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.
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.
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!
Claude Shannon authored Shannon's Juggling Theorem, and built juggling robots. I gave some links elsewhere in this thread.
My father-in-law knew worked with Shannon at Bell Labs, and then MIT. (Among other projects, they made useless machines[1].) One day Shannon rode in on a unicycle. "I don't know you could do that", Marvin said. "I just learned." "How long did it take you?" Shannon: "Only about twenty minutes of practice. But it took three months to get that twenty minutes."
Back to juggling: In addition to the other advice here, I recommend balls that don't bounce (or, balled-up socks), and stand over a bed so you don't have to chase the balls when you drop them. Then you can get your twenty (or thirty, or sixty) minutes of actual practice, in closer to twenty minutes (or thirty, or an hour).
Also, like many motor skills (sports, music), ten minutes of practice six days a week trumps an hour of practice once a week, especially if you're getting decent sleep in between.
My dad could juggle reasonably well, I'm fairly certain up to 6 balls. As a kid this was amazing, and it killed me that I couldn't do it at all. I was generally bad at physical things, but I tried this a lot, and never got anywhere.
Then, in my mid-twenties, my mother-in-law gave me a juggling book, apropos of nothing. I followed the instructions, and within a couple of days, could reasonably keep 3 balls in the air. I've never gotten any better than that, but by resetting my expectations and following instructions set out for me, I was able to cross that threshold so now my kids think I'm amazing. :)
I usually recommend juggling over a bed, because that limits the amount of exertion that happens during a drop. It also reduces the negative reinforcement that a drop is a failure. Because a drop is not a failure, it's just a drop.
People tend to have mental blocks around things, and I've found that when you break a mental block (this happened with me and Mill's Mess) the result is fantastic. It opens up levels of creativity you never believed you had.
It also teaches you patience with yourself. Good things are possible if you're patient with yourself. If you can't get something one day, give it a rest. Try it again the next day.
It's not something you can just pick up and try every once in a while. You have to seriously focus on it, like at least several hours a week. Once you get it, you'll never forget how, though. I learned in high school and only do it sporadically, and I can still pick up any random collection of 3 things and juggle 20 years later.
I've got a couple of other skills that took me a few months to pick up -- card tricks, and beatmatching records. They're all skills that look effortless but take a lot of practice to get right.
I suspect some people are significantly more strong hand dominate than other people.
I suspect that significantly adds to the learning curve.
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While I don't want to advocate a defeatist outlook (I'm sure if you truly plowed enough time into it you could brute force learn it), with juggling, the stakes are low enough, that maybe this is a nice opportunity to appreciate a little humility about how everyone's gifts are a little different,
and to be grateful for all the things you're able to accomplish w/o extraordinary brute force techniques
Scarves are harder than balls because their movement is unpredictable and your hands end up moving in all directions if you can't throw them well.
Find decently weighted balls (130g is standard) which will have enough weight that throws can be well controlled. Juggling is 90% throwing and 10% catching. Get the throws right and everything will quite literally fall in to place.
