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Learn how to do Barrel Rolls, Flips and Three great combos from this iconic yoyo trick.

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Barrel Rolls Yoyo Trick
In this video I am going to teach you the trick Barrel Rolls, and it looks like this.

Now, Barrel Rolls is probably the first really exciting String Trick that you are going to learn, it actually looks and feels like a real trick. In addition to teaching you Barrel Rolls, I am also going to teach you 3 combos you can build off of Barrel Rolls, each one gets a little bit more difficult and incorporates just a little bit more. So, if you like this trick as much as I do you can take it to the next level and also experiment with combo building with a trick that you already know.

But first, let’s just learn the trick. The first thing that you need to do in order to do Barrel Rolls is get the yoyo into a Front-Mount. We do teach the Front-Mount in another video, in our Brain-Twister video, we actually teach you a fast way to get into it and also the regular way. I’ll just reiterate that, but if you want to check that out, it actually has a lot more tips about how to deal with the yoyo on the string, so you do want to watch that video.

To get into Barrel Rolls, all you need to do to get into the Front-Mount, all you need to do is position your finger in-between you and the string. Lift the string up, set the yoyo onto the string, and then bring your hands together. Then, to get into Barrel Rolls, all you are going to do is drop your yoyo hand a little bit, then insert the first finger of your yoyo hand into the string, and that gets you setup to do the trick. To do the first part of the trick, just swing the yoyo a little bit, and when the yoyo is as close to you as it is going to get, just bring your yoyo hand right under the yoyo, just like that, and you will see the yoyo kind of just naturally hops right over your finger. If you are paying attention, you will notice that you are now in another mount you are familiar with, the Split-Bottom Mount. We actually have another video on the Split-Bottom Mount, and you might want to check that one out as well because we teach you several different ways to get into the Split-Bottom Mount, and a lot of people when they do Barrel Rolls they skip the first step, get right into the Split-Bottom Mount and then continue on with the trick. If you want to learn some of those more interesting ways to get into the Split-Bottom Mount to get into this trick you might want to check that video out.

Once you are into the Split-Bottom Mount, or to think of it another way, once you have done the first Roll in Barrel Rolls, then you you need to do the second roll. That works pretty much the same way. You are just going to swing the yoyo toward you. When the yoyo gets as close to you as it is going to get take your opposite hand, and this time push straight down under the yoyo – make sure to keep the strings lined up – and just like before, the yoyo is going to hop right over that string. Then, look at this, if you bring your hands together which is the next part of the trick, you are right back where you started. Now you can just repeat what you already know. Swing the yoyo toward you, bring your hands under the yoyo, once you have done two rolls bring your hands together, then you have completed Barrel Rolls.

You may have noticed, at this point, that I did dismount from where I started. It is just as obvious as you might think. You are just going to get into the trick, once you have done two rolls you are right back to where you started. Since you are right back to where you started. Since you are right back where you started, all you need to do is pull your first finger out of this loop created by the string. You are into a front-mount, and you can dismount from the front-mount however you want. That is how Barrel Rolls work.

Just like any trick, once you get into it you realize that you are going to run into some problems, so I am going to deal with those right here. The main problem people have with Barrel Rolls happens after the second roll. Let’s get back into it. We are going to do our first roll, and then our second roll. I have already commented about how you want to bring your hands together. That is not just to get you back to where you started. It actually helps you perform the trick a little bit better. Again, we are going to get into it, one, two, the big problem that a lot of people have, is they like to do the first roll again, without moving their hands together and that tends to be what happens. The yoyo kind of falls over, it doesn’t roll over your hand nicely and it tends to hit your hand as you are doing that first roll again. If that is happening to you, most likely you are rushing it a little bit, and you are not bringing your hands together in-between that second roll and going back into the first roll. Again, just to reiterate, you are going to go one, two, bring your hands together. One, two, bring your hands together.

As I have already pointed out, when you do this trick, the flow of the trick is really, really important. It is what makes the trick work. You move your hand down underneath the yoyo, alternating of course, whenever the yoyo gets as close to you as possible. What is so cool about Barrel Rolls is that it creates the flow for you as you are doing the trick. If you look at how we did the first one, you are going to swing the yoyo to get it started, but after I do the first roll, look at that, the yoyo naturally swings right toward me. I can use that swing and do the second roll, bring my hands together. Look, the yoyo is still swinging so when it swings towards me I can go back into the first roll, it swings towards me, go into the second roll. As you can imagine, as you speed up the trick, and as you start to match your rolls with every time the yoyo swings, that is when you start to get that really nice flow. It swings towards you, you go to the next one. It swings towards you, you go to the next one. Just make sure to bring your hands together after every second roll, and that gets you right back into the trick.

Another thing that is going to be happening as you perform Barrel Rolls, you will notice that the string is going to be wrapping around the first finger of your yoyo hand. I’ll just do a couple of rolls, just like you would. If you look at the first finger of my yoyo hand, you can see those strings are wrapping around it. That is totally normal, that is the way the trick is supposed to work. When you dismount you can just let those strings fall right off your hand. That will get you right back to where you started, and you can do your normal dismount.

Before I get into building combos with Barrel Rolls I do want to teach you one additional dismount technique. It is pretty similar to what you already know, but it kind of increases the speed of the dismount, which could make it look a little bit better. What you want to do for this one is after you do your second roll, instead of bringing your hands together, all you are going to do is drop the loop of string off the first finger of your yoyo hand, just like that. Now you can see you are still in a front-mount, but your hand is a little bit closer to the yoyo. That sets you up for other tricks that you might do off your Barrel Rolls, like Reverse Flips, you just go one, two, drop here, this is your setup for your Reverse Flip. If you have not learned that, again, we have another video on that. Then you can dismount and bring the yoyo back to your hand.

When you are in the flow of Barrel Rolls, it almost looks like you are tossing the yoyo forward if you do this right after your second roll. Let me show you what that looks like. You do one, two, let’s do another one, and then as soon as you get here you drop the string and watch this. Just like that. See how it kind of looks like I am tossing the yoyo forward, but really all I am doing is I am using the flow as the yoyo is moving forward on that second roll I drop the string off the first finger of my yoyo hand. Just like that. Now I am setup, again, for possibly Reverse Flip dismount, but you can do other tricks as well.

Once you have mastered Barrel Rolls, and you are starting to get the hang of it and it is feeling comfortable, then you want to take it to the next level. The first thing you want to do if you want to take it to the next level is actually something a lot of people don’t talk about a whole lot with Barrel Rolls, but you want to learn how to do it in reverse. It is not that much more difficult to do it in reverse, and you can do it in reverse on the Front-Mount, but it is actually a little bit easier to learn it in reverse on your side-mount. If you have already learned Man on the Flying Trapeze, you will know everything you need to know to learn this trick. If you have not, again, we have a great video on that, that will really help you out. Once you get the yoyo onto the Trapeze, everything works the same, it is just backwards. What you are going to do is you are going to take your first finger on your yoyo hand and you are going to insert it right in-between these two strings. Then, instead of swinging the yoyo toward you and doing the trick, you are going to swing it away. As soon as the yoyo is as far away from you as possible, you are just going to bring your hands straight down, now you are into this, kind of like a Split-Bottom Mount, it is actually called the Hydrogen-Mount, regardless you are going to swing the yoyo away, bring your hand under the yoyo, bring your hands together. Once you pull your finger out, you are right back into a Trapeze. Again, everything you have already learned applies the same here, you can get that same flow every time the yoyo is as far away from you as possible you can bring your next hand underneath the yoyo. Make sure to bring your hands together and you can see the flow works just like this. That is really nice to learn on the Trapeze that will actually give you some more stuff with the yoyo on the Trapeze if you want to incorporate Barrel Rolls.

The cool thing is once you have learned how to do that you are now ready for your first combo. For your first combo all you are going to do is pair a forward and reverse Barrel Rolls together. Again, we will do this on the front-mount. Let’s say you do two sets of Barrel Rolls. No you have the string wrapped around your fingers. If you do the same technique you learned on the Trapeze, you just reverse it, one, two, bring your hands together, one, two, bring your hands together. Now those wraps are gone off your finger. That’s your first combo to just do a Barrel Roll and then reverse it. Do a Barrel Roll and then reverse it. If you pair them together like that, those wraps just go away and you are right back to where you started.

That particular combo is kind of fun because it help you get used to flow in different directions. It is not that much more impressive than just Barrel Rolls, but we are just getting started.

The second technique that I want to show you involves a new element, it is very similar to Brain-Twister, but it is just a little bit different. What you want to do in this case is you want to do your first Barrel Roll, now you are in the Split-Bottom Mount. What you want to do here, again, this is a new technique, you are going to swing the yoyo, and instead of doing a Barrel Roll where you bring your opposite hand under the yoyo, you want to rotate both hands around with the yoyo. That looks like this. Then you are going to drop your hands down to slow the yoyo down, see how I do that. That stops the roll. The neat thing about that is it allows you to pair it together with Barrel Rolls to do some really interesting techniques. Let me show you this one again, this is the second combo. All you are going to do is add one of these flips in the Split-Bottom Mount in between every set of Barrel Rolls. Every time you get into a Split-Bottom Mount you are going to add one of these flips. Let me show you how that looks. You get into the Split-Bottom Mount, and then you do the Split-Bottom Mount Flip, and then you go one, two, and then you do a flip. Watch this, if you do the flip as soon as you do that second roll, see how it pairs together like that? Let me get back out to the beginning. I’ll just, every time I get into the Split-Bottom Mount I am going to do one of those flips. Look how nice this looks. You do a flip. One, two, flip. One, two, flip. See how that works? One of the problems with this is, as you can see, the string wraps around my finger twice as fast. If you want to incorporate this with your first combo and start to do some stuff in reverse, then you can get rid of those wraps as well.

The way that I have already showed you how to do the flip is in the Split-Bottom Mount. That works really well for your forward flip, as long as you move everything together, everything works really well. It is a little more tricks, it can be done, to do that in reverse. But it is actually a little bit easier to do the reverse flip if you are in the other mount, when your finger is just inserted into the Front-Mount. If you want to do this in reverse, then what you can do is do two Barrel Rolls, now you are back into this mount, and then for some reason that just gives you a little bit more control to do your reverse flip.

If you want to pair that together with your forward Barrel Rolls and your reverse Barrel Rolls, this is what it looks like. You are going to do your first roll, that gets you into your Split-Bottom mount, do your forward flip, then you are going to do a reverse Barrel Roll, which again, puts you back into this kind of Brain-Twister Mount, and then do a reverse flip, just like this. Watch what happens when you pair both of those together. You are going to do a roll, then a flip, and then a reverse roll and a reverse flip. A roll and a flip, a reverse roll and a reverse flip. See how that works? If you do that instead of on the first roll of each one, if you do it on the third roll, because that will get you back to where you started, then you can get a nice Barrel Roll flow going, then you reverse it. So, check that out. Let’s do one, two, three roll and then you go back, one, two, three roll, and now you are back. Look, no wraps are on your finger. Again, these are all progressive. Just learn one element at a time and you can incorporate it, build it together. You can match these things up however you want. As you build and build and put these elements together, then it forms a really impressive trick.

For the third combo, let me just show it to you first, and then I will explain how it works. It looks like this. You might be looking at this thinking, that has absolutely nothing to do with Barrel Rolls, but in fact it is just a repackaging of everything that I have already showed you. Again, we are just going to do things in a different order. What I have already explained is that this forward flip, again, what you are going to do is rotate the yoyo and both hands together, the forward flip is easier when it is done in the Split-Bottom Mount, and then if you do one Barrel Roll, the reverse flip is done in your initial mount. It is a lot easier to do that way, and it is exactly the same, you are just rotating all your hands together. What we did before is we did a forward flip with forward Barrel Rolls by doing it in the Split-Bottom Mount. Just like that. Then we did the reverse flip in reverse Barrel Rolls. This time what I am going to do is pair the reverse flip with forward Barrel Rolls, and vice-versa.

In order to do that we are going to do the flip on the opposite mount. The way that works, again, before we did one roll and then the forward flip because we are in the Split-Bottom Mount. In this case we are going to do the second roll and then a reverse flip. Now we are back where we started so what we are going to do now, we are going to do one reverse Barrel Roll, just like this, that puts us in a Split-Bottom mount, and again we are going to pair the reverse roll with the forward-flip, again the forward flip is what you do out of the Split-Bottom Mount, just like that. After this you just keep repeating it. So you get back into your initial mount by doing a forward Barrel Roll. That sets you up for the reverse flip. Then you do a reverse Barrel Roll, which sets you up into the Split-Bottom Mount. Then you do a forward flip.

The thing that makes the trick so interesting is when you really capture the flow of pairing these opposites together. Let me show you how that works. Again, you are going to do two Barrel Rolls to get yourself back into your starting position. Then do your reverse. Then you are going to do one reverse Barrel Roll, then your forward flip. That is what we are doing, right? In order to get the flow right, again, the reverse flip is going to be using the forward momentum, and the forward momentum, the forward movement comes right after you pass the yoyo over the first finger on your opposite hand. See how it is already moving forward. You can use that initial forward movement to do that reverse flip. The opposite is true when you do your reverse Barrel Roll. You are going to do your reverse by bringing your opposite hand under the yoyo. That already gets the yoyo moving toward you, which is the same direction that you want the yoyo to be going for that forward flip. Again, let’s pair it together. One, two, and on that forward movement that is when you do your reverse flip, then you are going to do a reverse Barrel Roll and that is going to give you the forward movement to do your next flip.

You can see the flow of the yoyo is like perfectly matched to this particular combo and it is everything that we have already showed you how to do, it is just setting up those various rolls and flips together in opposites, as opposed to doing the forward roll with the forward flip.

As you start to work on this trick, and even some of these other ones, you may find that the yoyo binds on you at unexpected times. If that is happening to you a lot, probably the easiest thing to do is just switch over to an unresponsive yoyo and that will give you a little bit more flexibility as you work on the ins and outs of this trick.

That is really all that you have to work on. You know, if you have your Barrel Rolls, that is one set of elements, then you have those flips that are done in the Barrel Roll mounts. Just mix and match them together. You can come up with your own combos. These are just three that I really enjoy. Again, one thing that you can do as you start to work on them is you start to speed things up. Just adding speed can make the tricks look different, and can make them look more impressive. So, don’t just learn Barrel Rolls. Work on all these different elements. Pair them together. Start to make up your own take on what you think these tricks should be. Then you will really be taking yourself to the next level and you will really be doing some impressive tricks.

So that is Barrel Rolls and a couple of combos built on Barrel Rolls.

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