(eccentric music)
- It's time for a new challenge,
and this time it's juggling.
My challenge is to try to juggle not one ball,
not two balls, not three balls, not four balls,
(laughs)
but five balls.
It's a lot of balls.
So I can juggle three.
I learned this when I was a kid.
I thought I could go four.
Four's a little bit weird because
it's kinda two balls in two hands.
So it's like that in one hand, like that in another hand.
So you're just kinda doing that at the same time,
which is pretty tricky.
But five seems like a really big jump up
in terms of skill level and difficulty.
So how many times do I need to juggle
for that to be considered juggling with five?
To qualify in juggling means
that you've actually juggled that many balls,
and you need to kinda catch every ball twice.
Here's a video of a guy qualifying 11 balls,
which is 22 catches, which is pretty crazy.
So my goal's gonna be to try to qualify five balls,
which means at least 10 catches, sometime this month.
I think that that's gonna be an ambitious challenge.
It's day one, let's do this.
I'm gonna start just by going for five straight away,
and just seeing how it goes.
(chuckles) It's so hard.
So on this day, I thought it'd be a good idea
to start trying to juggle with five,
but I realised it was just way out of my skill level.
So I wanted to just start with
a drill that was a little easier.
So starting by trying to juggle with four,
and just trying to throw up each ball once,
and then trying to catch every ball.
The other drill that I thought would be a good idea
was just to have three balls,
but to throw them at a five ball height,
and just try to catch them once.
I found this step pretty frustrating,
'cause I just really didn't seem to be going anywhere.
So this is Byron,
and he's my juggling teacher for the month.
And this was him a few minutes after he entered my house.
It was pretty crazy.
And this is him when I asked him
to do some cool stuff for camera.
He was heavily recommended.
And so he gave me my first juggling lesson.
- So let's start with your three ball flash.
- Yep.
So my lesson was really valuable,
and I learned some really great take aways,
like how you should have very consistent elbow height
at 90 degrees,
how you should have very minimal body movement,
how your throws really need to be very consistent,
and some techniques that you can use to practise that,
like throwing all the balls up
and letting them hit the floor
to hear the pattern of how they hit the floor
to learn about your rhythm and height of your throws.
I also learned a lot of really interesting drills
that would help my technique
for when I finally moved to juggling with five.
So I am on my way to buy some juggling balls.
So, as my coach kinda said,
I need to buy some awesome juggling balls,
some juggling balls that are all the same weight,
that are all the same size.
I'm better off having good equipment.
So I'm trying to buy good juggling balls.
So I'm going to a place called Juggle Art,
which is a juggling specialty store,
and I will buy some good juggling balls,
and hopefully, that helps.
After a little getaway, I was back juggling
with my new juggling balls,
and I was making better progress than ever.
I started nailing some of my new patterns.
And then I started going for
what's called a five ball flash,
where you throw every ball once and try to catch it once.
And on my 13th day, finally, this happened.
Yeah!
What was really interesting is,
after only learning my first
five ball flash only a few days ago,
I had this paradigm shift
where I could now almost just do them
relatively consistently.
From not being able to do them at all,
I could do them maybe every one out of two tries.
So next, it was on to trying to go for seven catches,
which felt like a really big jump up,
and it didn't go that well that day.
I started a new training regime,
where every time I walked past my juggling balls
I had to try to land a five ball flash.
About to go to a wedding.
Five ball flash.
On my first attempt, starting now.
Oh baby!
He can do it!
(laughs)
And then on day 19, after a lot of practise,
I finally caught my first ever seven catches.
It's safe to say, I was very excited.
Yes!
(screams lightly)
And then a few minutes later I did it again.
I had another paradigm shift.
Oh, my goodness.
So before I get back into it,
here's some of the tricks I learned this month.
I learned how to spin around while juggling,
do the through the leg, and catch all three balls,
and then throw them around the back and keep juggling.
And then also the classic around the back.
So back to the juggling challenge.
So I had another lesson with my teacher,
nearing the end of the month,
and right at the end of the session,
I finally landed my first ever qualify
10 catches with five balls.
- [Teacher] There it is!
- Was that? (laughing)
I don't think that was on camera.
I just caught my first five ball qualify.
I'm super happy that I got the qualify,
and excited that I've now officially juggled five balls.
So after getting my first ever qualify, or 10 catches,
I still wanted to get a really clean one on camera.
So here are a couple more attempts over the next few days.
There's an eight catch, another eight catch,
and here I land my very first, very clean, 10 catches.
And then finally, I get my personal best for the month.
I get 12 catches.
So my month ended a little short,
because I spent my last four days at a music festival
called Falls Festival.
But in the midst of all the craziness and partiness,
there was this one crazy guy still juggling,
juggling right to the end of the month.