When you first look at a yo-yo, you remember your childhood days when you get together with friends at exchanged simple tricks like “walk the dog” and “around the world”. However, you probably don’t realise that yo-yos have come a long way and evolved from a child’s toy to a hobby so addictive, yet totally unnoticed.

Yo-yo’s have been around since pre-historic times, however, the modern yo-yo was the centre of attention in the 70s. It was part of many advertising campaigns – like Coca Cola and McDonalds. Yo-yos used to be just strings attached to wooden disks, but a man named Tom Kuhn came up with the idea of placing a bearing on the axle of the yo-yo, to let it spin on the end of the string, allowing for very advanced yo-yo tricks. Soon the idea became popular, and the yo-yoing craze had kick-started.

Today’s yo-yo has kept most of the older yo-yos attributes, but became a whole lot more advanced. Nowdays, professonal players use yo-yos made of aircraft grade aluminum, and ceramic bearings. The yo-yo can happily spin at the end of the string for 4 minutes, and allows the players to do combinations of extremely advanced tricks!

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The hobby is now spread across the whole world. Competitions are held in countries like Poland, Germany, U.K. and the Czech Republic. These competitions are held to find the top players of each country, so they could participate in the Wold Yo-Yo Contest. The World Yo-Yo contest is held in the U.S.A. and lets the best of the best players compete each year for fame and great prizes.

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John Ando, 2008 World Yo-Yo Contest Winner (Source)

Even though Yo-Yoing is not very wide-spread, yo-yoers from all over the world join yo-yoing communities on the World Wide Web. They make yo-yo videos which they share with their peers and exchange tricks and tips on every aspect of yo-yoing. Most players will also show off their skills to their unsuspecting friends in real life, and get loads of attention. Kick starting a yo-yoing hobby isn’t difficult. Unlike most of the other hobbies, yo-yoing is not that expensive. A beginner yo-yo costs only around 20 dollars and the only other cost is the time you take to practice and perfect the tricks. However, most people who get themselves sucked into yo-yoing, become addicted and never want to leave the yo-yoing scene.

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