Juggling practice tips

Juggling was the first "circus skill" that I learned. I think I was maybe 12 years old, and I was with my grandmother during the summer when my parents worked. I had seen the Swedish magician Carl Einar Häckner's show on the amusement park Liseberg and decided that I would also learn how to do something circusy, and it just happened to be juggling.

I don't know how I could persist to actually learn how to juggle, because it is quite a steep learning curve and I didn't have any special method or technique except throwing all the balls around me and hoping to catch at least one of them. This was not very efficient and made me very frustrated - but also more eager to learn.

After learning three balls I later on learned four balls and some easy tricks but since then I haven't really improved my juggling until now. It has been very nice to have a teacher so I for the first time actually could get some feedback on my technique and progress.

What I will remember most from the juggling classes is to be persistent, have a plan and not move on to the next step too quickly.

I still think juggling can be very frustrating to practice since a throw is either a drop or a catch and nothing in between, but now I have some ideas how to make a practice session more efficient and less frustrating.

Juggling practice strategies top list:

Make a list at in advance what you want to practice, for example 100 normal cascade, 50 two ball in one hand and so on. Then you strictly follows this list, ignoring how many times you drop, until you complete eack task on the list. It is so satisfying to make a cross after each completed exercise.

Make a music play list that is as long as you want to practice. When the music stops, you know you are finished for today, and its very nice listening to music while juggling. When you are listening, you will forget how the time pass by. It doesn't work as well with radio programs since they might require too much brain power from juggling.

The classical tip of all times to save your back from pain: Practice juggling over a bed or sofa so you don't need to bend over to pick up your dropped balls.

Be patient and feel the success from what you can do at the moment.. I am anxious to move on to 5 balls but our teacher insists that there are many good five ball practices I have to do before actually moving on to practice five balls. It also means less dropping which also is good.

Count how many times you can throw a pattern and keep track of your record. Then you can beat your records.

Although don't do the previous exercise too much, because you don't want to practice to do a patterns until you fail and drop alls your balls, because that will make your muscles and body remember the movements of failure. Actually the ideal is to never make any wrong movements. To prevent this, set a number of catches that you know you can catch, and then olny do those catches and then stop. Do no more or less catches. . This way you practices to make it controlled and to practice to catch and finish. 

An exercise to train the ability to orientate in a new space and be able to juggle there, is to start a juggling pattern in one spot. Do a specific number of catches (as in the exercise above), and then as soon as you stopped juggling, start to run to a new spot. As soon as you stop running, immediately start juggling the specific number of catches again.  This does not only practice you condition, bit also to instantly start juggling and find new focus points.

When doing four (or six or eight...) balls, it will be convenient to just count the catches on one hand and then just double it up. But if you try this, make sure you alter the hands, because otherwise you will start do focus all the brain power to just the counting side. If counting a cascade pattern with three (or five or seven...) balls, count only the catches of one ball and multiply with the number of balls.