You will never be able to juggle. That sounds harsh, but all you need to do
is to pick the balls up every time you drop them. Your HANDS learn how to juggle. It’s
muscle memory. Eventually, you can juggle without even thinking about it.
THANKS HANDS!!! 😊
Juggling is a single throw. The throw looks like this. And the other way it looks like
that. Do it fast enough with 3 balls and… oh look! Juggling. When you start, you will
drop. No one knows how to juggle when they start; EVERYBODY drops, hundreds and hundreds
of times before they reach success.
All you need to do is to keep picking it up every time. Don’t get bored, don’t give
up, don’t go ‘OHOHHHHOH I WANNA DO SOMETHING ELSE’. Keep picking up those balls until
your hands know how to juggle.
Within an hour of practicing this, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll
probably manage… 20 catches.
Within 2 hours you might reach 50. Within 3 you’ll probably reach over 100, and you’ll
be ready to do some tricks.
Yeah. S’cool.
The first trick most people attempt is 2 in 1 hand. Which is about the same difficulty
as 3 balls in 2 hands. At the start you’ll probably find it a little bit easier, even
people who can’t juggle can manage 3 or 4 catches and then they’re all like ‘ayyy
look at me! I know how to juggle.’ But it takes longer to master. It is, after all,
how you do 4 ball juggling. That is just 2 in each hand like that. So rather than starting
with 4 ball juggling which is about… 10 times harder to learn, takes 10 times longer
to master than 3 ball juggling, you should start with some 3 ball juggling tricks.
The easiest one is one over the top, like this. Oh look, and I’ll do it back the other
way. Then both ways. Then you can start batting it back and forth. That’s the staple of
early juggling montages, that is. Then when you get good enough you can do it over and
over again. Look at that! That’s called the half shower. And if you do it with both
hands at the same time, that’s the inverse cascade which I still find a lot more difficult
than the normal juggling cascade, like this. But some people learn that way. Don’t do
it, it’s ugly.
What other juggling tricks are there?
Of course! The mills mess! This is one that took me months to get down. It’s probably
the most beautiful 3 ball pattern. I’ve said this already, but it is definitely the
best 3 ball pattern that you can do. When you start off, the problem is you don’t
curve it in the air. You juggle more like that and it looks kind of awkward. But once
you get the curves down, this will become ANOTHER staple of your early juggling montage
videos. It’s such a beautiful pattern. Another one you can do is the shower, so you know
how people do fake juggling like that with 2 balls, just throw another ball into the
pattern and that’s a pretty decent juggling move that is.
I can’t even do that one the other way. Look at how rubbish I am. It’s because I
wasn’t that interested in 3 ball juggling. I always liked numbers. I liked going up to
4, and then 5. Then 6, 7… I can even flash 9. Not going to try it now cos I haven’t
done it in years but 5 ball juggling, if that looks similar to 3 ball, that’s because
it’s the same thing, it’s the same ‘throw’, just higher and faster and more accurate.
But don’t let that deceive you- that’s 100 times harder to learn. I think my record
with this is about 4 minutes because it is actually quite tiring. Do that every day and
you’ll get some good muscles on you.
SIGHS *splat*
The sky’s the limit really.
Find somewhere with a nice ceiling, you don’t really want to do it outside because then
you’re weather dependant, um… don’t sit down either because sitting down is MUCH
more difficult, yeah, and just enjoy it. Juggling is probably one of the most rewarding hobbies
I’ve ever done. Per hour, I think it’s given me more fun than Counter-Strike. I haven’t
done it for as MANY hours as I’ve played Counter-Strike, but I think it’s a lot more
impressive. No one’s impressed with your Counter-Strike ability. Even if you’re really
good you just end up- people hate you.
Right, so you’ve decided that you want to learn to juggle. But what do you juggle with?
The best option are… beanbags. Ball-sacks, whatever you want to call them. And they’re
the best because they’re not fully filled, which means that when they land, they land
and they don’t bounce out of yer hand. There’s nothing worse than failing at a juggling move
because the ball has bounced out of yet hand. You feel cheated. So don’t use juggling
balls. Use juggling… ball… bean, beanbags. But say you’re locked down and can’t get
out of your house. Don’t worry! All you need are 3 pairs of socks. They don’t even
need to be clean. Here’s one I made earlier. This is quite complicated so you’re going
to have to pay attention here. To make a ball out of a pair of socks, get one sock and shove
it down into the other one.
Once you’ve done this, you then tuck the sock into itself again. Ballception. And you
repeat this over and over again, and make it as tight as you can, because otherwise
it’s just going to unravel when you use it and that sucks.
And there you have it. A ballsock! It’s not quite as good as a proper beanbag, but
it’ll do the job until you get one. Make 3 of these now.
After 3 months of practicing maybe an hour or so a day I could manage several catches
of 3 in one hand, and a fairly lengthy 3 ball routine. You can see I still hadn’t sussed
the mills mess, which looks quite wooden in this sequence. But one day soon after this,
it just happened. Even now I don’t understand how it works. And I could manage a few 2-in-1-hand
patterns as well.
‘Are you recording? Stop.’
This next bit’s going to sound really petty, but if you make progress videos, try to mix
up where you record them because having 30 or so set in the same room with different
clutter placement is really boring to look back at. I know this shouldn’t matter at
all, but as some one who’s done it… it does. And that’s why I value this footage,
filmed in Sri Lanka, so highly. Even if I don’t manage anything too impressive in
it. You’ll always manage your best juggling runs in the most boring looking places, usually
staring straight at a light-coloured wall for visibility, and always when the camera
isn’t recording. Also, since all this stuff was about 10 years ago, I gave them all really
embarrassing music tracks that Youtube later identified and blocked, so consider recording
them without music just in case you change your music taste later. But keep a folder
of the music you juggled to somewhere, just for the memories- listening to Britney Spears
still transports me back to good times. Petty rant over! Back to the juggling.
After 6 months I was getting around 22 catches with 5 balls. I could get 32 catches with
4 balls. I perhaps should have been better than that if I was managing 5 balls but honestly
I spent far more time on 5 because I liked the pattern a lot more.
After just 1 more month of practice I was managing over 100 catches with 5 balls, though
you can see I’m not fully stable with it and ended up turning around in circles slowly.
Another problem you can develop from bad juggling posture is ‘Dietz Syndrome’, which I thought
was some terrible juggling disease but it’s actually just named after a really good juggler
called Thomas Dietz who juggles lop-sided, with one shoulder raised higher than the other.
It’s done to compensate for an unbalanced juggling style.
9 months after starting juggling I was getting about 40 catches with 6 ball juggling, KNEELING
DOWN! That’s 3 in each hand. I hate 6 ball juggling probably because my left hand always
lets me down because I always practiced stuff in my right hand a lot more. Funnily enough
I was always better at juggling 3 in my left hand if I was also juggling 3 in my right
at the same time. I’m also beginning to get the 4 ball mills mess down. And my 7 ball
juggling’s coming along nicely as well! If it helps, think of it as 3 ball juggling,
but with 4 extra balls. And 10,000 times harder. And I could manage a short 5 ball routine
with half showers and multiplexes, which are rubbish moves where you throw 2 balls at the
same time.
After a year of juggling, I finally had access to a high ceiling, which may or may not have
been a factor when considering which University hall I stayed in. There were sometimes accidents.
After a year and 3 quarters, I could manage a decent run of 7 balls which would eventually
get too big and fail, bit like juggling in VR does. I managed a 7 ball 6 up 360, which…
actually I’ve never done better than I have here. Impressive. I also managed a ‘qualify’
of 8 balls, which is when you catch number of balls you’re juggling, times 2. And ALMOST
12 catches with 9 balls. Damn I was good.
And lastly, after 2 and a half years of juggling, this remains my best video. It was after a
week of pretty intensive training every day, and on the final one I broke almost every
one of my juggling records, then never really returned to juggling apart from on a holiday
a few years later- and that was just to get some nice mountain footage.
If you’re learning to juggle, my advice to you is to learn to count your catches.
It makes monitoring your progress easier and more noticeable. There used to be a website
called jugglingdb which was awesome cos you could input all your records and watch how
they had improved over time. There were always a few people who abused it and who claimed
they had juggled 7 balls for 10 hours solid. But most were good about it and I enjoyed
the rivalries I had with other jugglers of similar ability. Shame the site doesn’t
exist any more. It’s tempting to count your throws, since
you make more of them, but you have to count your catches, and must stop counting immediately
after dropping one. Which… I might not always have done. Naughty me. I’d count every catch
in my right hand and go up in 2’s, cos once you reach 5 or more balls you have to start
counting pretty quickly otherwise! I remember finding it hard to remember how many catches
I had made when I first started out, but you end up instinctively counting without thinking
about it. My records with juggling were… 13 catches with 9 balls, 24 with 8, 150 with
7, 180 with 6, several minutes with 5 and too long with 3 or 4.
Juggling was never a chore. It was something I loved doing. The people who never understood
why I wanted to juggle ended up being the ones asking why I stopped. And I guess it’s
because I had achieved everything I had wanted with it. I was always a fan of big numbers
juggling- check out Anthony Gatto because he’s among the best for stuff like 7 or
8 balls. What makes juggling more appealing than other hobbies is how consistent the progress
is. You don’t have to rely on other people, or monitoring your progress over a matter
of months, like other hobbies often require. If you juggle daily then you beat at least
one of your records every day. But when you get to 7 or more balls, it gets
so TIRING, and takes so long to prepare between each throw, that progress slows down immensely
and I think it’s that that ultimately made me stop. I like the idea of trying to break
my records again some day, I reckon I could do it with a week of practice. It would only
take a few hours to regain most of my old skills- it’s progressing further than that
which takes the most time. But until then, that’s my juggling story.
Good luck with yours.