Hi, this is Doug on behalf of expertvillage.com and this is a continuation of Introduction to Sleight of Hand. Now how do you get ready to perform sleight of hand or close up magic? You've got to of course sleight of hand, warm up your hands. A lot of the manipulations require you to be very agile with your hands and manipulating the prop or the object. So here's a couple different exercises you can use to warm up your hands. you never want to start with cold hands as with any art. You want to just warm up. One is called the stair step. You want to go over, over each hand. Again warming up the joints, making sure the blood is flowing properly. Another thing is the wave putting both fists together and opening up on one end, closing on the same end. Very fun how that works. You want to keep doing this over and over again making sure you don't perform with cold hands. Do whatever you can to warm up before your show. Rubbing your hands together also helps. Keep your hands nice and supple and soft. making sure they don't sweat as much is kind of nice. You don't want to lose grip on the objects. A lot of things require you to hold on to the objects so you can manipulate them in the fashion that you need to. So again, warm up your hands for awhile, make sure that they're nice and warm and ready to go before starting your illusion.
