Skin The Gerbil

Yo-Yo Trick

Skin the Gerbil Part 1:

Next trick I'm going to teach you today is "Skin the Gerbil". It's a cool trick. It's one worth practicing. If you can get it down fast and smooth you can really impress people. Trick looks like this. It's a really smooth. It really flows when you're doing it. Goes back and forth and hits all sides of the string. It's one of my favorite tricks. To start off "Skin the Gerbil" you land on a trapeze. Looks like this. You want to take your throw hand and turn it in towards yourself like that and then you push in on the string hair. It makes it swing way around like that. You push in. What that does is it allows the string to go around without getting in a knot. So what you do is take your throw hand, you push in, makes it go around. It's kind of like a backwards brain twister. Once you do that move you actually go right around and land it twice onto the string like that. You double up on the string. So it comes around twice. So we'll try that again. So push in, double around, like so. That's the first step of "Skin the Gerbil". Once you have that then push in, double up, come around, and you'll land it on this side of the string. Land it right there. Let's try this again. So you take it, push in, come double around, come back around, double up on the other side. One more time then we're going to break down the next part in the next segment. So double goes in, double up, comes around, goes around. When you're doing this try and get it really smooth. You want it to be one flowing motion. The last step you want to throw in is that part from "The Matrix" where you do this. Comes around like that. You want to do that move after you come double up. See, come double up. Undo. Do that move. Comes around and hits this string. So one more time now. So do what we were doing before, double up, throw in the extra turn, and come around and hit this side of the string. That's the first step to "Skin the Gerbil" and we're going to address the second part next.

Skin the Gerbil Part 2:

This is Part 2 to Skin the Gerbil. Skin the gerbil one more time looks like this. It is a really nice smooth flowing trick. When you do skin the gerbil, one of the things that you really want to think about is get your ears spinning fast, get it smooth and keep it dead center on a string. A lot of people tell me they have a hard time getting through this whole trick. It is a longer trick and what makes it a little more difficult is you are doing a lot of side maneuvers and you are really swinging it around so the yo-yo has a lot of time to push into the string, tip over and stop spinning on you so it is real important to keep that string dead center when you are doing it. So we've gone this far. We hit the string, we went under, doubled up and brought it back around and we are here. The next step isn't too bad. You are actually just missing once and bringing it back over like so and undoing that. So what you want to do is get up to this point with me, over here and from here what you are going to do is unwrap that part and you are going to swing it around your non-throw hand point a. You are actually going to miss that string entirely and the next step you are actually going to come around and hit the string. You land on the string like so. So one more time, break that down for you. You do the beginning step that we went through in part 1. You come around and hit there; that's the end of part 1. You undo that and come around and miss. All you are doing is missing. You land onto the string. Very simple. Unroll, unroll, unroll and catch and then that is skin the gerbil.

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