Most people can't juggle one ball

TLDR: A complete guide to juggling, from zero to siteswap notation, by someone who juggles in nightclubs.

I take my juggling balls with me wherever I go. Train stations. Airports. Nightclubs. You name a place I've been, and there's a decent chance I've juggled there. When I'm bored, I just whip out my balls and start having a play. And people watch, and sometimes join in.

I've been teaching people to juggle more or less since I started doing it in public. Especially in places like airports, many people drop their phones to watch me drop balls instead. At this point, I will often go up to them and offer them my balls. Some are too nervous to take my offer, but I can regularly get at least one to bite.

How to juggle

For those of you innocent bystanders who have never been granted the opportunity to learn the basic technique, here it is. This instruction set is best paired with three 115-g, 68mm Cascade Thud juggling balls filled with millet seeds. Or 3 random pieces of fruit you don't mind getting bruised. Or indeed any 3 vaguely round objects which fit into your hand, don't bounce too much and can take a hit.

Step 1: 0 balls

Stand with your feet and hands shoulder-width apart, elbows at 90 degrees. Tilt your head just slightly up and look at the sky while relaxing your shoulders. This is your starting position. Most people can do this.

Step 2: 1 ball

Take one ball. Resume your initial position, and practise throwing it from one hand to the other. Your aim is to get your throws accurate enough that you don't have to move your other hand to catch the ball – there's a saying in the juggling world that if you throw the throws, the catches catch themselves. The ideal arc goes from one hand, reaches its peak just above your eyeline, then lands on the joints between your fingers and hand, forcing your hand to close around it. You then throw the return throw by giving a smallish impulse coming from the elbow (the rest of your joints should stay more or less fixed – fewer degrees of freedom makes life easier). If you get something like this on your first couple of throws, you are already doing better than most people. If you don't, do not worry. It comes pretty quickly with practice.

Step 3: Fixing your 1 ball mistakes

The first common mistake is reaching up to catch the ball. Don't do this; you're going to want as much time as possible when you move on to the later steps, and this reduces your time available. 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. This is better than both ignoring the ball, which results in you not catching it, and following it the whole way, which means you then can't handle more than one ball.

Step 4: 2 balls

Start with one ball in each hand. Throw your first ball along the trajectory practised with 1 ball. Wait as long as possible, then throw the second ball along the same trajectory, in reverse. DO NOT JUST PASS THE SECOND BALL BETWEEN YOUR HANDS. This is a common thing, as people are regularly taught it, but it scales really badly as a juggling pattern. In order to avoid the balls colliding in mid air, you want to throw the second ball just to the inside of the arc of the first. Throw the second ball, then shift your hand back to the outside to catch the first. Make sure you practise starting with both your right and left hands.

Step 5: Fixing your 2-ball mistakes

A common mistake here is throwing the second ball too early. It really should be that the first ball coming in to land triggers the second ball. The later you can throw it, the more time you will have later on, and you will need more time later on. Another common mistake is throwing the balls at different heights. Both of them should be following the nice trajectories you plotted out with 1 ball. A final mistake is throwing the second ball behind the first, rather than inside. This isn't fatal but leaves you a lot less to play with once you start trying to do 3-ball tricks.

Step 6: 3 balls

You might be surprised to learn that 3 balls works exactly the same way as 2. Start with 2 ball in one hand and one in the other. Throw from the hand with more balls, then do a normal 2-ball swap (i.e., do precisely what we've just been practising) on the other side. You now have one ball in each hand and the second ball flying towards your originating hand. You can now do another 2-ball swap with that hand. Catch the 3rd ball and you have now completed a 3 ball "flash". To get better at juggling, all you now need to do is increase the number of two-ball swaps before you catch everything. Once you get 6 catches (i.e 2x the number of balls, or a "qualify"), you can officially say that you can juggle 3 balls.

Step 7: Fixing your 3 ball mistakes

The first mistake I commonly see with 3 balls is throwing the balls too quickly. This results in less time to process everything. If this is happening to you, go back and spend a bit more time practising with 2 balls. Another common issue is throwing the balls forwards. There are a couple of ways to fix this. One is to juggle in front of a table or bed, which a) stops you from walking forwards while juggling b) catches the balls for you nicely when you drop them. Another is juggling in front of a wall, which actually just fully stops you from sending the balls forward.

So, you now know how to juggle. Wonderful! I hope it brings you great joy. You now have a plethora of options for how to develop further.

Tricks

The easiest way to upgrade from basic 3 ball juggling is to start learning some tricks. For this you're going to need to learn some new throws.

The easiest throw to learn is the outside throw: rather than throwing on the inside of the incoming ball, throw on the outside. You can then mix and match these throws to form a range of patterns, such as tennis. Play with it, have fun.

So maybe you don't want to be doing fancy schmantzy tricks, and just want to juggle as many balls as possible. This is a path for the brave.

Learning to juggle 3 balls (as you of course know by now), takes anywhere from a few hours to a week or so. Learning to juggle 4 balls took me about a month.

The basic steps are simple: Learn to juggle 2 balls in one hand (essentially the same as 2 balls in 2 hands, but you're throwing more vertically). Next, do this in both hands at the same time. This is called a fountain pattern, as opposed to the 3 ball "cascade". Fountain patterns only work with even numbers, and cascades with odd, so they naturally complement each other as the canonical way to juggle n balls.

5 balls took me 4 years to learn. You read that right. 4 years. It is, like 3 balls, a cascade pattern. You're doing precisely the same thing, but you're throwing everything fast enough that you get an extra 2 balls in the air before you start catching anything. A large amount of the difficulty comes from the fact that balls are no longer only crossing at the point where you throw and catch. You now have to deal with the fact that 3 balls are going to cross each other in mid-air, and if you don't get your timing right they will collide. Good luck.

The next target after 5 balls is actually 7 balls. 6 is easier, but by the point you've learnt to juggle 5, you've spent such a long time juggling in a cascade pattern that 7 feels like a more natural step. It took me 2 years of specifically training for half an hour a day to get to the point where I managed to get 14 catches with 7 balls once.

Siteswap

This is where juggling gets weird. And (somewhat) mathematical. Thus far, we've only talked about patterns where all the balls are thrown to the same height, balls are thrown one after the other, right hand following left, and life is simple.