The majority of members in the juggling community do not make a primary living directly off of their juggling skills or other stage worthy talents as most clowns or circus performers do.
Juggling is not an overtly difficult skill to learn or teach yourself as one might think, even if you consider yourself to not be very coordinated, you would be surprised how much progress you would make if you tried to learn how to juggle three balls. There are many different avenues for you to teach yourself how to juggle and get involved with the local juggling community. Most large cities have a juggling club of sorts that meets on a regular basis. Check here if you are looking for a club near you.
If you give learning how to juggle a chance, you will find that juggling three balls is not a terribly difficult skill to teach yourself, even less difficult if you have some instruction in person. Juggling is a total mind body workout, and from my experience, you are working virtually every upper body muscle from the reaching and throwing motion of juggling as well as bending down and picking up the props you drop. You can even build or tone your muscles by juggling heavier objects or more objects at once if you want to learn how to juggle more than three balls.
However most people fail to realize that juggling is a great exercise for your brain. For one, you are focusing on multiple objects in the air and the pattern as a whole all at the same time, which works both sides of the brain as objects are continuously crossing between the left and right sides of your body, which is said to create more neural pathways and connections in your brain according to PubMed Central.
University of Oxford and University Regensburg in Germany conducted similar experiments where they taught a pool of test subjects how to juggle and had them juggle every day for weeks while the other half acts as the control group.
The pattern they were taught is called the three ball cascade which is the most basic juggling pattern there is. This is not saying that their brain physically grew in size, but the density of the gray matter increased. This is significant because it is commonly known that it is more difficult for the brain to increase in size or density in certain areas as an adult. However, even more interesting, is that the participants of these studies well called in after a few weeks to see how their brain reacted after they stopped juggling.
The density of the gray matter in their brain returned to its original density before they learned how to juggle. So as soon as the improvements in the brain came, they receded just as quickly. This raises the question, how do you make these improvements more permanent? Since juggling on a regular basis has been shown to improve brain density in gray matter, more and more people are turning to juggling recreationally to help alleviate the symptoms of ADHD, dyslexia, and autism.
Gray matter is the part of the brain that does all the calculations and computations, and by increasing the density of the gray matter in your brain, your brain will be able to perform more efficiently, just like upgrading the central processing unit cpu of your computer. To amp up the challenge increase the speed, add more balls, change patterns, or incorporate a bit of bounce juggling. Juggling teaches a growth mindset. You learn from mistakes, noticing how effort and increasing experience bring you ever greater mastery.
As Dr. Dweck explains in the ground-breaking book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success , this approach is a vital formula for success in school, sports, business, and personal relationships.
Might as well learn it while dropping the ball. How to Juggle. Wildcat Jugglers. When they fail, we look for explanations. We trip on the sidewalk, our brain gets this news milliseconds later, and we accusingly stare at the offending crack. The surprise violated our model. When you first get on an escalator that has stopped working, you gingerly take a few steps.
In the cascade, objects cross each other and land in the opposite hand. Traced out, it looks like a figure eight tipped on its side. When my daughter gave it a go, her head was wildly snapping as she tried to monitor each scarf.
But, as Heather Wolf had shown me, juggling is less about throwing individual objects than throwing to a pattern, like tossing to a little algorithm in the sky. Jugglers look to the apex of where things are thrown—that external focus again—and only ever have a peripheral sense of all those objects in flight.
Good jugglers can do it blindfolded. Back in my living room, I was having better luck with the scarves. I could now keep the three scarves aloft for a number of repetitions, or what jugglers call runs. We moved on to balls. First, Wolf asked me to just throw a ball, with a relatively high arc, from one hand to the other.
Then she wanted me to reel off three of those throws, but let the balls simply fall. This would help me diagnose my throws. In juggling, the throw is everything. With a good throw comes a nearly automatic catch prediction, again. I was struck by how fast it all seemed. Over time, she said, juggling would come to seem slower. And it did. As you sometimes hear a professional athlete describe it, I felt as though I had more time with the balls.
The pattern was as clear as skywriting; the balls seemed to hang in the air. When we start out with a skill like juggling, he suggested, novices pay attention to everything. And then another! Wait, I still have to throw another?
What happened to that first one? Here it comes! Did I just mess up my third throw? Should this throw be with my left or right? Wait, how did I get two balls in one hand? Why am I doing this again? The more things you have to pay attention to, the faster time seems to move. But as you get better, you learn what to pay attention to. You have a better sense of what to expect.
You have all sorts of spare attention. You can carry on a conversation while you juggle. Time seems more unoccupied, and thus slower.
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