Have you seen videos on the internet of people doing some really crazy tricks with a slinky and wanted to try it? 

This is why most people buy a HyperSpring - to learn this art form, which I call springbending.

Springbending is not just “playing with a slinky” - it’s the art of creating a resonant wave inside a toy spring, which can then be bent into twisting shapes which appear to magically “lag” or “freeze” in the air while zipping back and forth.

Many people think they can just pick up any slinky and figure out these tricks on their own by playing around with it.

Many people buy a HyperSpring, but don’t enroll in my video courses which teach you how to springbend.

However, if you try to figure out springbending on your own, you’re likely to hit a dead end very quickly.

This even happened to me the first time I tried to learn it.

Within 2 minutes, I realized this was MUCH harder than it looked. I had absolutely no idea how to get the slinky to float and twist like I’d seen in that video. The guy in the video made it look so easy - why wasn’t it working?!

I blamed it on the slinky, and gave up faster than an obese chihuahua going for a walk in a snowstorm. 

(Luckily I tried again months later with a different mindset and a different slinky, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.)

Springbending is so hard because it’s NOT intuitive at all. A toy spring (like a Slinky, or a HyperSpring) does not behave like any other object you’ve ever encountered in your life. This is why springbending looks so magical.

This is also why you are highly unlikely to stumble upon the correct techniques for these tricks just by playing around.

There’s a reason that the Slinky has been around since 1945, but springbending wasn’t even discovered until almost 70 years later.

Getting good at springbending requires three things:

1. The right toy spring

2. Knowledge of the correct techniques

3. Practice

#1 is very easy to accomplish - just buy a HyperSpring!

Practice is also easy to obtain, but without knowledge of the correct techniques, it’s not very useful.

#2 is the difficult part. These correct techniques are very difficult to discover on your own.

I did not discover springbending on my own - I saw a video of the godfather of springbending, Wu Wuqiang, and tried to copy what he was doing. 

He spent 10 hours a day selling slinkies at his night market stall in China for years to discover most of the techniques that we use in springbending today.

And without any tutorial actually teaching these techniques, it took me years of studying videos of Chinese springbenders to gain a decent level of skill.

However, I’ve seen many children learn from my video courses and reach a very high level of skill in only a few months of practice - a level of skill that took me years of “figuring it out on my own” to achieve.

Even after I’d been practicing for 10 years, there were still many tricks I had seen Chinese springbenders do, but couldn’t quite figure out.

So I went to China and asked them to teach me.

In China, I learned techniques that have massively increased my skill and opened the door for many new tricks. Techniques that I simply could NOT figure out on my own, because I had spent so long practicing without them.

I know you’ve heard the saying “Practice makes perfect.”

But the more accurate saying is, “Perfect practice makes perfect.”

Practice, on its own, will only reinforce whatever you’re practicing. If you’re practicing the wrong techniques, you will only get “better” at doing it wrong. This is why it’s so hard to break bad habits.

Because I had spent years practicing to do these advanced Chinese tricks without knowing the correct techniques, I was only reinforcing these incorrect techniques. Without a master to teach me the right way to do it, I was doomed to continue repeating the same mistakes over and over.

This applies not only to advanced techniques, but to the basics as well. Many beginners get stuck making the same mistakes, it never "clicks", and they give up. 

All of this is to say:

Having a mentor who can teach you the correct techniques is the only real way to learn springbending. 

I’ve seen grown men who have been practicing springbending for 5+ years… but are still at a lower skill level than a 10 year old who’s been practicing for 5 months with the correct techniques.

On the other hand, I learned more from 1 month spent in China learning the correct techniques from a master than I did from years of practice on my own.

Lucky for you, there is no need to go all the way to China to learn from a master.

If you’re ready to have a mentor and actually learn springbending with the correct techniques, check out my video courses.

Currently there are two:

The Fundamentals of HyperSpring Video Course (for beginners, and free for a limited time)

Twists, Flips, and Beyond (Part I) (advanced)

Heads up - the Fundamentals video course is going away soon. I'm currently finishing a brand new beginner video course which will cover the same tricks in more detail, plus a bunch of new ones. 

Keep practicing (with the correct techniques 😉)!