Why does my yoyo lean and tilt? Yoyo Trick Core

Why does my yoyo lean and tilt? Yoyo TrickIn this video I am going to help you solve the problem, Why is your yoyo leaning? Leaning is a big problem because it kills the spin on your yoyo, and it just makes you feel like something is wrong. There are really only 3 problems that would cause a yoyo to lean, and 2 of them are really common, one is very uncommon, so we will get to that. 

If you are trying to figure out how to get your yoyo to stop leaning, that most likely means that you are getting serious about yo-yoing. So, before you do anything I would recommend you download our free app that is basically available on all of your devices. It is our YoYoTricks Level Up app. On that we have taught over 350 tricks. All the tricks are put in order so it is easy to figure out where you can go. You can also keep track of your progress, so that makes it a whole lot more fun, and as you keep track you level up.

But let’s get right to it. So what is the real reason why your yoyo leans? A lot of people want to blame the yoyo, but as a matter of fact it is almost never the yoyos fault. Even if your yoyo is wildly unbalanced, just the physics of it would not cause the yoyo to lean. That is actually a good thing, because that means that the power is within you to solve this problem.

What is the first, the most common reason why the yoyo is leaning? Actually, it is just your throw. The fact of the matter is that even though it might seem like you are throwing the yoyo straight, if your hand is just a little bit crooked as you throw the yoyo, then that will naturally going to cause the yoyo to lean. If your holding the yoyo like this when you throw it, then you can see the yoyo sleeps at exactly that angle, and you can see that it does not sleep for very long.

The first thing that you want to do if you want to solve the lean, is you want to make sure that you have a very, very straight throw. We do have other videos where we teach you How to Throw in more detail, but I will give you a real quick overview here. First of all, you do want the yoyo to be on your middle finger, which is called the yoyo finger. As you hold the yoyo in your hand, you want the string to be going from your finger over the top of the yoyo like this. As long as the string is going like that, that means the yoyo can roll off your hand very smoothly.

Once you have the yoyo in your hand right, now you need to get your throw properly aligned. Usually, what I think about is I want to align my shoulder with my elbow with my wrist. All of those things are important, but even more important than that is you want to make sure your hand is perfectly flat as you release the yoyo. The more crooked your hand is as you release it, the more likely the yoyo is to lean. Even if the rest of your throw is a little bit off, if your hand is flat then the yoyo is still going to sleep relatively straight.

What I would do is if your yoyo is constantly leaning, I would just pause your hand and see, Oh, is it at a little bit of an angle? That might be what is causing the problem. 

The second thing that could cause your yoyo to lean, is that yoyos tend to lean more when they are not spinning as quickly. There are 2 causes for this. 1, you might not be throwing the yoyo hard enough. If you are not throwing the yoyo like this, if you are dropping it like this, the yoyo is not going to be spinning very fast, so that could cause it to lean. Also, even if you feel like you are throwing it really hard, you might not actually be getting a lot of power into the yoyo. Let me show you what that might look like. Let’s say that you are really moving fast but then you just kind of release the yoyo at the end. There are all sorts of reasons why your throw might not be string enough to get a good spin.

One reason might be is your string is just too long. If your string is too long then you kind of like, you want to be gently about it because you have to raise your hand up right at the end. You probably want to cut your string and adjust it for your height, that way you can get as much power out of your throw. Of course, we do have another video that teaches you how to do that. That is a huge part of this, so you definitely want to check that out.

The other reason besides just your throw why your yoyo might not be spinning long enough, is you might have a yoyo that actually can’t spin that long. If you bought your yoyo in a store, chances are it is not a ball bearing yoyo like the Sage Yoyo that I am using here, or the Fizz yoyo we also recommend for beginners. If you just got it in a store, chances are it might only be able to sleep for like 10 seconds even with a perfect throw. Even if your throw is pretty straight, if you have one of these yoyos, in about 2-3 seconds the yoyo is going to start to twist and lean because it doesn’t have the force to keep itself straight. If you are getting serious about learning how to yoyo, the second thing that you might want to think about is investing in a better yoyo, a yoyo that has ball bearings. 

The Sage, which is one of the yoyos we recommend for new players, it has a lot of great features that make yo-yoing easier. First of all it has a ball bearing, so it can sleep a lot longer. Second, you can take the yoyo apart. And that allows you to get knots out which is a huge problem if your yoyo, if you can’t take it apart, it is really difficult to get those knots out. Third, if you get your yoyo from a legitimate yoyo store, and not just from any store you might go to, you can also get extra string. Replacing the string will allow your yoyo to last a lot longer. Those are different things to consider.

The other thing, this is the less common case for what might make a yoyo tilt, is if your string has a lot of string tension in it. What do I mean by that? That is what a lot of new players call spaghetti string. It is when a string gets all twisted like this. If you have a yoyo that can sleep a very long time, like over 1 minute, then actually the string tension in the yoyo can cause it to lean. What is kind of cool about this is you can adjust the string tension as the yoyo is sleeping, and that will cause the yoyo to either lean a little bit more, or it can correct the lean. We have a whole video about, we just call it, ‘Why won’t my yoyo sleep longer?’ where we get into this exact method so that you can get your yoyo, if it is the right type of yoyo, to sleep 2, 3, even 10 minutes long just by adjusting the string tension after you throw it.

These are pretty much all the reasons why your yoyo might lean, if you are having that problem, just try out each one and see if you can figure out what the problem is. If you want to get better at yo-yoing, definitely get our free YoYoTricks Level Up app, that will help you go as far and as fast as possible.