The Basics of Counterweight Yo-Yo Tricks

Series Summary

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 series of free yoyo instructional videos, our professional competitor demonstrates how to do freehand yoyoing tricks with the yoyo attached to a counterweight instead of your finger. This setup allows you to slide the string through your fingers to do an amazing variety of tricks, such as the beesting, the braintwister and the atomsmasher. André Boulay tells you how to attach to attach the counterweight to the string and how to hold it in your hand, then you're off to the races. These tricks will amaze and astonish you, and as soon as you master them, you can do the same to your friends and family.

Video Transcript

"ANDRE BOULAY: So, this next section we're going to talk about is it's called a freehand counterweight or FiveA yoyoing. It's where you play with the yoyo. It's actually a knot connected to your hand. It's connected to a dice or some other object. The style itself is actually one of the most competitive styles of yoyoing today. When you go to a contest, the division is usually filled with incredibly, talented people, and it's one more of the more popular ones that people kinda gravitate towards to compete in. It's usually done where you release the dice, you throw the yoyo up into the air, catch it again, and you can do all sorts of crazy and fancy tricks where you whip dice around as the yoyo is swinging around parallel to it. It is actually invented by man named Steve Brown, back about five or six years ago. He was the first person to start playing around with letting go of a dice and actually doing tricks with the dice and the yoyo. And since then, it's been used by a yoyo company to sell yoyos with it. It's really turning into a part of the yoyoing today."