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Then what you described is the opposite of what Club 38 offers. While the other levels they presented are somewhat of a progression, they aren't linear. They won't tell what the other "skills" are when asked, saying you must progress through each level before unlocking the next. When I've asked a few times over the years I've been told that I could easily work through the videos to be declared a master, but they won't disclose what they all are. I was one of the first people to publicly view the program, one of my kites included their flier and I posted in their forums about a month before the program was officially launched. They were charging at first, and eventually made the program free. I ended up going through the first four levels, and don't think it was worth the small investment. Makatakam also paid up at the time, and I'm not sure how far along he went. Just as examples... Level 1 which is publicly available are all about the core skills, but badly taught. Setup is important, but the official Rev video is garbage. Watch JB's videos on line management and setup/teardown. The next skills of launch, turn, and back down do need to be taught first, but Joe's videos are not good at demonstrating them. In addition to the KiteLife videos, there are plenty of others on YouTube that are better tutorials. Sills 5 of landing on feet nicely and 6 of flipping over are duplicates of skills 3 and 4, just explained differently (and badly, struggling to keep the clips in frame and not showing hands and kite simultaneously). Their skills 9 and 13 for spinning, what he verbally describes is actually called a bicycle turn as he says the kite shouldn't drop at all, but then he doesn't describe the bicycle turn, instead he just describes a basic spin done quickly which is guaranteed to lose height. He then verbally describes the skill but mixes up three different types of turns, then he attempts to demonstrate them; he described that he was going to do a 360 hovering in place (a bicycle turn), does a quick turn that doesn't hover, does a half turn that loses height, does a lost-control 540 that drops considerably, and struggles to maintain control at several points, but never properly demonstrates what he described as the goal. So many FB posts ask the same question about how to not let their skills 9 and 13 do a spin spin without dropping so much height, but because he explains it as a fast turn nobody will do it as the bicycle motion required. When people recommend developing the skills required for a bicycle turn, specifically working on hovering in all orientations especially inverted, they get poo-pooed saying those are later skills that don't need to be developed yet. It isn't until #20 that he gets to reversing the kite, but it is a skill needed for 11, 12, 15, etc. I'm curious what their higher level skills are, but based on the videos people post on their FB page as people pass off the skills, they're all just the basics of control. There are so many better resources, even distributed directly from Rev (but not their creation). Their flying techniques page is okay. Rev is also one of many sites to host copies of the old flying manuals, although they didn't author them. While they're great salesfolks, they aren't great teachers.

I'd love to see what you come up with. Inspired by two things - your comment in "Rotational Drills" about using them as warmups and your mantra of "don't judge success or failure until you've done five in a row", I developed my own sort of "warm-up" routine that I run through at the start of every session. I've been surprised at how quickly I've improved the individual skills. In contrast to Club 38, where you do a pretty long pattern stringing together sometimes unrelated or out-of-progression elements, I'm doing quick repetitions of smaller skills - 20 reps of X, then 20 of Y, now back to X, but in the other direction, etc. It reminds me of penmanship in grade school - rather than writing a paragraph, I'm filling a whole page with a single letter. The main advantage, at least for me, is I stay hyper-focused on refining each skill in its turn. Also, I feel like it's more directly building muscle memory for each skill.

I've not had a DS for a number of years, but I found sliding the uphaul/outhaul knot position to increase the uphaul length by 0.5cm made the turtle sufficiently deep to make JLs significantly easier without detracting from any other tricks. Worth a try.

In this particular post no. I’ve always loved how direct sunlight or the lack there of affects the colors. Even on sunny days when big puffy clouds roll over the flying field it can look one way and change as I glide across the field in and out of the clouds shadow. Even the black panels can look almost deep blueish (is that a color) with the right light. However, with wind range, I tend to pull this out as soon as my Polo UL starts making noises and with a bit of tweaking at the leaders the more vented kites don’t come out till it starts to really pull. so yes a 2fer in both instances. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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For what its worth, I do intend to produce some videos with exercise maneuvers, but nothing "tiered" in any other way except professed difficulty - my style isn't conducive to "passing levels" and top, bottom or supposedly "mastered master's mastering masters the master level" tiers.