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May 20, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
27:21
Mike Adams talks about how to get started in the joyful art of POI SPINNING
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Hello and welcome.
This is Mike Adams, and this is about poi spinning.
I recently did a public demonstration in front of, I don't know, a few hundred people at the Exit and Build Land Summit event, and I decided to break out the poi.
Poi is spelled P-O-I, and it's a flow art.
It's a little bit juggling, a little bit Tai Chi with...
Strings or balls attached to the strings or sometimes flaming balls.
Typically, poi spinning was done with something that's on fire.
But because of LEDs, now today, you can get LED poi.
They're pretty cheap, too.
You can get them for $25 on Amazon or you can get the high-end ones that I got.
I'll tell you about those, which actually paint images in the air.
But poi spinning is something that's really remarkable for its benefits.
Talk about shoulder mobility, shoulder health, wrist health, also just cardiovascular fitness, hand-eye coordination, neurological workout.
Poi does all of those things, and that's why I strongly encourage you to check it out.
So in this special broadcast here, I'm going to tell you how to get started in poi.
A little bit of background about how I got started in it.
And then why you might want to do this.
It's a really great art and physical fitness exercise.
Like I said, it has so many health benefits.
And it's fun and it's beautiful.
Especially at night.
If you get the LED poi, you can do all kinds of amazing things with the lights.
And it's something that anybody can pick up.
It does take time, like any flow art.
But you don't have to be able to dance.
You notice that I'm not dancing.
A lot of people do poi with all kinds of exotic dances, and that's great, especially more when women do poi.
They do a lot of dancing moves together with it, and it's more of a dance than a technical poi spinning type thing.
The way I approach it is more masculine.
It's more of a power poi.
You notice my moves are really large and strong and fast and technically...
Some of them are technically difficult, although what I did publicly, I kept it simple.
I kept it to a lot of moves that I consider to be low-risk moves because I didn't want to screw it up on stage, although I did glitch a couple of times, but I was able to recover.
There's a lot more that I normally do when I'm practicing poi or just playing poi by myself.
A lot of things that I did not attempt on stage, just because they have maybe like a 20% failure rate.
And that's too high for a public performance.
So first of all, if you saw my video and you were just really blown away by it, because I heard that from a lot of people, people really loved it.
They were just astonished at how amazing it looks.
I do want to tell you that the poi moves that I'm using in that video are not considered advanced at all.
You can learn this.
You can get to that point within a few months, probably maybe a few weeks if you're really dedicated to the training.
And let me give you a little bit of my background of training in Poi and then also tell you how you can get started in Poi.
So my background is as a child, I played piano and I was a drummer.
So being a drummer from a very early age, before I was seven, I started training on percussion instruments.
Being a drummer does help you or any background in musical instruments will help you because it gives you a sense of timing.
And a lot of the patterns that you see Well, for example, in my presentation, what's called the forward weave pattern is a 3-3-3 pattern, 3 beats.
But then all the overhead stuff is 2 beats.
And so a lot of what you're doing is transitioning from 3 beats to 2 beats.
And then if I'm spinning from one side and then overhead and then to the other side, That transitions into a backward weave, but it goes to three beats again.
So having a sense of timing, any kind of music background will help you.
If you did even the flute, you know, whatever.
If you played trumpet, if you did anything, it's going to help you with poi.
A lot of it is about timing.
And, of course, a lot of it's about coordination.
So drumming is particularly good because you're doing two different things with your two hands.
I guess the same thing with guitar or whatever.
If you're used to doing different things with your hands, then that's going to benefit you in poi training.
Because in many cases, you're doing...
Completely different things with different hands, even spinning in different directions.
Although most of my presentation was in one direction, but you notice I started it out in opposite directions and then I switched my left hand to be a forward direction after like 20 seconds or whatever it was.
Think about your background and what skills or experiences you have that might be very useful here.
But I guarantee you, if you can drive a car, you can learn poi.
And just as you might have thought driving a car was very difficult when you were, you know, 15 or 16 or whenever you started driving, you're like, oh my gosh, there's so much to keep track of.
Multiple pedals, you know, especially if it was a stick shift.
What's this clutch do?
Oh, that just makes a grinding sound.
Awesome.
There's a lot to keep track of when you're learning to drive.
Same thing with poi, but very quickly it becomes natural and then you don't have to think about it at all.
It's fun to practice and it has so many health benefits.
So I first saw poi at a festival many years ago.
It was probably over 15 years ago.
And I saw someone perform it at, I think it was like the Raw Food Festival or something like that.
And when I saw it, I was immediately mesmerized and I thought, man, I want to do that.
And I'm pretty sure I can do that because part of my background also is juggling.
So when I was in college, I did some pretty intensive juggling training while I was skipping class.
I did make it through the university, by the way.
But one of the interesting things that happened during all that time was that there was, on campus, There was a British man who was known as a homeless juggler, and he would just juggle there with juggling pins and rings and everything.
And so one day I just said, hi, and hey, you ever juggled, you ever do two people juggling?
He's like, yeah, jump on in.
So he taught me two-person juggling, where we were passing at first, like beanbags back and forth, and then balls, and then pins, and then rings, and we would...
We would ultimately do...
I mean, this advanced over a period of many months to the point where we were doing...
And again, I was skipping class the whole time, but we were putting on quite a show on campus, let me tell you.
We would juggle seven rings between the two of us, which is extremely difficult because six rings is easy for a juggler.
Seven?
A whole different ballgame because now you have an extra ring, which means your timing is all jacked up.
Like somebody's doing three and somebody's doing four, and you're alternating timing back and forth.
So being able to juggle seven rings with a partner is no small thing.
And then we juggled pins, you know, the typical juggling pins, and we learned to juggle seven pins and then learned a lot of...
A special, you know, flourishes and things with the pins, like making them go behind your back and chucking them overhead and catching them in the middle of a juggling pattern and so on.
And then a friend of mine that I'd met a year earlier was a very accomplished juggler in college.
And even in college days, in our young, early 20s, he could juggle five balls.
Which is really something.
And he actually earned money for college by going to some commercial building.
I forgot where it was.
But he would actually juggle for money.
He had a collection plate, and he would do crazy juggling for money.
He was that good.
I was never as technically good as he was.
But again, he did teach me quite a few interesting things.
So the bottom line is, between drumming and juggling, And skipping class, I had a pretty good base of skills from which to learn poi.
And so when I picked up poi and started learning it, it came very easily to me.
Not to say that that's necessary.
Even if you have to work at it, it's still very rewarding.
But here's a quick test.
Can you circle your right hand in one direction?
Well, your right arm.
Like your right arm is a hand on a clock.
And just rotate your entire arm in one direction.
And then at the same time, take your left arm and rotate it in the opposite direction.
Can you do that?
A lot of people struggle with that.
If you can do that right away, then you're really advanced.
Most people cannot, but you can learn to do that.
And it's easy to learn, actually.
It just takes retraining your neurology.
If you can spin one arm in one direction and the other arm in the other direction, you can do some pretty cool things with poi, by the way.
So that's just a quick, easy test to kind of see if you are...
Especially gifted in poi, or poi potential, we'll call it.
But you know the old joke is like, can you pat your head and rub your stomach?
And again, a lot of people have trouble with that.
See if you can do it.
Can you pat your head and rub your stomach in a circle, let's say?
Well, it shouldn't be too hard to learn how to do that.
And you might struggle with it at first, but with a little bit of practice, you'll be able to do it.
So continuing my background, then I ended up learning some basic poi maneuvers, again, like 15 years ago or whatever it was, after seeing it performed publicly.
And I learned with a lot of difficulty, by the way, I didn't have any instructors.
There weren't how-to videos like there are now.
I mean, there was one video I bought of a performer.
But they weren't teaching you how to do it.
It was just like, watch this performance and then figure it out.
So that's what I did.
And it took a while, but I finally figured out the forward weave and the overhead maneuvers and some things like that.
Backward weave and butterflies and I don't know what all the names are of the different things that we do.
But today there are a lot more resources available in order to learn POI. So First of all, I think I may actually end up posting some how-to lessons on Poi.
Probably will.
Just to show you some basics on how to get started.
But if you want a more formal course, there is a really great instructor that I actually signed up with, I think, three weeks ago, just to brush up before my public performance.
I wanted to brush up on Poi and see if there were any new moves or anything that I could incorporate.
And his name is Nick Woolsey.
And Nick has a really great course.
I think it's called Poi Dancing.
And you can find that at Udemy.com, U-D-E-M-Y, which is a learning site.
And I think his course is $35.
I think that's what I paid for it.
And it's well worth it.
Nick is a great teacher.
And he's way more advanced than I am by a long shot, because he's been doing it forever, it seems.
And he's got very advanced poi methods and all kinds of interesting things.
In any case, check out that course at udemy.com if you want a more formal poi training course.
And then in terms of the actual light sticks that I was using, those are offered by a company called Lighttoys.cz.
They're from the Czech Republic.
Lighttoys.cz.
And those particular sticks that I was using cost about $1,500, by the way.
And they can break.
So you don't want to start with those.
You want to start with a pair of socks or whatever with a beanbag in it until you're really good to where you know you're not going to break your $1,500 poi.
And I even hit them in my show because I had only, believe it or not, I had only received those light sticks three days before that show.
And so, I know, it's kind of crazy that I even thought about performing that, but...
I wanted to do the light show and I found that company.
I ordered them and they had to ship from the Czech Republic.
I got them three days before and then I practiced and didn't quite have it nailed down, but I'm like, oh well, if I screw up, you know, I screw up, whatever, but it should be a fun show anyway.
And so now I'm going to train on those more so that I can have more proficiency with those devices.
By the way, the other interesting thing I found out about these light sticks is that they're a lot heavier than just spinning poi with poi socks and bean bags or whatever.
They're even heavier than just regular LED poi.
They're quite heavy.
I mean, when you pick them up at first, you're like, oh, that's not heavy.
But if you're spinning them at very high speed, they get heavy.
And of course, again, I'm doing high-speed power poi, and so these things give you quite a workout.
That's why I was out of breath after doing that routine, because I'd only trained with these for three days.
But it also helps me realize that if you do train with heavier items, like over time, you know, start with something easy.
Start with a little juggling ball in a sock, for example.
To just learn the moves.
But then over time, you can make it heavier and heavier and it's really building muscle in that case.
Building some serious muscle.
I mean, again, this is a wonderful fitness tool.
And then the other thing that happened is that I actually got blisters on my first two fingers for holding the straps that go to those.
Because they're heavier, there's a lot more friction.
And so I was actually performing with slight blisters.
I mean, it wasn't crazy.
It was tolerable, but it wasn't pain-free.
I'll just put it that way.
Now, the way those light sticks work, by the way, is...
They connect through USB cables to your computer and then you download the software called Light Composer.
And it's a piece of software where you can lay out the graphic images on a timeline.
And essentially it's a bunch of JPEGs or PNG files and you want them to show up at these specific times after you hit go.
And then those light sticks, they contain some really advanced circuitry, gyroscopic sensing, motion sensing, positional awareness circuitry.
And so then they display on the LEDs, they display the right pixel at the right moment when it's at the correct position in a circle.
And that way, if you spin it in a circle, it's actually painting a full image.
And the effect of that in person is very prominent.
But what you're seeing in this video is nothing at all like what it looks like with the naked eye.
When you're watching this in the real world, it is a persistent full circle image because it's kind of painted into your retina.
It looks way more amazing in person.
And that's why this poi art is best experienced in person.
And I encourage you to seek out.
There might be some fire spinning groups near you.
Maybe there's a poi spinning performance.
Maybe there's group poi.
Who knows?
But check it out and give them a visit.
See what it looks like and then pick it up yourself.
Now, let me give you some pointers on how to start.
The first thing to realize is that there's a performance plane.
So when you see me standing on stage there, I'm spinning in a way that the audience in front of me can see the full circle.
And you notice that everything I did, even though I turned my body, that all of my spins were You know, parallel with the audience, you could say.
So that's a performance plane.
Although, I wasn't perfectly staying within the plane, but I tried to.
When you are spinning poi, start with one hand.
You can just take a sock, or you can buy a poi sock online.
They're not expensive.
You could use a sock and put a beanbag in it, or just take a small handful of You know, corn or whatever and throw it in the bottom of a sock and you can practice with that.
And just start playing with it, spinning it in both directions, clockwise and counterclockwise with each hand.
Left hand, right hand, just one at a time.
The first thing to do with poi is to just play around with it.
Not to try to do crazy technical things, but just to have some fun, spin it around, but keep it in that plane.
That's the question at first, is keep it as if you're performing for an audience so that they can see the full circle.
And then you can just play around with it.
It's okay to act like a kid, too.
Just, like, swing it around, and you're going to smack yourself in the face a little bit, so maybe don't make the poi too heavy and use a nice fluffy sock.
And if you're a man, eventually you're going to crack yourself in the nuts, so just be mindful of that.
Try not to whack yourself in the nuts.
You're going to hit yourself and that's why you start with socks, fluffy things, instead of hard impact things that are spinning way too fast with sensitive electronics in them.
So just play around.
And your body is gonna have to open up in terms of your neurology and your musculoskeletal communication.
You're gonna have to get used to doing things that you've never done before.
And remember, you can spin it clockwise or counterclockwise with each hand.
So that's four variations to practice.
So again, just take a sock, start spinning it around clockwise with your right hand and then switch it, make it counterclockwise and spin it around a bunch And then switch hands.
Do it with your left hand.
Spin it high.
Spin it low.
Spin it fast.
Spin it slow.
Choke up on the sock.
Spin it small.
Small circles.
Or go all the way to the end of the sock and make big circles.
And you can also spin with your entire arm instead of just your wrist.
So you can make a giant circle with your arm.
And this is simply how you get started.
You'll notice that in my show I did, like at one point my left arm was making full circles.
The whole arm was doing a circle at half the speed that my right hand was doing the smaller circles.
So I was doing two circles with my right hand for every one circle with my left arm.
And that's a pattern that is really cool to watch because it looks like the small circle is chasing the big circle.
I mean, all kinds of optical effects that come out of this, but just play with it.
Spin it slow, spin it fast, spin it small, spin it big, high, low, side to side.
And just one hand at a time.
When you do that for a few hours, then you can start to do things like, hey, spin it behind your back, but keep it in the same plane.
And that's where you get into training.
Actual training courses with guys like Nick Woolsey can walk you through step-by-step how to start training your body to do those motions.
And it's a lot of fun.
And, of course, over time, then you'll start to spin both of your hands together, sometimes in the same direction, sometimes in different directions, sometimes in the same plane, sometimes one's in front of you, another one is behind you, sometimes one is overhead.
But that's how you get started.
So, enjoy playing around with poi and understand that the benefits are very real.
If you have shoulder pain, if you have...
Weakness in your arms, if you want to have more tone arms, if you want to have more mobility, poi is a great way to get started.
Now, of course, if you have an injury or something or a severe mobility limitation, don't hurt yourself, spinning poi.
Obviously, work within your body's boundaries.
But over time, you'll find that spinning poi opens up the joints.
It boosts circulation.
It creates a wonderful feeling.
Your muscles will be more flush with healthy blood.
Your arms feel more mobile.
If you've ever suffered from repetitive motion injury from, let's say, sitting at a desk too much, typing too much, or whatever you do, this is a great way to add some variety.
To your movement.
A lot of us, as we get older, we lack that movement.
We lack the mobility that we had as kids.
And then your joints tend to stiffen up.
And nutritionally, by the way, if you want to enhance your joint mobility, use turmeric as a spice that really supports Joint mobility and supports your natural inflammatory response.
Turmeric is a wonderful herb.
Of course, at our store, healthrangerstore.com, we have turmeric herb.
We do heavy metals testing for it.
We do pesticide testing.
We have the most extensive mass spec testing lab for any online retailer that I've ever heard of.
So if you want clean turmeric or other supplements or herbs that can help support your lifestyle, check us out at healthrangerstore.com.
In the meantime, I am going to put together a new program for you.
So this time I won't perform it live in front of an audience.
I'm going to perform it in a forest at night.
My own forest.
And I'll put together a new song and a new program and some new moves and try to have that for you within a few weeks.
Let you check that out, see what you think.
And I'm going to keep studying the Nick Woolsey course also and just see what other moves he's introducing and things that I can come up with myself and just keep it fun, you know?
You got to keep it fun.
Alright, thank you for listening.
Mike Adams here, The Health Ranger, naturalnews.com.
Take care.
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