trick. A good way to start practicing this move is, throw a really strong trapeze; take your throw hand and your non throw hand just kind of guides it on to the hand like that. Try and point your hand a little bit side ways. There's actually, you want your arm to point like this, so you kind of feel there's kind of like a little bone that goes through here. It's a really good place to help guide the yoyo up. If the yoyo will sit it will just fly right up your arm like that. So land it on there when you first start just try and get the yoyo to hit it and shoot straight across. It's still pretty impressive if you can just get it to go right across; it kind of looks like it's walking the dog across your arm. You can also try tilting your arm down a little bit lower this will get it to stall a little bit more, it will kind of go back and forth on your arm. Again, the harder you throw the better this is going to work. Eventually, with a little practice, you can give it a good hard throw, and pop the yoyo up and land it onto your hand, like that, and get it to walk across. That's my favorite way to do it. I think it looks really cool, it looks really impressive. A really strong throw, get it to shoot across your hand and come back and catch. And that's grinding."