Category: juggling

Juggling Shower Practice Hits and Misses

I’m still working on the 3-ball juggling shower practice. I’m up to the toss and catch. It has taken me a couple of weeks to get beyond just dropping balls all over the place.

There are a couple of methods I’m trying. One of them is to start the toss and catch by tossing up the 2 balls in my dominant hand right away, one after the other (which I’ll call Method A). The other is to toss just one ball up (Method B).

Method A is illustrated using an animated stick figure and circles on a website called the Library of Juggling. It’s also recommended by some jugglers. Method B is demonstrated on the website Taylor Tries.

I thought Method A would be the only one I could hope to master, but I can’t seem to work my way up to tossing the second ball up high enough to work my way into the actual shower pattern—which is very fast, in my opinion.

But I couldn’t manage to do Method B at all until today. I would consistently drop all the balls. I’m not sure what made the difference today, but that’s been the usual way I progress. I get stuck and somehow, I get unstuck if I just keep practicing.

Where I’m at today is usually where I have trouble working into the juggle pattern. I had the same problem working into the 3-ball cascade (which Sena is working her way up to now). I have trouble letting go of the ball I need to toss in order to start the actual pattern.

I’ll be working on trying to sneak extra throws into the toss and catch for now. I need to let go.

Stuck in Two Ball Shower Juggling Practice

I get stuck at certain stages in juggling. It’s uglier than usual with learning the Shower. I’m struggling with the two-ball practice. I’ve looked at the YouTube videos of several experts and their demos vary.

I found out from a Wikipedia article that the two ball Shower is a thing. But it’s not juggling. I’ve been stuck in ugly juggling learning stages before. I’m thinking I’ll get through it.

Sena is still learning to juggle. She’s eager to try the three ball Cascade. We’re both dropping balls all over the place.

Juggling in Living Color!

Sena got me a spectacular gift—glowing juggling balls! They’re not like any of the juggling balls we have. You plug them into a wall socket and they light up.

They are not much bigger than the other juggling balls we have, so not much of a learning curve. In a way, they’re kind of like stage balls, only not as big as most of those are. And the light show is fantastic, especially in the dark. There are several colors, they can be bright or dim and programmable to change colors as you juggle.

And they’re solid, not filled with millet. When you charge them up, they sort of “breathe” red color (meaning they wax and wane with brightness). And when charged (takes about and hour and a half), they “breathe” green.

Feisty and So On

There’s this dialogue in Men in Black II between Serleena and Zed:

Serleena: Zed, look at you, 25 years and you’re still just such a looker.

Zed: Cut out the meat dairy. And you, still a pile of squirmy crap in a different wrapper.

Serleena: So feisty.

I’m becoming more aware of the use of the word “feisty” in reference to so-called “older” persons. That’s because I’m getting older.

I noticed an article on the use of patronizing words for older persons. A couple of other such words are “spry” and “sharp.”

“Sharp” as in sharp as a tack (for his age, of course). Also, as in sharp enough to know today’s date.

“Spry” as in he is spry enough to get into and out of a chair.

I’m also spry enough on most days to do under the leg and behind the back juggling tricks.

I’m still sharp enough to know the difference between respectful and patronizing.

I guess that makes me feisty.

Ugly Juggling Hits the Shower

OK, I’ve found out that there’s more than one way to hit the shower pertaining to the juggling trick called “The Shower.”

As usual, my form is ugly because I’m in the early practice phase of trying to learn the shower. But then, even when I think I’ve got a trick down—it’s always ugly.

Anyway, different experts have different instructions for the shower trick. A couple of them tell you to throw the two balls in your dominant hand one right after the other. “Go for it” the guy says, who wrote the Learn to Juggle manual I still use. A YouTuber also tells you to just throw the two balls up there. Another expert doesn’t suggest that—but I can’t do it at all unless I toss two balls up sequentially.

I keep my two hands two close together and too high for the “slap” part of the pattern, which is tossing a ball straight across from my nondominant hand to my dominant hand. I also throw a ball too far out from the pane of glass (which is a pain in the ass!).

As usual, you can see all my mistakes in my ugly juggling on my own YouTube video, which you should not use as an example of anything but the wrong way to learn the shower.

By the way, Sena is making progress learning to juggle!

Sena Learning How to Juggle!

Big news flash—Sena is learning how to juggle. She just started doing the single and two-ball practice throws on the way to learning how to do the 3-ball cascade, just like I did about 5 months ago.

Just like she heard me dropping balls—now I hear her doing it. It’s a gas! It’s fascinating to watch her gradually improve.

On the other hand, I’m trying to learn how to do another juggling trick called the shower. If you look this up on the web, you’ll find a comical entry that reads “How do you juggle 3 balls in the shower?”

It’s not a trick you do in the shower.

The shower is what some call an intermediate level trick which, I think, historically was how everyone started learning to juggle. Instead of learning the cascade, you started by learning the shower. The way the balls fly, they sort of look like they’re raining. And it’s a lot harder than the cascade.

There’s a half shower trick that I learned pretty quickly. And I can sort of handle the two-ball practice for the shower. I’m stuck when I add the 3rd ball, sort of how I got stuck learning the behind the back throw. You have to throw two balls up from your dominant hand in perfect arcs just before throwing one ball across from your non-dominant hand to the dominant hand. Catch them all. Right.

You can find YouTube videos of this that make it look easy. But that’s only because the teachers are very well practiced!

More On Taming the Juggling Balls

I’ve been juggling for about 5 months now and reflecting on my progress. I think I’m doing OK for a geezer. Sena would call me a hot dog although I would still call it ugly juggling by any standard.

What’s striking, at least to me, is the little bit of science I can find on the web about juggling. I hear the term “muscle memory” when it comes to learning juggling. Actually, there’s some truth to that. There are different kinds of memory. For example, most of us know about declarative memory, which about memorizing facts, because we use it to prepare for exams. Those of us who went to medical school remember the agony of taking tests for the basic sciences.

But so-called muscle memory, or the memory for learning new skills like juggling, takes place in the brain. There was a study published in 2009 which found changes in both gray and white matter of subjects before and after learning to juggle (Scholz J, Klein MC, Behrens TE, Johansen-Berg H. Training induces changes in white-matter architecture. Nat Neurosci. 2009;12(11):1370-1371. doi:10.1038/nn.2412).

The study about correlation of the inability to stand on one leg for 10 seconds with higher mortality in older patients, which I relate to the ability to do the under the leg juggling trick, was published last year (Araujo CG, de Souza e Silva CG, Laukkanen JA, et al. Successful 10-second one-legged stance performance predicts survival in middle-aged and older individuals. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2022; 56:975-980.)

I talk a lot about juggling as though I’m a teacher. I’m not a juggling instructor by any means. You can find better juggling teachers on the web. But my approach to talking about juggling in terms of it being a hobby for me is really not different from how I talked about consultation-liaison psychiatry before and after I retired. I’m still a teacher—just evolving in retirement.

However, you can find much better resources for learning how to juggle at the following websites:

Juggling for Beginners
How to Juggle

https://www.renegadejuggling.com/

Have fun!

Lost Juggling Ball Found!

I lost one of my new juggling balls temporarily this morning while trying the behind the back throw. OK, so I dramatized the video a little. That’s because I got interrupted in the search to help Sena hang our new wall clock.

I had no idea where that ball was. I even considered a wormhole vortex opened up in my office—briefly.

But the place I finally found it was just where I’ve dropped juggling balls before—on one of my bookshelves.

New 12 Panel Juggling Balls!

I got one of the two new sets of juggling balls today. They are the Zeekio 12 panel, 67 mm, 130 gm balls, which are noticeably heavier and a little harder to do certain tricks with-like the behind the back throw.

I dropped them several times, so they are getting broken in very well!