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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

I found scarves harder to learn. You can learn to juggle three balls in 30 minutes:

1. Hold one bean bag in your dominant hand while standing, facing a wall, about a foot away.

2. Drop the bag. There, that's over with. (You'll be doing it a lot.)

3. Pick up the bag.

4. Toss the bag from one hand to the other, keeping your elbows loosely at your sides, until you consistently have it arcing at about eye level before descending to the other hand.

5. Do that 100 more times.

6. Hold one bag in each hand (drop them once, if you like).

7. Toss from your dominant hand and, when the bag is at the top of its arc in front of your eyes, toss the other bag. Catch them both.

8. Repeat without pausing another 100 times.

9. Hold two bags in your dominant hand and one in your other hand. Toss the first, wait for the top of the arc and toss the second, wait for the top of the arc and toss the third.

10. You're juggling. Drop all the bags to celebrate.

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Definitely. I've had a hard time convincing people to do the required repetitions. They end early and say that they can't juggle. The few people that have, successfully juggle in a relatively short amount of time. Their form isn't great and they can't keep it up for a long time, but they have a great start.

A couple other exercises/tips worth mentioning:

- Start with your non-dominant hand for 2 balls as well (alternate which hand you start with).

- Stand over a couch or bed to make it less costly to drop a ball.

- Stand in front of a wall to notice when you're moving forward.

- For the advanced: try two in one hand (much harder than 3). Will make 3 ball juggling easier.

> try two in one hand (much harder than 3). Will make 3 ball juggling easier.

What does this mean?

Not GP, but if I were to guess: Try juggling only two balls, but use only one hand. Here's a video for demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMui692JHU

One key thing that's always left out of these instructions is that you can't throw the same arc with both hands. This causes the balls to collide mid-air if your throws are too consistent. This was very frustrating for me when I was first learning. You have to move your hands side to side a little, throwing when your hand is closer to your center and catching when your hand is further from your center.

The pattern is like McDonald's Golden Arches but with the arches pushed inwards so that they mostly overlap, and as you say you always throw inside the ball coming down.

Two helpful things while learning are a) doing it standing in front of a wall, so you don't have to worry about keeping throws from going forward away from your body (common while starting), and b) doing it in front of a ledge, so you don't have to bend over so far when you drop balls (even more common while starting). Combine both if you can, makes it much less frustrating!

Repetition is the key. It's very difficult, at first, to consistently throw a ball in the same way. It's also difficult to do it in the same way with both hands (right to left, left to right). Once you master the simple action of throwing the ball consistently from either hand, throwing 2, and then 3 balls at a time is much easier.

When you can juggle you won't ever look at your hands, you just look at the space in front of your eyes and your hands will be where they need to be.

I can juggle 3 balls quite well, but I can not for the life of me juggle 4 (different pattern) or 5 (same pattern as 3, more balls). 4 is extraordinarily difficult for me. I approach it by separately juggling 2 balls in each hand (no ball swaps hands), but my left hand betrays me!

Ahh, the Klutz method. I know it well. :)

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