I suppose it is to be expected, but I was surprised all the same. Since I started working on 4 clubs I’ve yet to really hurt myself up to this point, which is a bit of a shock since learning 3 clubs involved many painful encounters very frequently. 

I don’t remember exactly what I did or when I did it, but my finger has been painfully stiff for a few days now. I bang my fingers pretty regularly working on 4 clubs, but I must have smacked this one pretty nastily because it is still sore. 

Anyway I kept waiting for it to get better, but when I woke up and it was still just as bad off as ever I decided to wrap it up in tape today and see how it reacts. 

I think I had better take a brake from practice for the next few days as well, just in case I’ve actually fractured it. 

And all I can say about that is it is disappointing. 

In the past week or so I have really come a good ways with 4 clubs, despite a lot of rainy weather that has limited my practice. I have also gotten all of the 3 ball tricks on my list down very solidly, and have made great progress with the 4 ball half shower. I even started working on a 4 ball shower yesterday, but I missed a catch and smacked my hurt finger and that was it for the day. 

I am just going to have to bite the bullet here, accept the fact that I will loose some of my most recent progress, and take the week off. 

Lame. 

I guess there will never really be a time when I will want to take time off, but it does seem like I am on the verge of a lot right now. 

So it goes. 

In 3 ball news, the box is rapidly becoming my new favorite pattern and I can’t wait to start playing with variations. Once my stupid finger is better. 

In fact, I might say that the past few weeks have been some of the most productive of my juggling career. When last I wrote, I was feeling a bit lackluster about juggling, and in an attempt to refocus myself I came up with a practice guide. 

It has been more successful than I could have ever imagined. 

Writing it out gave me a wonderful rededication and focus and I have made absolutely wonderful progress. I’ve made a few changes to the guide in practice, but I am not going to go through and make a real revision for a few more weeks. 

The reason for the delay? 

I am learning 4 clubs, and putting in so much time to get past the initial stumbling blocks that I am not following the guide as closely as I hope to once I am more comfortable with 4. 

Well, that sort of lets the cat out of the bag, because 4 clubs is my biggest news. At least to me. I’ve been very happy with my juggling so far, but honestly up to this point I’ve really felt like I haven’t been doing anything that special. 

4 clubs is different. 

I consider running 4 clubs fairly serious juggling, and working on them fills me with a wonderful sense of accomplishment and purpose–which is nice, since other parts of my life aren’t really so hot these days. 

Also something that warrants mentioning, and is directly related to 4 clubs is the Jesup Juggling Jam. I hosted a World Juggling Day event this year and it was a great success. I actually met another juggler in town!

I hope we can arrange some time to juggle at some point. Anyway, it was at the event that I really got the idea that I had 4 balls down pretty solidly. I saw Ian (the other juggler) run 4 and i knew right off that my fountain was much more solid. 

So I thought after a while, “hey I wonder if i could do 3 balls and a club.”

Well, a few hours later I was juggling 3 clubs and one ball, and that night I ordered my fourth and yellowest club. It got here friday and on my third attempt I got 4 catches. 

I went out of town for the weekend, and only practiced a bit while I was gone. I managed to get enough catches for a few nice pictures, but didn’t feel like I made any real progress. 

Once I got back home though, I made a clean qualifying run with a nice collection after about 20 minuets in the yard. Yesterday, after a warmup I went out and got around 10 catches on nearly every try. I had a few long runs, topping out around 30 or so, but it was hard to keep count. 

I feel pretty comfortable with the progress I am making, and it is so very, very exciting even to be working with 4 that I just can’t wait to do another session. 

It is all thanks to the practice guide I made. Since I started doing that my practices are no long just haphazard attempts, they have structure and direction.

I have also made profound progress with 3 ball shower, the box and 4 ball multiplexes. Work with five is also going much faster now. My flashes are much more reliable and I  can actually run a few catches of the chase (505050?) and 50510. I think that if I start flashing from my left hand I will be in good shape by the end of the summer. 

Almost everything I know with 3 is crisper now too. 

I am very pleased with the state of my juggling right now. If i can manage to escape the office, I am going to go do it right now. 

The one really happy thing I’ve got going on at the moment, though, is some nice juggling progress. I learned a very nice new trick in the past week, and I have made some really excellent progress with four. 

I learned a 3-ball carrying trick which I’ve seen called “yo-yo on both sides” or something similar. Carry tricks have a nifty look to them, because instead of letting the balls take a natural trajectory, well you carry them in a pattern of your own choosing. The yo-yo carry I’ve been working on is really fun to juggle, and it has a very dramatic visual component. The carried ball seems to sort of hop along with the pattern while the other balls do what they are supposed to. 

The very same day I figured out this yo-yo carry trick (even though I was able to find some videos of the trick after I’d learned it, I figured it out on my own) I had a big breakthrough with four ball crossing patterns. 

I managed to work two different types of crossing tosses into my 4-ball fountain (an outside and an inside switch). For both of the crosses the throws are fairly similar–a high “5″ throw followed by a low “3″ throw, and back into 4 4 4 4 4 etc.–and the only difference is, one uses regular cascade tosses, and the other uses reverse cascade tosses. 

I think that, with the reverse tosses at least, this is how 4-ball half-showers are juggled. I think for the inside (read: traditional cascade) throws, this is the first step in learning some “siteswapy” patterns. 

I have also been working on a cool little multiplex start for coin juggling. This isn’t exactly the most productive thing in the world, but all the same it is cool. I think it could make a good youtube video. I kind of want to go get some $1 coins from the bank though, quarters are tricky to catch with any reliability. 

I also taught my friend Robert how to juggle using my new methodology, and he was up to 12 catches on day 2. 

Juggling has been a bit more of a mental priority I suppose. It is a comfortable place to send my thoughts when things are stress-filled in real life. Sitting at work today, I came up with a structure for practicing.

I’ve thought about doing this, even tried it once or twice, but with very little success. This list, I have been musing over while juggling for the past week, and I am pretty pleased with it. It seems like the more I’ve read from jugglers such as Anthony Gatto, and Jason Garfield–jugglers who are unquestionably at the top of human achievement–the clearer it is that having focus in practice is the most important thing for improvement. 

Taking a page from Gatto’s practice book, What I plan to do with this practice list is go through each item, spending about 2-5 minutes per line trying to get everything on the line down, in sequence, without any drops.  I have toyed with the idea of imposing a “drop limit” per line–after which I would have to move on to the next trick–but I don’t think I am at that point yet. 

Basically, this list represents what I can do, with a huge variety of proficiency. The ultimate goal here is to get everything clean. There are quite a few 3-ball activities, patterns I would call “prep work for 5″ that I have left off. I think if I add anything It will be 3-ball flashes. For now though, I am going to focus on what I have outlined so far. 

I hope that, within a few months of spending at least 1 hour a day, every day, on this list, I will be able to develop the across-the-board-consistency I am looking for. 

I have also included focus points for each section, just to give myself a reminder of what I am looking for. While there is no strict relationship between them, it should be obvious that things such as fluidity and continuity are necessarily preceded by things like endurance, accuracy etc. 

Here is the list: 

BALLS 

3 ball–focus on: fluidity

cascade, 1-up 2-up–left, right, cross, underarm cross. 

cascade, 423–high, low, high claws.

cascade, claws; mills mess claws. 

cascade, over the top, tennis, reverse cascade, mills mess. 

cascade, fake 1-up 2-up, yo-yo carry, factory

shower, box

4 ball–focus on: continuity 

fountain endurance. 

reverse fountain endurance. 

pistons endurance. 

circles endurance. 

fountain, reverse fountain, pistons, fountain, circles. 

fountain, synch switch, left, right, cross, shower, switch. 

fountain, inside 5-3 swap, outside 5-3 swap. 

5 ball–focus on: accuracy (first 2 throws)

flashes

multiplexes–focus on: precision/endurance

4 ball cascade stacks

5 ball cascade stacks

4 ball cascade split to 4 ball fountain

RINGS

3 rings–focus on: comfort

cascade endurance

cascade, 1-up 2-up, 4 ring prep work

cascade, over the top, reverse cascade

CLUBS

3 clubs–focus on: continuity/accuracy

cascade endurance.

cascade, 1 double, 2 doubles, 3 doubles. 

doubles endurance.

cascade, 1-up 2-up.

half shower endurance.

reverse cascade endurance. 

423 endurance.

mills mess endurance. 

cascade, over the top, tennis, half shower, reverse cascade, mills mess, UA-double to cascade. 

cool down with mixed props 3 and 4 patterns, or juggling on unicycle. 

To be fair, I was coming down with a bit of a cold, so I was probably a bit testy to begin with when I went to the Georgia Renaissance Festival.

I already had my doubts about seeing any really impressive juggling there. My mom is a potter, and at a recent show she had a booth next to a group of people promoting the renaissance festival. Striking up a bit of conversation, she started telling them about me, and how I juggled and how, “wouldn’t it be great for me to come see the jugglers at the festival?”

She told me all of this later, and at one point she said she told them how I’d just started working on five. This is where my misgivings came from. 

According to my mom, the lady seemed really surprised and said, “Wow! If he is doing five then he must be really really good, no one does five.”

This was not a good sign. 

Yes. Five is tricky. Five has given me fits for months now. Not that I have been able to dedicate half as much time as I’d like towards it, but since my first flash of five a few months back, I am only up to 7 catches. 

I, however, have been juggling just over a year. That’s one year. One. Probably I’d peg myself at about 14-15 months at this point. 

I’m no prodigy, I don’t have any special gift–I just like to juggle. 

What I don’t like, though, is juggling for money. And therein lies the difference. 

Not to detract from the performances at the renaissance festival–I mean, after all, balance ladders and rolla-bolla’s are neat, they look cool–but still. To watch a half-hour of something billed as a juggling show and to see non-continouious under-the-leg throws be the most difficult trick performed–wait, make that the only trick performed–was a huge disappointment. It was more than disappointing. It made me angry. 

This was not a juggling show by any stretch of the imagination. I realize that it must get tedious doing the same half-hour show dozens of times in a weekend, week after week. 

But still. 

Go ahead, juggle the can of span, garden weasel and knife; the audience goes for it, include it in your act. 

But don’t you think they would respond to some quality 3-club tricks? I’m not asking for 7-ball siteswap patterns–no one but jugglers like that. 

A few backcrosses though, a good run of Mills mess, a pirouette or two, or even a kick-up to a run with five if your up to it–these tricks could be done in less than five minutes. I can’t fathom that seeing them wouldn’t be exciting for an audience and it would do so much to expand their idea of what can really be done by jugglers. Is it really so important that what you juggle be pointy or gimmicky that you don’t have a single club on stage during a juggling act?

I just don’t understand what would lead a person to call a show with so little juggling a juggling act. 

Other performers at the festival, I am thinking here of the Dexter Tripp Thrill Show (note the lack of juggling in the billing) actually did much more real juggling on stage. 

While the Thrill Show didn’t feature anything too elaborate, and despite having five torches on stage, Tripp only juggled three (I learned later, from his fiance, that he can do a run of continuous back-crosses with five torches) he also didn’t bill himself as a juggling act. 

I actually really enjoyed Tripp’s performance. He did a great act on a loose high-rope, and when he did a nice, clean run with three torches while standing on an audience member’s head, it looked really nice. 

He also threw in a few double tosses, and when he did chops with the torches, I have to admit it looked way, way better than club chops–the trail of fire really made the trick stand out. 

Tripp, too, used some interesting props. He did a run with a knife, an apple and a chainsaw that ended with the apple being cut in half by the saw. He played it up well, and it got a nice reaction. 

While Tripp didn’t do anything juggling wise that I would call exceedingly technically difficult, he didn’t bill himself as a juggler. His was a thrill show, and the focus was on the rope act. His performance there was fantastic. 

His tricks were complex, difficult and technically demanding; and it showed. He was a great talent because he pulled them off. He was a great performer because he made them entertaining. 

The same thing is true for good juggling. Good juggling, done well, is hard. Making it appealing onstage is even harder. 

The irony of all of this is that, of all the performances I saw, the “Juggling Show” not only had the least amount of juggling, but the juggling it had was also the most boring. 

Even the Barely Balanced Acrobatic show had more juggling in it. There were a few runs of simple 3-torch cascades, and some very clean four-count passing. 

I didn’t go to the renaissance festival to see a WJF or IJA routine. But I expected to at least see something that I couldn’t get up on stage and do after scarcely more than a year of casual practice. 

And for a final note, the juggler who tossed the can of spam and the other “dangerous” objects, was celebrating his 21st year on stage at that festival alone. 

Between end-of-the-year banquets and the added workload of graduation, I have had my hands full at the paper recently. 

With everything going on, I have more or less abandoned the notion of making any real juggling progress for most of this month–and that is a pretty good explanation for the lack of posts recently. 

This has really been a growing trend lately. But even with these time-constraints I have still managed to do a good bit of juggling–it has just not been as goal-driven as in the past. 

Most of the juggling I’ve done has been in short bursts. 10-20 minuets or so a few times a day. 

I have been under so much stress and had some many obligations that I just haven’t had enough long, uninterrupted bits of time to have a long session. 

I have been having a lot of fun with four balls though. I can feel the pattern getting more and more solid, even after having it comfortably in hand for months now. 

I can manage a nice little transition from 3-4 (starting with the fourth held, tossing in a few stacked multiplexes, and then moving into a asynch fountain). From there I can make a nice transition to a synch pattern, manage a few simple placement tricks, and then move back into an asynch, and then back into a 3 ball cascade. 

It is nothing impressive, but it is very fun to work on stringing a few tricks together, and it is something that i haven’t really attempted in the past. 

I’ve also started working on a similar string of tricks with 3 clubs, but this usually takes me a bit longer to warm up into. 

From a cascade I start with an over-the-top tennis, go into a half shower, into a reverse cascade, into mills-mess (this part is ugly), then work a double toss on the underarm throw of mills mess and use that to go into a doubles cascade, back into a regular cascade, and then throw three 1.5 spins to end up with an all fat-end cascade, then back. 

I don’t think I’ve ever finished all of that, but writing it out makes it a bit more real in my mind, and I think I will be a bit more dedicated to getting it all together in the coming days. 

I’ve also done a bit of work with 3 balls, and I finally managed a few decent runs of a clawed mills mess. It is  very fun to juggle. I’ve also started working on the factory, and I managed a few catches of it.. although they were ugly. 

My shower is still ugly, too, and I would like to see both of those improve a bit. 

Other than that I have not done much. I haven’t dedicated any real time to progressing with 5, but I usually end my short sessions with a few flashes, just to keep the feel and form fresh. 

Hopefully in the coming weeks things will be more juggle-freindly. 

Just to give me something to do with my hands, and in an attempt to casually further my goal of juggling clubs on the unicycle, I brought along two clubs to toss around during the ride. 

After about 10 minutes or so of this, I was surprised by how well I was doing, so I swung back by the house and swapped out the pair of clubs for a set of three balls. 

Now, let me back up here to just review my last attempt at juggling on the unicycle. It was about a month or so ago, and it was terrible. I could barely manage a cascade beyond four or five catches. I am a bit better at the reverse cascade, and I was able to keep that going for about 8-to-10 catches, but with a total lack of control on the unicycle-end of things.

The moment I pulled out of my driveway Friday afternoon I started a cascade that was as well-controled as anything I’ve juggled on two feet. I kept the pattern going and rode down the block, turned up the road and started rolling around the elementary school beside my house. Within the next 20 or so minutes I was doing mills mess and almost any trick I could think of. 

I spent about 30-45 minutes enjoying my new and unexpected skills before heading back home. I grabbed my clubs and took a short spin around the block, and I managed to get better than a qualifying run in before I smacked myself in the face and decided to call it quits for the day. 

I went out again Saturday, just playing with balls, and happily discovered that, no, i had not, in fact, been possessed by some strange juggling-disposed deamon, and that my skills were my own to do with as I saw fit. 

I didn’t make much more progress with clubs, but I also didn’t work much on them. 

On Sunday I took another, longer ride, and brought all 7 pounds (3198 g for you metricly-inclined chaps) of my Exerballs along with me. Just as before I found an unexpected and inexplicable level of success. 

What’s more it was probably the hardest-core (hard-corest?) workout i’ve done in a good long while. I was very pleased. I made it around the entire walkway of the school with only 2 drops (at the two tightest, pole-lined turns). 

I even had a chance to showcase my talents, and I took my unicycle and props out to the local Relay for Life. 

I am not really sure what can account for this sudden breakthrough. I don’t really feel as if I am appreciably better at either juggling or unicycling since my last attempt to wed the two, but something has certainly clicked. I find it much easier now to keep either activity going smoothly while shifting my focus from one to the other. 

I still am more comfortable with the reverse cascade, and i usually drop into it whenever there is a difficult patch or a sharp turn coming up. I have the feeling that making the tosses in toward the center of my body, instead of out and away from them, and having all of the balls heading toward my center really adds a lot of stability and control to my pattern. 

It is an interesting point, and one I have been thinking about for awhile, juggling on the unicycle seems to have re-emphasised it in my mind. 

I really think that a well-controled reverse cascade is an inherently more stable pattern than a traditional cascade. The props cross at different places in the pattern, and it seems to make collisions much rarer. Even on a wild throw, the reverse cascade seems more salvageable. With everything moving into the center of my body, I can usually manage to cradle a mistake between my arm and torso–a much easier feat than reaching out to grab a 2.35 pound ball while perched atop a unicycle. 

For a while I thought this might just be a personal bias. Since I learned to juggle with the reverse cascade, I thought that this explained my higher level of comfort with it. 

I am not so sure now. I think there are some legitimate advantages to the pattern in terms of sustainability and resistance to degradation. 

Now, of course i realize that it is much less well-suited to higher numbers. The accuracy and height requirements of five make the regular cascade seem like a better and more natural choice. But when it comes to regular old three ball juggling, anything I do feels a bit more stable with a reverse cascade. 

Claw catches especially go much more smoothly for me in reverse, and I can juggle the reverse in a much, much tighter, faster pattern. 

I think that this goes back to the issue of where and how the balls cross. In the reverse my props’ trajectories cross as they are falling, meaning any collision is less likely to cause an unrecoverable disruption. 

Also, it seems like the pattern just keeps the balls farther apart in general. I wonder if there has been any experimentation with these issues by jogglers. 

At the very least, it warrants some further exploration. 

I am fairly comfortable calling the work I’ve done a success. I’ve finally broken my mental block against learning the shower, and I seem to increase my catches with each attempt. I think if i can ever manage to get some real time invested in working with the pattern I will be able to nail it down pretty solidly and transition into juggling a box pattern with relative ease.

Time, yet again, is the critical element in the equation. My time spent juggling has really dropped off in the past month. A result of many factors, I hope that the shortage of juggling time is a passing problem. I have high hopes for the coming weeks, and I think that if i can just set aside an hour a day to juggle and an hour a day to unicyle i will be able to get back on track. 

The biggest deterrent has been a general lack of energy. I think, though, that starting off with a nice ride around town on the unicyle will help pep me up and get me more in the mood to do some serious juggling. 

I’ve also been working on backcrosses with three balls. This is a pretty intense little trick, i have to admit. In the time i’ve spent trying to learn it i’ve learned to make under the leg throws pretty easily. At this point, after about a week of working on it very half heartedly  (i managed about three good practice sessions) i can start with a behind the back throw 10 out of 10 tries, and i can actually pull one off mid-pattern at about a 3-for-10 rate. 

it seems like behind the back throws, under the leg throws, and under the arm throws are all pretty similar skills. Each trick just involves carrying a prop and throwing it from a new location. To give myself time to pull off the tricks i’m less familiar with, i’ve found that i can just make a high throw with one ball. 

As i continue to work on backcrosses the challenge will be to first achieve a level of constancy, and then try to do it without making such a high toss. The high toss makes the trick work, but it also makes the pattern look broken. 

I did a small bit of fun club juggling at my brother’s wedding. I really like mills mess with clubs, in case that has not been made clear so far. I can get a toss or two of doubles into it and then go back into a normal pattern now, so it is good to see things improving on that front. 

I don’t think i have even tried to work on five much since my last post. I’ve just felt drained and unmotivated whenever i try. 

I am very tired and don’t much feel like writing any more. Hopefully i will have some more productive news for the next post. 

I suppose there are a host of excuses I could get into, but more than anything I have just felt a bit run-down. I went to the chiropractor earlier this week though, and since then I have felt better (not 100% yet but getting there). 

I have spent some time juggling, and have continued to work with five in both the regular cascade and the three-ball multiplex. I’ve not made much progress, which isn’t surprising. To really hit any kind of breakthrough I know I will need at least an hour or two of solid, uninterrupted practice. 

I did notice, however, that after having slacked off for a few days I’ve not regressed at all in what I am able to do. In fact, (and this has been a pretty regular phenomenon) it seems like i am almost a little better in some areas. Not that I am suddenly able to make six good catches with five or anything, but rather, my first five catches seem a bit tighter. 

So, in a way, no news is good news I suppose. 

Mills mess with clubs is also going very nicely. I finally managed to get a thread up and running on rec.juggling (the WJF forum was very lackluster). I got some really nice links. This video by Luke Burrage is by far the best of what I got linked to. 

It is really nice to see someone else do what you are working on, it makes it seem possible, and gives you a better sense of what is really going on. 

I can very nearly put doubles spins on the third throw of my MM pattern now, in fact, I was able to get about five catches with high under-arm tosses. So, as seems to always be the case these days, things are going along slowly but surely. 

Well, thats all for now. 

The five ball stacked multiplex cascade is the simplest of all multiplex patterns involving that number of props. 

While any sustained multiplex pattern inherently involves some level of complexity, the stacked throw is nigh-universally regarded as the easiest and most introductory skill that can be considered a true multiplex talent. 

I think that anyone honestly looking to develop some modicum of multiplex proficiency–especially with five–would view a stacked cascade as step one and a split cascade as step two. 

Multiplexing is a very interesting avenue of juggling, and one that I have explored tentatively since about the time I started working with four (just before the first of the year). 

I never invested much time at all in trying to develop multiplexing abilities. The most I’d done before last week was make two stacked throws with four, just swapping all four balls between my hands in two tosses.I got pretty good in a relatively short amount of time with this very simple skill, but never made an attempt to make more than one catch each.  I have also worked on a multiplex quickstart into a cascade in which all three are thrown from one hand, but that does not have much real bearing on most true multiplex patterns. 

Last week, after feeling a bit fatigued from working on five-ball flashes, I made an attempt to actually juggle a three ball cascade that included a repeated stacked multiplex toss on every third beat. 

This is a step below a stacked five-ball cascade, which is effectively identical and just involves multiplex tosses on beat two as well as beat three. 

The reason a stacked multiplex is so much simpler than a split throw lies in many dimensions. First off the toss itself is harder to make. To make a split throw work the balls have to follow two separately conceived trajectories. Just getting the balls to work together in a stack is difficult enough, splitting them requires an added level of dexterity and concentration. 

Not only are the tosses themselves more difficult to control, but the pattern as a whole is much more complex. 

When depicted in siteswap notation a multiplex throw is shown in brackets. A three-ball cascade juggle with one extra ball and a single, stacked multiplex throw would thus read as follows:

3 3 [33], 3 3 [33]   (*Note: commas delineate a full iteration of the pattern) 

The bracketed threes represent two balls, thrown together with a beat of three. this looks much like the notation of a regular( 333, 333)  cascade and it juggles the same way–everything is a three. 

Stacked notation stays the same with five balls as well. (3 [33] [33], 3 [33] [33])

Things are not quite as simple with splits. I am not entirely sure i have this down, but as best I can figure out a split three-ball cascade, done with five balls, would look like this. 

[32] [32] [32],  [32] [32] [32] (or just [32] in shorthand) 

Because only one ball is changing hands with each toss, and the other is being tossed and then caught by the same hand, it makes every throw interact with two balls. Yet that is really just half the story. 

Now, since I can juggle neither a six-ball stacked multiplex pattern nor a five-ball split patter, I am not in much of a position to say one is easier than another. However, a six-ball multiplexed three-ball cascade is just the next logical extension of the same stacked pattern with five ([33] [33] [33] in siteswap), whereas splits involves an entirely new skill. 

At the moment even my five-ball stacked cascade is shaky, but it is very fun to juggle. It provides a good distraction from working on honest five-ball patterns (a skill with which I am still stuck on flashes). 

Well, that is enough of this needlessly convoluted issue for the moment. As is always the case improvement is just a matter of practice. I plan to continue working 3 3 [33] as a warmup and 3 [33] [33] as a true challenge for the next few weeks. Once I can juggle the latter comfortably I am going to start trying to work out how to make [32] split tosses. 

Splits look much, much better and the added skill it takes to pull them off is well worth it. 

Until then, 

Happy Juggling. 

I am not going to say much about juggling at UGA just because it was weeks and weeks ago, but I do want to mention it. Emily and I spent a good two or three hours juggling at UGA last time I was in Athens, and the experience was very nice. 

Everyone at the UGA club (the “Ugallers,” as no one calls them) was very good. Granted, we only met three people, and they were probably the three most dedicated members of the club, but still, all of them could do five quite nicely. 

It was really helpful to see a five pattern going on in person again, and I think it helped steer me in the right direction as far as the five-ball cascade is concerned. 

I was also very glad to finally get the chance to do a bit more club passing. I worked with Mo, a maths teacher at UGA and the head of the club. He is a pretty phenomenal juggler (he flashed eight while we were there) and it was great to work with someone who is so talented. 

We started working on a basic four-count passing pattern, and even moved up to two-count for a bit. Stepping up to two-count was really helpful, it served as a sort of “overload” and when we went back to four-count things went really well. 

I used this same idea, combined with a few tips I picked up at the AJA Festival, to give my first real juggling lesson. 

I was teaching my friend, Helena, after dinner and it was pretty amazing. Inside of an hour she’d gone from absolutely no understanding of juggling to a pretty well-formed 6-catch run of a cascade.

I realize that some people have a natural ability to juggle, and can pick it up for whatever reason with shocking ease. I don’t think this is the case here. Not to disparage Helena, but I don’t think she is exactly a juggling prodigy. She just payed very close attention, and made a good effort to do everything that I said. 

Here is a breakdown of what I did to teach her how to juggle.  So first of we started standing face to face with one ball. I tossed it over to her in a regular cascade throw, just putting it in her hand instead of mine. Next i got her to do the same thing to me. We worked on this for probably a dozen throws, switching out hands every so often before moving on to do the same thing with two balls. 

After a few tosses between us with two balls–which she picked up pretty easily–I went ahead and moved up to three, starting off by explaining what order they were going in, and how the most important thing was just getting the balls in the air in the right order with the right rhythm. Obviously this didn’t go quite as smoothly as things did with two, but we kept at it and by switching back and forth from catches to throws, sending the balls between us each time, she eventually got a good feel for the rhythm 

Once she got the rhythm down i started her working on her own. I dropped her down to two balls, and got her to start throwing to her self. As she got more comfortable with the first two throws I told her to shift her attention more toward throws and away from catches and this seemed to really improve things pretty quickly.

We were probably just under half an hour into the lesson at this point, and I took out a third bag and told her to just hold it in her right hand and keep working on two throws, then switch it over to the left and do the same thing. 

Once she got used to making throws and catches with another ball in her hand i took the balls back and showed her a nice clean pattern with three, explaining how the order and timing worked in a bit more detail. 

In about three tries she’d managed a flash. 

We worked on just getting 3 throws, 3 catches from the right hand for a bit until she was comfortable with it and then moved on to the left.  In the next 10-15 minutes she’d moved up to four, then five and eventually six catches. 

I was pretty pleased with the progress she made, and with the success of my teaching methodology. 

In Luke-related news I have been steadily improving my basic skill set in the past few weeks. 

I’ve managed to improve my clubs mills mess to the point where I can move seamlessly to and from mills mess and a cascade. This is a pretty big improvement, and it makes mills mess feel like much less of a “one trick pony” as it were. Not only that, but I have also started working a doubles toss into the pattern 

It’s all going along pretty nicely. Five is slow but steady, but to be honest I have not had much time to really devote to practicing. 

I did manage to get a nice stacked multiplex pattern going, but I want to put that in an entry of its own. 

All for now.