Learning to Juggle: Getting Started

Juggling is one of those things that's really impressive to watch, but is surprisingly easy once you learn how and give it a serious try yourself. Learning how to juggle 3 balls in the most basic (but still impressive) way really doesn't take all that much time - you could probably learn in a few hours. Invest in 3 tennis balls, a few hours of your time, and a bit of focus and you'll be juggling before you know it. It's really an amazing feeling when everything clicks and you suddenly get in "the zone" and you feel like you could juggle forever; it just becomes automatic once you have it. Like riding a bicycle.

The real key to learning is to never give up. Yes, it's awkward and yes, you feel clumsy, and yes, you will drop the ball more times than you can count. But the truth is, these feelings and facts are inevitable - everyone who's learned to juggle has gone through it. Like I said, patience is the real barrier that keeps people from learning to juggle. Don't be discouraged! If you decide you want to be able to juggle, don't stop until you can do it. That said, I suggest practicing over a bed so that if you do drop balls, they don't bounce or roll away. Trust me, the less time you spend running after balls, the less discouraged you'll feel, and of course, the more efficient your practice time will be. Also, don't be afraid to play music or watch tv while practicing. Unlike studying for exams or doing your taxes, tossing balls really gets to be a rather mindless, automatic exercise. You'll drop balls and pick them up and keep tossing them like nothing happened.

To start off, what you want to do is use one ball. With your arms fairly relaxed and your hands held steady at about waist level, toss the ball from hand to hand in a tall, parabolic path. Around head-level is a good height to throw. A word about the toss: it's a gentle toss, a sort of flick of the wrist with minimal elbow action. Think of it as a "pop", if that helps. Your goal here is to develop a consistent, reproducible toss that you don't have to think about to perform, or to catch. Now I don't expect you to perfect it to the point where you could do it with your eyes closed, but try to get it so that you don't have to watch the ball the whole way down to catch it - when you see it reach your eye level, try to predict where it's going and catch it without looking. Just toss the ball back and forth until you feel comfortable with your toss, and ready to move on to two balls.

Here's the procedure for 2 balls: have a ball in each hand, toss the ball in your right hand, and catch it in your left. But you can't catch it because your left hand is holding the 2nd ball, so what do you do? Ditch the 2nd ball to make space to catch the first. By ditch, I mean toss it to your right hand. This step may take some time to get used to. You want to get to the point where you can catch both balls easily. You want to be able to start with either hand, perform the ditch-catch with either hand. I find that when performing the ditch-catch it is helpful to blend both motions into one. What I mean is this: Ditching involves pushing the ball in hand up into the air. Catching involves tracking your hand to a falling ball. So blend the two motions - aim for the falling ball, and as you move your hand up to catch it, that motion is the ditch. By going for the falling ball, you're guaranteed a catch, but your ditch may or may not be a good toss. That can be improved over time. If you try to isolate the ditch-catch into two discrete motions, you'll miss out on the fluidity of the act of juggling. Another exercise that can help with ditch-catch is juggling 2 balls in one hand. Toss one, and then it's just an endless ditch-catch. One thing to note about ditch-catch is that you want to avoid tossing the ditched ball into a collision path with the falling ball. Obvious, yes, but it happens. What you want to do is ditch the ball to a path inside the falling ball's trajectory, then as you open your hand to catch you also position it slightly to the outside so that it's directly underneath the ball you're catching. It's kind of hard to explain, but I'm sure you'll figure it out as you go along.

You can see where this is going: juggling 3 balls is nothing more than a chain of the 2-ball procedure. At any given time, there's really only one ball in the air, and one in each hand. As the air ball comes down, you ditch-catch and a new ball is in the air, and the cycle repeats, with you alternating hands for ditch-catch. Even if you get good at 2 balls, integrating it into a sustainable 3-ball cascade is a skill that takes a bit of time to get the hang of. So to do this, hold 2 balls in one hand and the 3rd ball in the other hand. To start, toss the extra ball from your first hand up, and as it comes down you ditch-catch, and repeat. What might help here is to perform higher tosses to give yourself more time to focus on what you're doing while you're learning. It might help to say to yourself: toss, di-catch, di-catch, di-catch, etc. You won't have time to say "ditch-catch" in real life at speed. At first, you'll drop balls after 2-3 cycles. Gradually, you'll be able to consistently do 4, 5, 6 cycles before making a mistake. But then you'll just hit a point where you can do it for an indefinite amount of time before screwing up. And that's a great feeling, because now you have a skill that most people can't do. And you can go show all your friends. Or perform on the streets for money.

For anyone out there who's trying to learn how to juggle, I hope this was helpful...and good luck!