/Arvid Andersson
March 21, 1999.

Ball juggling.

This page is about ball juggling. If you don't know what that is or how to do it, just relax. Help is just one click away! Anyone can learn how to juggle. Just look at me!

Two balls.

Two ball juggling is easy, anyone can juggle two! But two ball juggling can be very fun and sometimes pretty hard as well. The 501 is one example, another one is the square, a trick that is really cool if you can do it well. If you juggle a two ball shower pretty wide and extremely low, almost horizontal, you get a very fast pattern you can keep going forever without even looking.

Two in one hand juggling is really important to know well if you want to learn to juggle four balls. It also lets you do several three ball tricks like columns and eating the apple (juggle the two balls in one hand and eat the apple with the other one).

Three balls.

Three ball juggling is fun. It's not too hard just to keep the balls in the air, so you can concentrate on the tricks instead. But the three ball cascade can be very interesting in itself too. You can juggle it in so many different ways; high, low, tight, wide, over your head, clawing the balls, with your eyes closed, behind the back and so on...

The cascade is also the pattern to use when you have no beanbags handy and your hands start itching (you know what I'm talking about). It's a good thing most stuff can be juggled. According to the flying Karamazov brothers (a great group of jugglers) everything can be juggled. They challenge their audience to bring stuff, anything they think can't be juggled, and have them juggle it. When I watched them, they got a lamp, a big fishbowl of glass, and a BLT sandwhich. Their 'master' had to keep the pattern going for ten catches, but unfortunately he only made nine. As he put it himself, "never try to juggle a fishbowl with mayonnaise on your fingers."

My favorite tricks with three balls are any fast and low ones, especially the box and the Boston mess. And a Mills Mess never fails to impress! If you can do the Mills' Mess you could try the Rubenstein's Revenge. I just learned it after having spent years of passive training! (That is, trying it once in a while). If you had trouble fitting that third ball into the Mills Mess, then you'll be happy to hear that the same third ball will give you problems in the Revenge, only much more so :)

Here are some links for the Rubenstein's Revenge:
On the JIS: text + MPEG videos
On JAG's home page: A good description (the one I learned from)

Four balls.

Four ball juggling is a bit harder than juggling three. If you feel confident with three balls, then you're ready to go on to four. There are two secrets of four ball juggling. The first is that the balls don't cross. A four ball fountain is just two balls in one hand, juggled in two hands at the same time. The second secret is practice. Four ball juggling is much more impressive than three though, so you won't be practicing for nothing.

This link goes to a page teaching you the basic four ball juggling.

Tricks I like with four balls are pistons and the four ball flash. I also try to learn starting with all four balls in one hand. Haven't been able to yet though... :( Harder tricks are the four ball shower and the four ball Mills Mess. Both of these require you to know the three ball versions. To learn them with four, all you have to do is to throw a little higher and pretend you're only juggling three. It really works!

Five balls.

When you juggle three balls, you hold two of the balls in your hands and there's only one ball to keep track of. When you juggle four, there's only one ball per hand to keep track of, so the five ball cascade is the first pattern where you need to keep track of several objects at the same time!

In the beginning of December 1996, I decided that I needed to master the five ball cascade. I started working, practicing furiously every day for a couple of weeks. I thought I'd be done in no time, but when I realized how much time it was going to take, practice changed to maybe twenty tired minutes every day. Well, almost every day. It felt like I just wasn't improving. I suppose this happens to everyone, because the five ball cascade really takes a long time to learn. I think I flashed five in the spring, and by the summer of 97 I could do about twenty catches. It takes a couple of months to master five, but it's worth the effort. I think.

I hope I didn't discourage you. Five ball juggling is hard, but not impossible. It doesn't take any superhuman feats to learn five, just some good, honest practice. Don't take it too seriously, just give it a shot every now and then.

Here's a link to the JIS five ball page.

Six balls.

I'm learning to juggle six. So far, I've flashed six a couple of times and I can do about thirty catches of three in one hand with both hands, so I have a long way to go. My goal for this year is twenty catches of a six ball fountain...

When I'm praticing, I can't help feeling this is easier than learning five was. Of course it helps when you can practice one hand at a time, but I still feel it should be harder. That makes me suspicious. All the trouble must be ahead of me!

If all you want to do is to juggle six and you don't care how you do it, then you can try to multiplex six balls! It's not nearly as hard as real six ball juggling.

There are some interesting pages on the JIS about learning six.

Seven balls.

Just kidding...

/Arvid Andersson