TLDR: A complete guide to juggling, from zero to siteswap notation, by someone who juggles in nightclubs.

I take my juggling balls with me wherever I go. Train stations. Airports. Nightclubs. You name a place I've been, and there's a decent chance I've juggled there. When I'm bored, I just whip out my balls and start having a play. And people watch, and sometimes join in.

I've been teaching people to juggle more or less since I started doing it in public. Especially in places like airports, many people drop their phones to watch me drop balls instead. At this point, I will often go up to them and offer them my balls. Some are too nervous to take my offer, but I can regularly get at least one to bite.

How to juggle

For those of you innocent bystanders who have never been granted the opportunity to learn the basic technique, here it is. This instruction set is best paired with three 115-g, 68mm Cascade Thud juggling balls filled with millet seeds. Or 3 random pieces of fruit you don't mind getting bruised. Or indeed any 3 vaguely round objects which fit into your hand, don't bounce too much and can take a hit.

Step 1: 0 balls

Stand with your feet and hands shoulder-width apart, elbows at 90 degrees. Tilt your head just slightly up and look at the sky while relaxing your shoulders. This is your starting position. Most people can do this.

Step 2: 1 ball

Take one ball. Resume your initial position, and practise throwing it from one hand to the other. Your aim is to get your throws accurate enough that you don't have to move your other hand to catch the ball – there's a saying in the juggling world that if you throw the throws, the catches catch themselves. The ideal arc goes from one hand, reaches its peak just above your eyeline, then lands on the joints between your fingers and hand, forcing your hand to close around it. You then throw the return throw by giving a smallish impulse coming from the elbow (the rest of your joints should stay more or less fixed – fewer degrees of freedom makes life easier). If you get something like this on your first couple of throws, you are already doing better than most people. If you don't, do not worry. It comes pretty quickly with practice.

Step 3: Fixing your 1 ball mistakes

The first common mistake is reaching up to catch the ball. Don't do this; you're going to want as much time as possible when you move on to the later steps, and this reduces your time available. Another mistake is completely ignoring the ball and staring into the distance. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've seen it a bunch more with rats than anywhere else. In any case, I would recommend you just casually glance up at the ball as it reaches the top of its arc. This is better than both ignoring the ball, which results in you not catching it, and following it the whole way, which means you then can't handle more than one ball.

Step 4: 2 balls

Start with one ball in each hand. Throw your first ball along the trajectory practised with 1 ball. Wait as long as possible, then throw the second ball along the same trajectory, in reverse. DO NOT JUST PASS THE SECOND BALL BETWEEN YOUR HANDS. This is a common thing, as people are regularly taught it, but it scales really badly as a juggling pattern^[1]. In order to avoid the balls colliding in mid air, you want to throw the second ball just to the inside of the arc of the first (I.e your right hand throw should be closer to your left hand throw than your right hand catch). Throw the second ball, then shift your hand back to the outside to catch the first. Make sure you practise starting with both your right and left hands.

Step 5: Fixing your 2-ball mistakes

A common mistake here is throwing the second ball too early. It really should be that the first ball coming in to land triggers the second ball. The later you can throw it, the more time you will have later on, and you will need more time later on. Another common mistake is throwing the balls at different heights. Both of them should be following the nice trajectories you plotted out with 1 ball. A final mistake is throwing the second ball behind the first, rather than inside. This isn't fatal but leaves you a lot less to play with once you start trying to do 3-ball tricks.

Step 6: 3 balls

You might be surprised to learn that 3 balls works exactly the same way as 2. Start with 2 ball in one hand and one in the other. Throw from the hand with more balls, then do a normal 2-ball swap (i.e., do precisely what we've just been practising) on the other side. You now have one ball in each hand and the second ball flying towards your originating hand. You can now do another 2-ball swap with that hand. Catch the 3rd ball and you have now completed a 3 ball "flash"^[2]. Don't forget to tell all your friends you've just flashed your balls. To get better at juggling, all you now need to do is increase the number of two-ball swaps before you catch everything. Once you get 6 catches (i.e 2x the number of balls, or a "qualify"), you can officially say that you can juggle 3 balls.

Step 7: Fixing your 3 ball mistakes

The first mistake I commonly see with 3 balls is throwing the balls too quickly. This results in less time to process everything. If this is happening to you, go back and spend a bit more time practising with 2 balls^[3]. Another common issue is throwing the balls forwards. There are a couple of ways to fix this. One is to juggle in front of a table or bed, which a) stops you from walking forwards while juggling b) catches the balls for you nicely when you drop them. Another is juggling in front of a wall, which actually just fully stops you from sending the balls forward.

So, you now know how to juggle. Wonderful! I hope it brings you great joy. You now have a plethora of options for how to develop further.

Tricks

The easiest way to upgrade from basic 3 ball juggling is to start learning some tricks. For this you're going to need to learn some new throws.

The easiest throw to learn is the outside throw: rather than throwing on the inside of the incoming ball, throw on the outside. You can then mix and match these throws to form a range of patterns, such as tennis. Play with it, have fun.

A few other fun things to try include under arm throws and catches, behind the back throws and catches and overhead juggling. In particular, I would recommend learning Mill's Mess, a great pattern where the balls look like they're following each other.

Numbers

So maybe you don't want to be doing fancy schmantzy tricks, and just want to juggle as many balls as possible. This is a path for the brave.

Learning to juggle 3 balls (as you of course know by now), takes anywhere from a few hours to a week or so. Learning to juggle 4 balls took me about a month.

The basic steps are simple: Learn to juggle 2 balls in one hand (essentially the same as 2 balls in 2 hands, but you're throwing more vertically). Next, do this in both hands at the same time. This is called a fountain pattern, as opposed to the 3 ball "cascade". Fountain patterns only work with even numbers, and cascades with odd, so they naturally complement each other as the canonical way to juggle n balls.

5 balls took me 4 years to learn. You read that right. 4 years. It is, like 3 balls, a cascade pattern. You're doing precisely the same thing, but you're throwing everything fast enough that you get an extra 2 balls in the air before you start catching anything. A large amount of the difficulty comes from the fact that balls are no longer only crossing at the point where you throw and catch. You now have to deal with the fact that 3 balls are going to cross each other in mid-air, and if you don't get your timing right they will collide. Good luck.

The next target after 5 balls is actually 7 balls. 6 is easier, but by the point you've learnt to juggle 5, you've spent such a long time juggling in a cascade pattern that 7 feels like a more natural step. It took me 2 years of specifically training for half an hour a day to get to the point where I managed to get 14 catches with 7 balls once.

Siteswap

This is where juggling gets weird. And (somewhat) mathematical. Thus far, we've only talked about patterns where all the balls are thrown to the same height, balls are thrown one after the other, right hand following left, and life is simple.

Siteswaps are not like that. The principle behind it is actually very simple; each throw and catch happens on a "tempo". The only restriction is that for each throw/catch, you cannot have more than one ball arriving at a time^[4].

You then notate a pattern by giving each throw a number; a throw that arrives 3 tempi later is a 3, 4 tempi later is a 4, etc. This works out nicely to mean that juggling 3 balls in a normal cascade pattern is just denoted "3", which generalises to juggling n balls being denoted "n" in siteswap^[5].

0, 1, and 2 are also possible throws - 0 means an empty hand, so no ball is thrown, 1 means a pass (what I told you not to do when juggling 2 balls) and 2 just means holding a ball in that hand for the tempo.

Thus, a 51 would be a pattern where one throws the balls high from one side to the other, and they get passed immediately to the other hand.

A nice property of siteswap is that the average of the digits is the number of balls in the pattern. Thus, 75 is a valid 6 ball pattern, but 67 would require 6 and a half balls.

Passing

A fun thing to try if you have a few friends is passing balls to each other.

The simplest trick here is juggler A has 3 balls, juggler B has 2. A starts juggling. At some point, they pass one ball to B, who uses it to start their pattern.

Once you've mastered this, you can move up to patterns like passing all the balls to each other, stealing balls from each other, and continuous passing (e.g., a ball goes around the hands in a circle).

Clubs/Rings

One can also juggle a number of other implements, of which the main items are clubs and rings.

I have limited experience in this sphere, but I found 3 rings easy to pick up after having learnt with balls. The main trick with clubs is to hold it at its centre of mass, so that it predictably rotates around the right point.

Other stuff

So far I have told you about some of the more common things that juggling is. It is significantly harder to define what juggling is not. In fact, if you come up with a rule for what juggling is, there's a good chance someone will break it and invent a new form of juggling.

Bounce juggling, Contact juggling, and erm, this?

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This pattern of juggling is called the "shower", while the more standard style that I'm teaching is called the "cascade". Even just juggling 3 balls is harder as a shower pattern, but notice that when scaling up the number of balls, all of the airtime is generated by one arm. This means that for the same number of balls you either need to be throwing them twice as fast or four times as high. The most balls I was able to find being juggled in a shower pattern was 8 by this dude. The world record in cascade is 14. Note that as I explain later, as this is an even number of balls, it technically happened in the "fountain" pattern, where you juggle 7 in each hand.
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The first time I got seven catches with seven balls, I excitedly rushed into my sister's room and told her I had just flashed 7 balls. She was extremely concerned for my wellbeing.
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In fact I would recommend moving up and down between numbers of balls regularly. I tend to find that doing exercises which are "too easy", like 1 ball juggling actually just help your base skills, while exercises which are "too hard", like e.g 4 ball juggling for a 3 ball juggler, help you process things at a faster speed, and make challenges at the "right level" feel easier. Broadly speaking it's good to have diversity like this in your training regime to become a well rounded juggler.
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There are actually variations of siteswap notation which handle these possibilities, but we'll ignore them for this post.
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Patterns which require 10 ball throws or higher are notated with the alphabet - A6 would denote an 8 ball pattern made up of 10 ball throws and 6 ball throws. I'll tell you what happens with 36 or higher the day you show me a pattern which uses throws where 36 ball height is necessary.