Have you ever wanted to improve your coordination, balance, and over-all physical ability? If you have, poi might be just the tool for you.

Essentially, poi are weights on the ends of strings or chains. By attaching one to each hand, they become extensions of the body's movement, and provide an excellent means of exploring and training motor skills, balance, and full-body coordination.

Moving a specific part of your body, such as your hand, requires a variety of muscle groups to work together. Each muscle group creates a force vector. These vectors combine to create the resulting force vector of your hand. Complex movement, like walking, dancing, or martial arts, requires hundreds of such muscle groups to work together in simultaneous coordination. These motor skills can also be developed to different degrees. The most developed motor skills are reflexive and instinctive, and require little or no thought. Although reflex skills are the desired goal of dancers, martial artists, and athletes, such skills can also pose the greatest obstacles, as they are the hardest skills to re-learn. Our ability to develop motor skills increases with our ability to perceive, isolate, and practice specific movements. The simpler a given movement is, the quicker our brains can create or develop the appropriate motor skill.

Poi literally magnify our movements, allowing us to observe the accuracy of direction, timing, rhythm, and force. Once observed, the repetitive nature of poi proves ideal for making corrections or developing new skills. The circular nature of poi movement encourages us to develop skill through a full range of force vectors on any given plane. By manipulating the planes and positioning of our hands, we are able to explore our skill with all force vectors throughout our movement sphere. The practice of stalls and left/right timing exercises can help us fine-tune our ability to send the correct signals to the correct part of our bodies. As we explore our coordination with poi, all of our movements become increasingly fluid, natural, and precise, resulting in greater overall balance and coordination.

Tai-Chi technique bring the benefits of poi further into the entire body. In Tai-Chi, all movement comes from the Dan-Tien (located in the centre of the body, two inches below the belly button). The Dan-Tien is the fulcrum point between the forces. A force forward from the right hand is executed with an equal force from the left leg. All Tai-Chi movements follow this principle. In many poi exercises, for proper timing, one hand must move in perfect symmetry or opposed symmetry with the other. We can apply Tai-Chi technique by relaxing the arms and initiating the movement from the Dan-Tien.

We tend to have greater control and skill within certain areas of our movement sphere, and less in others. The area in front of our bodies is usually our area of greatest skill, as it is the area of our most common actions. The area behind our heads and bodies is usually the area of least skill, as we rarely have reason to reach behind ourselves. Whole body movements require skill throughout our movement sphere. An unbalanced dispersion of skill (well developed in front, but poor behind) can inhibit whole body movement skill. As we explore and develop our skills throughout our movement sphere, whole body movements become increasingly fluid, natural, and precise, resulting in greater overall balance and whole body coordination.