Many of you might know of Noisebridge, a beloved hackerspace in San Francisco. They had (have?) a juggling workshop every saturday called "Juggling with Judy", taught by Judy Pinelli, founder of the famed Pickle Family Circus (and a huge influence on Cirque Du Soleil).
I had no idea how famous or influential she was. She first taught us how to make our own juggling balls: snip the ends of a balloon, fill with enough rice to feel comfortable in the hand, then wrap that with another balloon to seal the rice in, then snip the ends of the second balloon.
Then she went through the usual sequence: throw a ball, er, balloon, from one hand to the next, then practice with two and so on. By the end of that 2 hour session, we had got the essentials.
The remarkable thing about this workshop was that Judy was at an advanced stage of multiple sclerosis at that point. She was pretty much completely immobile from the neck down, and couldn't even see our hands properly from her wheelchair. She could only see the arc of the ball, but that was sufficient information for her to tell us how we could improve. "Pull your elbow in". "Focus on the left hand, the right will follow".
After the 2 hour workshop, she'd go to Golden Gate park to teach juggling. All for free. I feel extraordinarily privileged. She's been my polestar in life.
> She was pretty much completely immobile from the neck down, and couldn't even see our hands properly from her wheelchair. She could only see the arc of the ball, but that was sufficient information for her to tell us how we could improve. "Pull your elbow in". "Focus on the left hand, the right will follow".
I've both been a coach (paintball/martial arts) and been coached (golf) and it really is wild how good your brain can become at seeing the outcome or just a piece of the process and then working backwards to a root cause.
I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."
My favorite version of diagnosing a root cause from an outcome was "Car Talk" on NPR, where somebody would call into the Tappet Brothers's show and imitate the weird sound that the car was making, and then the brothers would diagnose a very specific car problem based on the secondhand impersonation of a weird noise. I have no idea how accurate their diagnoses actually were, but it always seemed like a tremendously impressive trick.
>> I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."
I keep coming back to that. Nobody has ever directly seen direct the force carrying particles, only their effects (indirect evidence). The models make excellent predictions, but I still feel like they're "wrong" in some sense.
This is the only fact we know for certain in physics; we know for sure that our existing models are incorrect. But they sure are great at lots of stuff and correctly predict lots of phenomenon so until someone can come up with a better model they're likely to continue to be used widely!
This is one of the nice things about the juggling community: it's one of the open, sharing communities where people are willing to freely share and teach. It's no cost/low cost entry. The juggling community has been a really important part of my life, so I see it as giving back to teach others.
If a balloon is made of a thin neck and a round body, you're chopping the neck off near the bottom of the neck. You're then left with a round rubber pouch for the contents (rice). Use two balloons in opposite directions so the closed end of the outer layer covers the opening of the inner layer.
Great for juggling balls - nice weight and very grippy.
Indeed. Do not blow up the balloon. Just use it as a rubber pouch. If anything is still unclear, describe as detailed as you can the difficulty you're visualizing.
Outside of more complicated tricks like the claw and other specialized patterns, the most common juggling patterns (such as the cascade [1]) don’t rely as much on pure handeye coordination as they do on maintaining a consistent, even toss. The key is throwing each ball so it rises and falls in a predictable arc, so it lands approximately in the same spot where your other hand is waiting to catch it.
When I teach complete beginners, I actually start with a set of special handkerchiefs. They fall more slowly than balls, which gives learners more time to react and makes it much easier to see and follow the path of each object through the air.
I tried and failed to learn to juggle three balls many times, I've just got terrible coordination. But one day I stood over a bed and just threw them in the air and listened to the rhythm of the "thuds" as the missed balls hit the mattress. As soon as I'd got that down it was like a switch clicked and my hands knew "when" to be ready for the catch, rather than trying to follow the balls to catch them. I never managed four, so mileage may vary with this technique, but it was a very surprising lightbulb moment.
I taught myself in junior high to juggle three balls with two hands and two balls with one hand. It's not a huge accomplishment but what amazes me is that I can go years without trying it and when an opportunity comes up I can just do it again, within just a couple of tries. Those neuronal connections just never go away.
Juggling has a very special place in my heart. I met my wife through juggling. We were both staying at a youth hostel in Ireland, and the owner introduced us to each other because she'd seen us both juggling, and said we should juggle together. She was way better than me. She juggled with clubs, burning torches and knives, so yeah, life was never the same after that.
I can only juggle 3, but I prefer clubs. Balls are so boring they are so small and not spectacular. Clubs on the other hand, man they are rotating. Once, twice, treetimes, backwards. I believe that if someone stuck at this basic level of juggling 3 balls, he should try clubs - at least for me it's pure satisfaction watching these rotating in various variants before.
I thought this post was going to be a metaphor about how most people can barely handle 1 project, while some people need to multiple projects for it to feel natural...
Just today I improved my record to 18 minutes. Btw, I noticed my juggling is completely subconscious, I don't move my hands voluntarily where the ball is, the hands move on its own.
In my experience most folks go to clubs in order to do pass juggling with others (or because it’s a nice indoor space with high ceilings), but typically folks are very happy to spare some time to help beginners learn
I really enjoyed learning to juggle. My mum randomly brought a juggling book back from a second hand shop. It probably sat on a shelf for a year until one day my brother and I picked it up for some reason. It also goes to show how important it is to have access to lots of books. You never know when one might catch your interest.
> Another mistake is completely ignoring the ball and staring into the distance. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've seen it a bunch more with *rats* than anywhere else. In any case, I would recommend you just casually glance up at the ball as it reaches the top of its arc
Is 'rats' a juggling jargon I'm unfamiliar with? Or do rats stare into the distance often?
Thanks for posting this. You reminded me I have three juggling balls collecting dust behind my monitor. I forgot how fun it is! As others have said I'm surprised the muscle memory is still there even after a few years without trying.
> DO NOT JUST PASS THE SECOND BALL BETWEEN YOUR HANDS. This is a common thing, as people are regularly taught it
People are really regularly taught it? Who's doing that teaching?
I suspect a different cause: cartoons. Especially in older animation, juggling was typically presented in the 'circle' style, which is probably where people tended to pick up the misconception. I guess that animation is a lot easier to produce.
Many years ago I saw Penn & Teller and Penn Jillette talked about how juggling flaming sticks or knives isn't that impressive because they are perfectly balanced for juggling.
Instead, he took three large whiskey bottles of different shapes and sizes. On stage, he broke the bottom of each bottle. They came out all sharp, jagged, and uneven. He then proceeded to juggle three of them. I think he got only a few rounds before he was forced to drop them.
I've been juggling for almost 50 years and there's a lot of good stuff in this post. I just want to add a few things from my own approach to juggling and teaching others.
I often tell beginners two things: (1) a big part of learning to juggle is training yourself to suppress the panic reflex, so simply mindless practice solves a lot of problems, and (2) you have much more time to react than you think (yes this is related to #1).
Joining a juggling club is one of the top suggestions I can offer. I juggled 3 balls and practiced various tricks for years before I joined the motley collection of engineering, physics, and math students juggling in the chemistry building at the University of Michigan, and my progress accelerated massively after I had a chance to see what people were doing and get advice from people who could see me. They also pushed me to try things that I wasn't particularly interested in, and that helped a lot even though I don't do most of those things regularly anymore.
Personally I juggle as self-entertainment more than performance, so as time went on I gravitated toward turning errors into repeatable tricks that look good from behind the balls, with no concern about how they look to observers. If you want to look good to observers then you have to approach it differently. I practice controlling ball collisions (hit them intentionally and make them go where you want!) as well as ball slaps and other really fast recoveries that are honestly too fast moving for an observer to grasp but they make my hair stand on end and that's the point. Do something wrong, then do it intentionally, then do it controllably, then repeat it. Occasionally these look cool but mostly it is more like a fidget spinner than a performance.
My ongoing practice for the panic reflex is things like hitting myself in the face with the balls repeatedly. You have to escalate that to keep gaining benefits. I'm winning if I can smash balls in my face repeatedly without blinking. It can be done!
I've wanted to code a VR game for juggling but never found time for it.
Feels like it would be super-easy-to-code and probably would be lucrative. Implement "slow down time" so people can practice juggling in slow motion, add some other features like catch radius and bias towards consistent height of throws and you've got a great game!
Several years ago we had a juggling "craze" at my otherwise very stodgy corporate office. We all juggled constantly on every little break and several of us got pretty good at it. By the end a few of us were doing harder 3-ball tricks like mills mess and passing balls back and forth to each other. It was super fun. Honestly while specific tips can help, I think it mainly comes down to persistence and getting ideas from others, youtube, etc. Some ideas will click, some won't. Doing it with friends everyday helps too. It just takes time to get a really consistent throw dialed in, especially under pressure, but once you do 3-ball gets quite easy and then you can focus more on goofing around and trying new things.
Just juggling with balls in the air gets boring very quickly, and the added numbers don't make it much different. Learning statics and flows from contact juggling, but performing them with standard juggling balls is so much more fun. And then you discover statics with hoops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF6UuPsw2i4
Tim Kelly's 3 ball juggling is still my favourite of all time. You won't regret watching him. I've literally never seen anyone juggle this well. Always been such an inspiration: https://youtu.be/q37vo62psGA?si=r_Kh4RWl7HTAu4Mq
Huh. I thought there was going to be something insightful about one ball juggling specifically, but I didn't see it in reading or searching.
I haven't tried just 1 ball, but I find 2 to be a lot harder than 3. (which, I suppose, is why I was expecting something insightful about why it would be difficult to juggle just one ball).
Profoundly disagree with the author on skipping 6. It helped so much with my 7.
I do agree on clubs though. They were as big of a revelation as siteswap when I learned them and I'd highly recommend trying.
Most juggling clubs(accumulations of people, not object) have loaner clubs and nice people willing to share theirs as well as teach.
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I had no idea how famous or influential she was. She first taught us how to make our own juggling balls: snip the ends of a balloon, fill with enough rice to feel comfortable in the hand, then wrap that with another balloon to seal the rice in, then snip the ends of the second balloon.
Then she went through the usual sequence: throw a ball, er, balloon, from one hand to the next, then practice with two and so on. By the end of that 2 hour session, we had got the essentials.
The remarkable thing about this workshop was that Judy was at an advanced stage of multiple sclerosis at that point. She was pretty much completely immobile from the neck down, and couldn't even see our hands properly from her wheelchair. She could only see the arc of the ball, but that was sufficient information for her to tell us how we could improve. "Pull your elbow in". "Focus on the left hand, the right will follow".
After the 2 hour workshop, she'd go to Golden Gate park to teach juggling. All for free. I feel extraordinarily privileged. She's been my polestar in life.
> She was pretty much completely immobile from the neck down, and couldn't even see our hands properly from her wheelchair. She could only see the arc of the ball, but that was sufficient information for her to tell us how we could improve. "Pull your elbow in". "Focus on the left hand, the right will follow".
I've both been a coach (paintball/martial arts) and been coached (golf) and it really is wild how good your brain can become at seeing the outcome or just a piece of the process and then working backwards to a root cause.
I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."
>> I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."
I keep coming back to that. Nobody has ever directly seen direct the force carrying particles, only their effects (indirect evidence). The models make excellent predictions, but I still feel like they're "wrong" in some sense.
Great for juggling balls - nice weight and very grippy.
Outside of more complicated tricks like the claw and other specialized patterns, the most common juggling patterns (such as the cascade [1]) don’t rely as much on pure handeye coordination as they do on maintaining a consistent, even toss. The key is throwing each ball so it rises and falls in a predictable arc, so it lands approximately in the same spot where your other hand is waiting to catch it.
When I teach complete beginners, I actually start with a set of special handkerchiefs. They fall more slowly than balls, which gives learners more time to react and makes it much easier to see and follow the path of each object through the air.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_(juggling)
> When I'm bored, I just whip out my balls and start having a play. And people watch, and sometimes join in.
Nice.
(I'm sure the author did this intentionally)
In my experience most folks go to clubs in order to do pass juggling with others (or because it’s a nice indoor space with high ceilings), but typically folks are very happy to spare some time to help beginners learn
Seemed annoying then.
Seems radical now.
> Another mistake is completely ignoring the ball and staring into the distance. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've seen it a bunch more with *rats* than anywhere else. In any case, I would recommend you just casually glance up at the ball as it reaches the top of its arc
Is 'rats' a juggling jargon I'm unfamiliar with? Or do rats stare into the distance often?
> DO NOT JUST PASS THE SECOND BALL BETWEEN YOUR HANDS. This is a common thing, as people are regularly taught it
People are really regularly taught it? Who's doing that teaching?
I suspect a different cause: cartoons. Especially in older animation, juggling was typically presented in the 'circle' style, which is probably where people tended to pick up the misconception. I guess that animation is a lot easier to produce.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAPkX11Bfu8
Instead, he took three large whiskey bottles of different shapes and sizes. On stage, he broke the bottom of each bottle. They came out all sharp, jagged, and uneven. He then proceeded to juggle three of them. I think he got only a few rounds before he was forced to drop them.
I don't think he does that anymore.
I often tell beginners two things: (1) a big part of learning to juggle is training yourself to suppress the panic reflex, so simply mindless practice solves a lot of problems, and (2) you have much more time to react than you think (yes this is related to #1).
Joining a juggling club is one of the top suggestions I can offer. I juggled 3 balls and practiced various tricks for years before I joined the motley collection of engineering, physics, and math students juggling in the chemistry building at the University of Michigan, and my progress accelerated massively after I had a chance to see what people were doing and get advice from people who could see me. They also pushed me to try things that I wasn't particularly interested in, and that helped a lot even though I don't do most of those things regularly anymore.
Personally I juggle as self-entertainment more than performance, so as time went on I gravitated toward turning errors into repeatable tricks that look good from behind the balls, with no concern about how they look to observers. If you want to look good to observers then you have to approach it differently. I practice controlling ball collisions (hit them intentionally and make them go where you want!) as well as ball slaps and other really fast recoveries that are honestly too fast moving for an observer to grasp but they make my hair stand on end and that's the point. Do something wrong, then do it intentionally, then do it controllably, then repeat it. Occasionally these look cool but mostly it is more like a fidget spinner than a performance.
My ongoing practice for the panic reflex is things like hitting myself in the face with the balls repeatedly. You have to escalate that to keep gaining benefits. I'm winning if I can smash balls in my face repeatedly without blinking. It can be done!
Feels like it would be super-easy-to-code and probably would be lucrative. Implement "slow down time" so people can practice juggling in slow motion, add some other features like catch radius and bias towards consistent height of throws and you've got a great game!
I haven't tried just 1 ball, but I find 2 to be a lot harder than 3. (which, I suppose, is why I was expecting something insightful about why it would be difficult to juggle just one ball).
I do agree on clubs though. They were as big of a revelation as siteswap when I learned them and I'd highly recommend trying. Most juggling clubs(accumulations of people, not object) have loaner clubs and nice people willing to share theirs as well as teach.