A part of the RPM Project.
Another service of Infinite Illusions
Another service of Infinite Illusions
Ever since Sage first introduced Iron Whip, it has been an elusive trick for many people, including myself. However, I'd like to propose that it isn't really as hard as it seems. I think a lot of people are doing some fundamentally wrong things when trying to do this trick, which makes it much harder than it should be.
If you've never seen it being performed, finding a video of it should help a lot to grasp the basic concept of the trick. This description is written for right-handed people.
You want to land trapeze, bring your throw hand toward your free hand, and grab the closest string of the loop with all four fingers of the throw hand. You want to grab it about halfway up between the yo-yo and your free hand index finger.
The yo-yo is going to exit the loop of string to the side closest to your body, AKA toward you. You help this to happen by pulling your free hand a bit to the side (to the left) and forward away from your body. However, what you don't want to do is to pop the yo-yo up in the air. One of the keys of iron whip is that the yo-yo should stay almost still throughout the entire trick.
All the motion happens with the throw hand. One big thing to keep in mind is that the hand does not simply whip downward. There is a back and forth turning at the wrist which makes the loop of string make a full circle in a counter-clockwise direction.
At the start of the trick, the palm of your throw hand will be facing to the left and knuckles facing away from you (from grabbing the string). What needs to happen is that you want to turn your hand so that your palm is facing upward and the knuckles a bit to the left. You now twist your hand downward and to the right, around, and end with your palm down and knuckles facing left. Basicaly you want to imagine the knuckle of your index finger making a full circle in the air in front of you. Near your index finger is the string which both pulled out of the gap of the yo-yo at the beginning, and whipped into the gap at the end of the trick.
Remember again that almost all the work of the trick happens with the throw hand, with very little movement of the yo-yo or the free hand. The free hand simply moves the left-most string out of the way so that the whipping motion of the throw hand can get the loop of string off the yo-yo and back on.
There are also a couple of little training things you can do. One is to land trapeze, grab the string with the throw hand, but then let the yo-yo die. Now take your free hand out of the strings and grab the side of the yo-yo closest to your body with your fingers and thumb, careful to just hold the edge and not cover the gap. Then you can kind of ease the yo-yo out of the loop and whip it back on. Obviously, this isn't quite the same thing as doing the trick "live", but can give you a basic feel of how a whip works if you aren't clear in your head about what string whips in the gap, etc.
The second training thing which helped me a lot is actually a trick in itself called Jade Whip. It is another whip which is a bit easier to do than the Iron Whip itself.
You start off at trapeze, and dismount and swing around the middle finger and to the right as if you were going into a trapeze brother. You want to have your throw hand palm up with your fingers extended and pointing away from you. Now, what is going to happen is that the yo-yo will swing up and around the hand.
As soon as the yo-yo is starting to go upward and to the left, the string attached to the yo-yo will be above your palm. What you want to do is reach up and close your fingers around the string. This will put you in exactly the same string formation as in Iron Whip and the dead yo-yo exercise I described above. The yo-yo will continue swinging to the left and down, where you can then whip the string onto the yo-yo.
While it sounds like there is a lot going on, it is actually a very fluid trick where one thing goes right into another. The fact that your palm is already up helps to get into the correct whipping motion (as well as the general momentum of the trick, as opposed to the motionless start of Iron Whip), and the entire trick can be done pretty slowly.
Keep at it, and good luck!
