Why It's Almost Impossible to Juggle 15 Balls | WIRED

so juggling is pretty hard at least for me it is I want to get to three balls there's just natural question right it's like before five what's the limit this guy definitely knows hi I'm Alex Barron and I hold the world record for most balls juggle that's 11 and I also hold the world record for something called most balls flashed and that's 14 that's right alex has flashed 14 balls flash just means throwing a certain number of balls in the air and catching that many balls in sequence one time here he is laughing 13 but is 14 balls the limit today we're gonna look at white juggling 15 balls might be almost impossible to learn what it takes I got a lesson from Barren it's close talk with a juggling pro about the patterns and science that make it possible to keep so many balls up in the air and with someone who doesn't even have to see the balls to juggle people have been juggling for millennia this Egyptian painting of women juggling is nearly 4,000 years old and it's always seemed like a bit of magic even three ball juggling is mesmerizing to watch but performers have always been pushing the limit for higher numbers back in the 1920s famed juggler Enrico rastelli was said to have juggled ten balls in for a while that seemed like the upper limit for continuous juggling people could match it but nobody can really exceed it that was until 2012 when Baron managed this astounding feat 11 balls for 23 catches I think it feels good yeah like I was very happy when I go the world records I mean I wouldn't have spent so many hours doing it if I didn't care about it Baron started juggling as a kid you know determined to be like one of the youngest people to do 11 like for a flash you know first you're like oh yeah like I learned five and like you hear people talking on the internet about how how hard five is you know my car I'm gonna like I'm gonna be able to do five and then it just kind of keeps going man so I don't think I'll ever have the time or maybe more likely the patients never become the serious numbers and juggler but I can already do three so Baron gave me some lessons on how I could do so if I want to graduate from three balls to five balls you're talking about some of the things I need to work on are my actual hand speed yeah and how high I'm throwing the ball because it's the time in between the throws right exactly yeah you'll have to go higher and faster okay so show me how they yeah that works yeah so if five I'm gonna end up throwing them about eye level or a little bit higher as it hosts a lower with three but otherwise it's the same really the motion is very similar you just have to be a little bit more fluid and you know move your hands have been faster the hardest bit is to start because that's when you go all the weight in your hands right so to begin with yeah I just try don't even worry about catching them just go one two three four five here we go I'm just gonna do one two three four five see if I can just get them all up in the air or if I can throw the last ball before the first one comes down right even faster with looks pretty good yeah and if it goes really well what you want to see is two little piles one for each am pretty good I managed to pull off a lucky flash when the cameras weren't rolling and I'm still working on doing it continuously like really working on it these days five is just a warm-up for Baron he can do seven without much trouble and makes it look effortless but when he starts going for big numbers like nine ten eleven all the way up to fourteen he usually heads indoors to a squash court we're outside right now yes it's a little windy that has something to do with why you practice in squash courts yes well wind obviously is gonna mess up your pattern a little bit you want the balls to have a very consistent trajectory every single time you try and the squash courts have really good contrast too because it's basically a white background so typically it's much easier to see and even though you're not looking at one ball in particular your subconscious is still taking in where they all are in the sky and where they're coming down so keeping an eye on the balls at the top of their arc or apex is critical for Berens big numbers you look vaguely at the apex of the pattern and then from that you have some sense of what the pattern looks like whether it's slanted off-kilter there's not like me registering each throw and going on that was a good one that was a bad one I guess I do think that was a bad one if I do a bad throw I typically notice that ball in particular but that's not the only way to juggle a lot of balls my name is Zach McAllister I hold three different records for BBB which stands for blind behind the back juggling I hold the record for doing it five six and seven McCallister doesn't have to look at the balls at all he feels for their apex I'll start with them behind the back and I'll make my first throw and once the throw is made then I wait to feel it hit my elbow and once I feel that then I know it's ready for the next ball usually in my head I will feel out be like okay at this point when I feel this I need to make this next throw once I feel it coming down to my wrists then I know that I need to open up my hand and have it ready so that way it can make the catch it is crazy impressive but McAllister thinks he's at the numbers limit for blind behind the back as you increase each ball you start to realize I'm running out of space on my back and four balls isn't too bad but once you hit five balls then you're starting to realize like I need to either like start making my throws a little higher than my elbow which is not ideal because then it's even more blind and I have to think about it even more which takes up to like seven so you just have to hope that they all work out traditional numbers jugglers don't have that kind of limit in fact the sky is literally their limit but it seems like there are physical barriers to getting more balls in the air let's talk about 15 for a second for example just four there for the flash I do think there's a physiological barrier there where someone will have to train very very specifically for flashing that number doing 15 is gonna require a level of strength which is considerably beyond what I have in the moment to learn more I talked with Jack Calvin he's a professional juggler and former engineer and he's writing a book on human performance and juggling Calvin has been measuring juggling hand speed with an accelerometer in a smartphone app so naturally we asked Alex Barron to try it out first Calvin had him juggle progressively higher numbers of balls do you want to try it a run of nine and then he had him try an absurdly fast perhaps not surprisingly Baron topped Calvin's charts balls according to his maximum hand speed when he shook his hand as fast as he could it was equivalent to juggling 23 to 25 balls so he's actually nowhere near his limit according to his hand speed that's crazy but according to Calvin speed is not the only limit when it comes to numbers juggling basically what it found is that hand speed is not the main limiting factor of of juggling it's actually the accuracy there's a few different degrees of accuracy but the first degree would be able to throw something up so that it lands within reach the other is is the space that you have in the air and having to avoid collisions between objects of course I wanted to find out how I stack up so I strapped on the accelerometer go have three ball data here okay one do two in one hand yeah [Music] put the balls down and shake your hand as fast as you can come on faster you can go faster than that the hell you got come on and according to Calvin's calculations your maximum amount was fourteen point one balls sweet so so if I practice really diligently I could maybe flash the 14 you could you I have the hand speed to flash 14 balls just like Alex okay but you probably accuracy so I'm still working on five but it's nice to know that I have the hand speed to do more than that if I keep practicing in fact according to Jack's research most people probably have the hand speed to do as many as not know so hand speed is definitely a factor to consider here but here's another big one how do you even hold this many balls jugglers call it the grip so yeah in terms of the grip we start off just a very simple one in each hand we move to two you end up with a little line this one further out goes first three is a little triangle I like to release this one first four so some people stack it on top which maybe you do for lower numbers but we're gonna go high so we can't do that quite yet you're not this little diamond five I like this kind of trapezium shape six in one hand suddenly you get this pretty ugly two lines of three deal this one as you can see is pretty compressed there's probably the worst one to release if you get up to 14 then you just shove the last two on top three anytime you can shove the last two on top but with 14 we're forced to go like this I do these little setup throws to try and get them in the right position Baron is a pretty tall guy he's over six feet tall and he's got big hands but what about the rest of us [Music] okay so not all of us are up for massive numbers juggling 14 but there are other ways to impress mathematically of course there's the beauty of something called siteswap so side swap is a way of notating juggling patterns so you can throw balls at different heights when you juggle and the way jugglers typically denote those different heights is they do it based on how high you'd have to throw to juggle a certain number of balls so for three balls I can do it like really low like this right if I pick up five balls just because there are more balls I've got to throw it higher to do the same thing so what siteswaps lets you do is combine throws from different numbers of balls and you just call those throw who's the number of balls so a simple one for example with four balls would be something called five three four and so if I was just doing four right they all go the same height so this is lots of fours over and over again what I can do is I can throw one ball higher to be a five and then one below to be a three and then go back to four so that's like five three four you can see there's a five ball throw a three ball throw and then you can either do five three continuously or you can mix it up and yeah what's fun about that is now if you want to tell your friend hey I found this great in your juggling pattern you just give them a list of numbers and then they can do it right they can try and learn at least sites warred can even be a way to practice juggling greater numbers according to Kelvin siteswap is a way that you can that some people practice higher numbers using a lower number of balls in this pattern you're actually throw one hand is doing the work of five balls one hand is is is doing exactly is doing half of a five ball of pattern and the other hand is doing a one ball pattern that's useful because practicing big numbers can be a serious workout the raw physical act of it like the speed at which you have to move your hands the amount of weight that you have in your hands at the beginning is on a different level people tend to see in the juggling world going from an even number to an odd number as being substantially harder than going from an odd number to an even number with even numbers you can throw them in pairs which means you can get your whole body involved with fifteen you'd have to do it asynchronously the biggest question mark for me is probably whether someone has the physical ability to practice 15 enough to be able to do it or have enough attempts to be lucky enough to catch 15 balls because of course there's like luck involved between the practice needed to perfect technique and the strength and speed required to keep the balls in the air Baron thinks his record will stand but he's eager to see it challenged yeah like do I think someone will ever do 15 for a flash I like to think someone will do 15 I mean I you know you compare this to like 100-meter sprint or marathon or something where countless people have optimized themselves as hard as they can and trained for it I think there's there's more to go in juggling for sure I don't know what if that's within my personal limits that tend to find out over the next ten years or so beyond that I mean yes I think there is a physical limit at some point right and for me it's hard to conceive of juggling 16 or 17 or flashing 16 or 17 balls maybe I should say that 15 is impossible and then some guy will come up on the be like or some girl and be like no like through you like I'm gonna do it so I've been practicing a few minutes every day and every once in a while I will get lucky and flash five and I finally managed to do it on camera yeah oh sure there's hope but it's not like I'm ever gonna challenge somebody like bear and that's totally fine because what he's doing is already almost impossible you

Channel: WIRED

Views: 5,014,478

Rating: 4.8676476 out of 5

Keywords: circus, competition, performance, practice, science, skills, world record, yo-yo, jack kalvan, juggle, skill, juggling, zak mcalister, robbie gonzalez, juggling ball, juggling clubs, alex barron, juggling patterns, extreme skills, juggler, best juggler, best juggling, extreme juggling, juggles, great juggler, amazing juggling, how to juggle, juggling tutorial, tutorial juggling, ball juggling, juggling balls, 15 balls, balls, ball, ball juggler, wired

Id: 7RDfNn7crqE

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/d3l3t3rious]

Did anyone else notice that when they cut from the modern guy to Rastelli that they look exactly alike? At like 1:20.

[u/Buki1]

I can flash 2 balls

[u/Damn_Croissant]

Guy is like a more handsome and British Trevor Martin

[u/ironbody]

Now i really want to go and learn juggling

[u/Positronix]

Skip to 6:25 to get anything resembling an answer.

[u/procor1]

k so a quit run down since some people may have missed it;

accuracy is the most important, getting 15+ balls in the air accurately is going to be extremely hard. (height is very very important)

strength and speed is 2nd. you need to do it fast enough while high enough, and odd numbers will throw off the rest of your body ( think one had at a time throwing a ball) where even numbers you can throw in pairs (both hands going up at the same time)

lower, but still problematic is actual grip of the balls. holding 14 balls alone in both hands is hard enough.

its not that juggling 15(+, they don't talk about doing 16, which seems would be easier with what they outlined) balls is impossible. Its that the physical limitation of being able to do the practice NEEDED to juggle 15+ is just insane.

with that said, the guy holding the record for for juggling (11 balls) thinks its possible, it would just be very hard.

[u/CptnPants]

I practised a ton of juggling 3 balls and I can do some fancy moves with 3 and I can sometimes do 4 for a bit but 5 may as well be impossible. Doing 5 or anymore than 5 seems like witchcraft. The accuracy you need is on another level.

[u/Lausten-Found]

How many of y'all learned juggling in P.E. in elementary school?

[u/stmuxa]

Still don't get it. No any physical limit was mentioned. The faster your hands, the more balls you can juggle.

ELI5, anyone maybe?