Juggling Tips and Ideas

This section will contain some tips from club members, and ideas for juggling tricks you could try yourself.

Contents

• What is Juggling?
• Juggling props
• Juggling Theory (Siteswap)
• Passing
• Feeding

Enough of this - let's get back to basics.

If you want to learn to juggle for the first time, take a look at the Beginners Corner. But if you'd like to learn a bit more about how it all works, then read on.

The Cascade
	This is the basic juggling pattern, and it can be performed with any odd number of objects. Most people learn this first (as a three ball pattern) , and it's the basis for lots of more interesting patterns. A cascade is totally symmetrical - the hands alternate, throwing the ball to the other hand, all at the same height. Most people who have learnt to juggle casually can do a three ball cascade.
The Fountain
	The Fountain is to even numbers what the cascade is to odd - i.e. it is the basic pattern for four ball juggling, or six, eight, etc. for the more adventurous! It is basically two circles - the right hand throws only to the right, the left only to the left, the balls circle around from inside to out on each side. What? The balls don't cross over? That's right. A four ball fountain is just juggling two in each hand - but that's quite a bit harder than it sounds!
The Shower
	This pattern can be done with any number of objects (no I don't mean it's really easy to do big numbers - I mean you can do it with odd or even numbers). One hand throws up and across, while the other passes a ball quickly underneath it. Kids often learn to juggle 2 balls this way. It's the easiest pattern for two, but it soon gets much harder. If you juggle a three ball shower, one hand is working as hard as if it were juggling five balls (yes - it's true!) A four ball shower makes one hand work as hard as it would in a seven ball pattern, five equates to nine, and so on. We'll come on to an explanation of why this is a bit later.
The Half Shower
	Again, this can be done with any number of objects. It's similar to the shower, in that one hand always throws higher than the other, but instead of passing straight across, the lower hand does a small throw, so the pattern looks like two different sized arcs in the air.
Reversing the Patterns
	It's possible to juggle backwards. A reverse cascade looks like a cascade, but the balls are thrown on the outside and caught on the inside. The same is true of the fountain - each hand throws up the outside and the balls fall back on the inside - i.e. the circles go the other way around. Can you do a shower or half shower backwards? Sort of, but effectively the pattern just mirrors, so a reverse shower is just a left-handed shower.
Getting more complicated
These are the basic patterns which people tend to learn first. Some people stick with these, striving to put more and more objects into them - they're known as numbers jugglers. Others may never bother with more than three balls, but learn complex patterns involving a mixture of the throws described above, combined with other moves, such as crossed arms, throws under the leg, behind the back, etc. There are many fascinating patterns to learn, like Mill's Mess (the 'twirly' pattern most people master first), Burke's Barrage, Rubenstein's Revene (really twirly!), The Box (a 'sqaure' pattern), The Machine and many more. Many jugglers run patterns together, or make up new ones of their own devising, to create striking effects.

Juggling Props

Balls
	Balls come in various sizes and weights and it's really down to personal preference which sort you buy. There's also a vast range of colours to choose from. So-called stage balls have a plastic shell and are usually large and brightly coloured for performance. Most hobbyists use a cloth, millet-filled ball known as a thud. The balls pictured to the left are Spotlight Raves, quite small and light but very, very bright. I like these for bigger numbers, but find them a bit light for most juggling.
	These are Beard 180s, a heavy (180g) thud which I've used as my main juggling ball for about 18 months. That's why they look a bit battered :-) I like these because the weight makes them easy to control, but they can wear you out quite quickly. Other manufacturers do balls of similar weight.
Bouncing Balls
	Bounce jugglers do it upside-down. Basically most patterns which can be juggled in the air can also be juggled off the floor. Provided you have balls that bounce, of course. If you try this with thuds they just go, well... thud. So you need some balls like those pictured here. These are Oddball bouncing balls, one of the more common varieties. The Rolls Royce of bouncing balls are silicones, perfect spheres of pure white silicone, beautiful to look at and handle. However, they would set you back about £35 each, so stick with the rubber variety unless you're really keen.
Clubs
	By far my favourite prop, there is a great variety of clubs on the market. They vary in weight, spin speed, shape and decoration. Pictured here are Henry's Pirouettes, regarded by many (especially passers) as one of the best clubs available. They are reasonably light and have a fairly fast spin. I favour them for passing, but am starting to turn back to a slower-spinning club for solo juggling, currently Henry's Albatross. You can see some of those in the third picture.
	I said clubs come in various shapes, and I wasn't kidding. Pictured here are Beard Radical Fish, one of the more unusual-looking clubs. They were very popular a few years ago, especially with numbers jugglers because of their small size, low weight (180g or 210g) and relatively slow spin. This set are the 210g variety - they're over four years old and have seen quite some action, as you can see from the worn handles.
	Clubs come in two basic types: one-piece and two-piece. One-piece are a single piece of hollow, moulded plastic. They're generally regarded as inferior, except by some club-swingers, who find their moulded plastic knobs better than the separate rubber ones found on most two-piece clubs. Some jugglers still rate certain one-piece clubs highly, notably the Dube Klassic. Two piece clubs have a separate body and handle, with a wooden dowel running all the way through the middle. Rubber knobs and ends are usually held on by a screw into the end of the dowel. All the clubs pictured here are two-piece, including the Henry's Albatross to the left, a fairly heavy club at 230g.
Rings
Picture to follow	I'm no expert on rings, as I never juggle them (hence no photo yet!) There are two basic varieties, one is a very thin plastic disc, the other slightly thicker and hollow. The latter are more forgiving on the hands, but it's harder to hold a lot of them. Also worthy of note are colour-change rings, which have a different colour on each side, so the juggler can flip them around during a routine to give the illusion that they've changed colour. Rings can be quite good for juggling big numbers and the fluourescent sort are also effective in UV shows.
Diabolo
	Diabolo was a kids' toy popular about 50(?) years ago (before my time, I'm afraid). Basically you keep the diabolo spinning on the string suspended between two sticks. There are lots of tricks you can do, including throwing it, making it jump over your legs and arms, keeping more than one going, etc. Although I own a diabolo, I have rarely been seen using it, so I won't offer any advice. Diabolos are all basically the same shape, but come in a variety of sizes, colours and patterns to suit your preference. Most are made of slightly rubbery plastic, but some (notably Renegade) are made of hard plastic. A variety of strings and handsticks are also available.
Devilstick
Picture to follow	A devilstick is a wooden stick, tapering towards the middle, which you keep in the air with two other sticks, usually coated in rubber or silicone. There are all kinds of really impressive twirly tricks to be done with devilstick, and I can't do any of them. All I can say about these props is that they come in different weights and (of course) decorations.
Pole Spinning
	Pole (or staff) spinning is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - spinning a pole, throwing it, twirling it around your body, etc. There aren't many special poles available - the one pictured here is home-made out of a broom-handle.
Contact Juggling
	Contact juggling involves rolling a ball around your hands, arms and (for the more expert) chest, head, legs, etc. When done properly it is mesmerising, as the ball appears to flow around the juggler, sometimes even staying completely still while the juggler moves under it. It can't be explained - you have to see it. Any hard and reasonably heavy ball will do for practice, but it looks best with crystals as pictured to the left. These come in two basic forms, the more expensive but harder-wearing and clearer acrylic and the cheaper poly-carbon. Originally they were always clear, but these days there are a variety of colours and transparencies - some even have a coloured cylinder through the middle, which produces some odd optical effects. They are not cheap - you won't see much change from £20 even for a small one.
Hats
	Hat manipulation can be great fun and looks really good when it's done well. You can do many of the tricks with any hat (within reason - I'm not talking policemen's helmets), but for others you need one which is reasonably solid and quite heavy. The hat pictured to the left is specially designed for hat juggling and manipulation by Nils Pols. If you want to learn more about hat tricks, take a look at www.trickswithhats.org. It even has a guide to converting an ordinary hat to one suitable for manipulation.
Fire Props
	Most juggling props come in a version you can set fire to. OK, so this isn't true for hats or contact balls (at least, not that I've seen). Pictured to the left are Henry's Niteflite fire clubs. These can be juggled exactly like ordinary clubs, assuming you can get over the big flames whooshing inches in front of your face, and you remember not to catch the wrong end. Fire props usually have a wick on the end which can be dipped in paraffin - NOT petrol! Fire shows are quite common at juggling conventions and other events. Please find an expert before trying fire juggling for the first time.
Unicycling
	Unicycling can be great fun, especially if you start to get involved in games like unicycle hockey. There are lots of tricks to learn too, such as riding one-footed, wheel walking (pushing the wheel with your feet instead of using the pedals), etc. Most people learn to ride on a 20" wheel, as pictured to the left. This is a DM Ringmaster Pro, an excellent unicycle, which is practically bomb-proof but pays for that in its weight.
	This is a Pashley 26" Muni, designed for mountain unicycling (yes, we really do it!) A larger wheel lets you go faster and ride over obstacles and rough ground more easily. However, the larger wheel can be harder to control, which makes it less suited for indoor riding and learning tricks. You can find a full range of unicycles for sale at unicycle.com.

Juggling Theory (Siteswap)

Siteswap represents each throw with a number indicating its height and speed. A pattern represented by a single number is the basic way of juggling that number of balls. So a siteswap value of 3 represents a three ball cascade, 5 represents a five ball cascade and so on. Where odd numbers represent cascade throws (i.e. from one hand to the other) even numbers represent fountain throws (i.e. to the same hand). Hence a value of 4 means a four-ball fountain, 6 a six-ball fountain, etc. If you're not sure on the difference between a cascade and a fountain then read the section above, which describes basic juggling patterns.

However, much more complex patterns than this are possible. If you read the section in Beginners' Corner on how to learn a three ball cascade, you may remember that I advised against learning a three ball shower first, because one hand would be working as hard as if it were juggling five balls. A shower is a pattern in which the balls travel round in a circle, thrown high by one hand, but just passed across by the other (many people learn to juggle two balls like this as kids). A three ball shower has a siteswap value of 51 (pronounced five-one, not fifty-one). This means you alternately throw a 5 and a 1. As you already know, a 5 is what you would throw in a five ball cascade. A 1 is a pass straight from one hand to the other (or a fast horizontal throw).

Of course, you can juggle any given pattern at different speeds or heights. This is because the numbers are relative to each other. So a pattern of 3 can have high, slow throws or low, fast throws - it doesn't matter as long as they are all the same. Similarly you could juggle 51 with very low 5s, as long as you make the 1s really fast.

A pattern is only valid if the average of all its numbers is a round number. In fact, the average indicates how many balls are in the pattern. Hence,

• 3 is a three ball pattern, because 3/1 = 3
• 51 is also a three ball pattern, because (5+1)/2 = 3
• 53 is a four ball pattern, because (5+3)/2 = 4

It's possible to come up with all kinds of pattern. A fairly simple, but interesting, one is 534. You'll notice this is the first pattern I've mentioned which contains both odd and even numbers. That means it contains some throws to the opposite hand (like a cascade) and some to the same hand (like a fountain). You should be able to work out that this is a four-ball pattern: (5+3+4)/3 = 4. It consists of the first two throws of a half shower, followed by a throw straight up in the air. The straight throw should be between the hight of the first and second throws. The pattern then repeats on the other side - unlike showers and half-showers it is symmetrical.

There are a few values which might not be immediately obvious:

• 0 means an empty hand. This is most commonly seen in 'gap' patterns, such as 55550, which is basically a five-ball cascade with one ball missing
• 1 means a horizontal throw (known as a 'zip' or 'hand-across'), as we've seen in showers.
• 2 means a hold. It can sometimes be a very small throw to same hand, or a fast spin with a club. This can be seen in patterns like 552, a four-ball pattern which is quite a good warm-up for learning five balls.

Want to give it a try? See if you can juggle these, or at least work out what they would look like:

• 441
• 633
• 63551
• 2 - bet you can do this one - think about it :-)

• When passing, jugglers usually face each other, whereas sharing patterns are generally done facing the same way (side by side or one behind the other). However, I can think of both passing and sharing patterns which break this rule (e.g. backdrop patterns).
• Passing usually involves at least three objects per juggler, whereas sharing can be done with only three objects. Again, I can think of exceptions (e.g. shooting-star).
• Clubs are most popular for passing, balls for sharing. However, this is by no means a rule.

Do you have to be a good juggler to start passing? Not really, but you should at least be able to hold a stable cascade by yourself. If you don't know what a cascade is, read the What is Juggling? section above. If you can't juggle a cascade yet, I would strongly advise learning that first. Passing is most common (and I would argue most fun) with clubs, but if you can't juggle clubs yet there's no reason not to try it with balls, as long as you know someone else who can juggle, of course. Essentially, every passing pattern consists of a mixture of throws to yourself and throws to the other juggler(s). OK, before the juggling pedants start on me, there is one two-person pattern which doesn't - it's called Ultimates and involves passing every single throw to the other person. Throws to yourself are (amazingly) known as selves, while throws to someone else are called passes. Simple, eh?

The pattern most people learn first is called four-count or every-others. It goes like this:

• Right pass
• Left self
• Right self
• Left self
• Right pass
• Left self
• Right self
• Left self
• ...

You can probably see from this why it is called four-count (every fourth throw is a pass), but why every-others? The second name is a one-handed view of the pattern - every other right hand throw is a pass. Personally I don't like this second way of naming patterns, as it assumes you will do passes with one hand only. That may be true at the start, but there are some really great patterns out there for two-handed passers. But enough of this - back to the passing. Stand facing your partner. The distance depends on what you're juggling. If you're using balls you should probably be about one to two metres apart; for clubs two to three metres is more suitable. The pass should go from your right hand to your partner's left - i.e. in a straight line down the side of the pattern. Of course, you can do it left-handed if you want. Be careful though, as most one-handed passers juggle right-handed, so you'll find you can't pass with some people if you learn left-handed. You should both pass at the same time, which, as you've probably realised, means you have to juggle at the same speed. That's probably the most challenging part for beginners. So give it a try, and keep on practising. The best place to learn is at your local juggling club, so if you're in the North East, come along and see us on a Thursday evening and we'll help you learn.

Here are some commom problems when learning to pass:

• The two jugglers going at different speeds. This is often because of...
• ...looking at your own throws instead of the other person. When juggling by yourself, practise looking through your pattern at an object beyond it. This is a useful skill to have anyway - if you start to learn five balls you'll soon realise you can't watch all of them!
• For clubs, spinning the club too much or too little. You just have to practise to sort this out. Try just throwing passes to each other before you get started, to get the spin right.

• Right pass
• Hold
• Hold
• Hold
• Left self (as you catch the return pass)
• Right self
• Left self
• Right pass
• ...

What about other patterns? You can replace the 'four' in four-count with any other number to get a different pattern. The lower the number, the more passes there are. Odd numbers are two-handed patterns, even numbers one-handed. Personally I think numbers above four get pretty boring and it gets too easy to lose count of all the selves - they're used in some patterns for more than two people, though. The best patterns to learn next are two-count (also called solids) and three-count (also known as waltzing). Two-count means every right-hand throw is a pass. It feels a bit hectic at first, but in fact it is slower than four-count (passes take longer to arrive than selves!) Three-count is the most basic two-handed pattern:

• Right pass
• Left self
• Right self
• Left pass
• Right self
• Left self
• ...

Passing is a very versatile (and sociable) form of juggling. There are all kinds of different patterns beyond those I've mentioned here - some with crossing throws, double- or triple-height throws and all kinds of tricks you can include. It's also possible to pass with more than two people (in theory there is no limit to how many people can be added to some patterns, except for the size of the room and the number of clubs you have!) Passing to two or more other people at the same time is called feeding. Maybe I'll write a section on that in future...

There are some pictures of people passing in the club gallery and even a short video...

Feeding

• Right pass to B
• Left self
• Right pass to C
• Left self
• Right pass to B
• Left self
• Right pass to C
• ...

• Right self
• Left self
• Right pass to A
• Left self
• Right self
• Left self
• Right pass to A
• ...

What else can you do? There's a two-handed version of this basic feed, where the feeder juggles pass-pass-self and the others juggle three-count. It goes like this:

A's pattern	B's pattern	C's pattern
Right pass to B Left pass to C Right self Left pass to B Right pass to C Left self ...	Right pass to A Left self Right self Left pass to A Right self Left self ...	Right self (or wait) Left pass to A Right self Left self Right pass to A Left self ...

You all need to be quite solid two-handed passers before this will work, but it's a nice pattern.

There are some patterns for more than two people which don't involve feeding. The most obvious is called Box. It's basically two pairs of jugglers passing at right-angles so their patterns form a cross shape when viewed from above. The skill lies in avoiding the obvious collisions in the middle of the cross, which becomes harder the lower the count - typically is is done on four-count or two-count but I suppose it could even be done with ultimates.

There are some others patterns which are all based around the same basic concept - that you receive from one person and pass to another, so the clubs essentially travel from one juggler to the next in a 'circle'. The variations come from changing the shape of the 'circle'. It can be a triangle of three people, a star of five people, a 'Y' shape or even a line (where some people pass back over their heads). I suppose you could argue that this is technically feeding, and certainly it becomes so as soon as you reach the two-handed versions of all these patterns, but I'm not going to get into that discussion :-)