The Juggling Equipment Blog

I would just like to take the oppurtunity to post the Anthony Gatto 7 ball world record that Robin Lövgren just uploaded.

If you watch the entire video by fast forwarding through it with your cursor on the timeline, you will see that the man does not move his feet at all during the entire run except for at the very end.

Wow.

This week we have a poi video!
It features one of the world’s greatest poi masters – Ronan McLoughlin.
I don’t really know or understand what tricks he’s doing there, but the video itself has a great ambience.
A cosmic and kind of an Indian meditative style was made here gracefully.
Enjoy

Hello everyone, and welcome to another blog entry! Today what seems to concern me is something that I have experienced during my time as a juggler, and I would like to share it with all of you.

You see, juggling is almost in every case where it is presented to an audience, mistaken for something that it is not. Or, something that it might not be anyway, or is not, in the first instance. What juggling is, is a physically oriented way of throwing and catching things. What it is mistaken for, is entertainment. Because juggling is not entertainment. It can indeed be very entertaining, but it is not that in itself.

So what is the problem here? Well, the thing is that very many jugglers today tend to work on their technique for perfecting hard, challening and technical tricks. But what we all seem to forget about, at least many of us, is to work on our show skills! Now why would I say this? Because I am some WJF (see some online debate to understand what I mean by this) hater? No, not at all. I am simply explaining to you that when you juggle, in some way, you are very likely to be asked by someone in some way, to perform for an audience, at some point.

Now if you are very shy and hate being in front of an audience, simply forget what I am saying and say no thank you. But we all do know that if you want to make some really really easy money with juggling, you should be working on your show skills to some extent. Of course, I am not saying develop a routine and work on it fifteen times a day, but just keep in mind guys, there are more things to this world than what interests you. In all fairness it would be a pretty good idea for most of us to ask other jugglers what tricks to learn that will please an audience (perhaps except for if you are genuinely trying to trick them into thinking you are better than you are, but we can talk about that later) so that you will not have a total failure when you are standing in front of one. This is also very important whenever you want to put together a short street performance, so keep it in mind! Spend some time thinking about how you would like to have some sort of show, what to do in it, and what will please a non-juggling audience!

When you watch Chris Bliss juggling his 3 balls, he seems very frantic in his movements, and I know that if you enjoy the stage and get a lot of adrenaline once there, it’s easy to go into such a frenzy when there. But practice thinking clearly and knowing what you are doing when up there, because if you do try to imitate this 3-baller, you are going to mess up, no question. So do things slowly – no stress! Remember an audience is wowed almost no matter what – but when you relax, take it easy and make it look like you are awake but almost falling asleep at the same time, the whole thing gets much better. An audience appreciates it when you look like you’re so good you hardly have to keep your eyes open.

Those were just my 2 cents of today! Now go juggle!

This week’s Video of the week comes from a random search for recent videos posted on youtube that are juggling related.

The first seconds where the red curtain moves up and down made me think that this is probably not worth seeing, but waiting a bit longer was worth it all. Usualy the videos we post here show skills that after a few years of practicing you could do as well, this video has some tricks that  could take a life time to master, or maybe more.

Here is what the creator of the movie, Niven Wilson, wrote about in in its youtube page:
“This is my first cartoon, I finished it in 2008, during my senior year in high school. I am currently working on its sequel, “JUGGLERS 2″.”

so sit back, relax – and try to stay relaxed the whole video long.

When looking for something (other then you car keys), one of the first things most of us do is search for it in Google. So, wanting desperately to do some real research for this week sights and sites i went looking for other interesting juggling blogs out there that might be of interest to our readers.

Interestingly enough, most of the first page results are results that would hardly be worthy visiting. Some blogs were not updated in the last couple of years, and most of them, even if they were updated in the last months would not really be worth the trip over there. There are however a few exceptions between those 10 first results, two if I have to be exact (depending on where you live you might get another list for the results, so blame it on my Google if I missed something…) – the first one, and third on google’s list is the MoM blog – you’ll find out what that means if you click. We might feature that site in the future as well, but we are really here today to let you know about site #8 on the list – The Gandini Juggling Blog.

so who are Gandini Juggling? for those of you who don’t know here is how they introduce them selfs on their web-site:

“Gandini Juggling was founded by Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala in 1992. Coming from a background of street performance, dance and rhythmic gymnastics the company was originally founded as a laboratory to develop new ideas about juggling. They created a handful of full-evening performances which toured to great acclaim and were seminal in redefining what juggling performance could be.”

Their site has some useful information, like a list of site-swaps, but other then that it is mainly showing the companies capabilities. What I found to be the interesting part of their web-site was the blog. The Gandini Juggling Blog does not update daily or even weekly, but when it does you are probably going to find something interesting.

I will leave you with a video from one of the recent posts in the Gandini Juggling Blog, with the hope that it will make you go the distance and click the click.

Hi all, and welcome back from the ninth Bestcoast festival in Stavanger, Norway. Now, I know not very many of you were there, but I could still inform you about it.

The Bestcoast festival, formerly known as Westcoast because of its location but now changed to Bestcoast based on its enjoyability, took place on August 7th-11th this year, and hosted about a million jugglers from all over the world. I don’t know the exact number, but there were a fair bit of people meeting up – mainly from Norway, but also other parts of Scandinavia as well as other countries of this good and green earth – say, the American Sharpe Brothers.

The festival hosted several workshops from beginning to advanced level, teaching both technical and creative-ish techniques and tricks. There was also a gala show watched by both jugglers and members of the general public of Stavanger. The atmosphere of the festival was as always completely unique, strengthened by the location: Tou Scene, an old beer brewery modded(look, I can use a nerd word!) to become a venue hosting a performance area with matching stage, a café, and a sleeping area as well as practice space for the jugglers. Of course the magnificent spot has not been built for this sole purpose, but it is one that it serves well.

I will have a video up in a bit if you will just give me time to edit, but for now, thank you very much to the Flaks juggling group of Norway, and hopefully some of you guys reading this blog will show up in Stavanger next year! It was a blast, and we are counting on having one next year as well!

Piece!

The last Thomas Dietz video before releasing his new DVD.

As always, this video is packed with hard stuff, nevertheless some funny stuff.

If you want to buy Thomas’ DVD (which includes even harder stuff and many surprises), just wait a bit more and we will let you know as soon as it hits the markets.

Enjoy

We have decided to add another weekly category to our blog! as you can see it holds the name of sites and sights and it will feature on a weekly basis sites and sights (duh) from the world wide web that might interest the average juggling Joe.

And to kick off the category we are featuring a site that every diabolo lover already knows – diabolo.ca

diabolo.ca is a site that is dedicated solely to diabolo – yes, diabolo and nothing else.

Upon entering you will reach the blog page that is updated on a non-regular basis. The real power of the site lies in the small link in the upper area – forum. The diabolo.ca forum is probably the biggest and most active diabolo forum on the web with hundreds of active users discussing and sharing diabolo love and knowledge.

I have always had a problem with juggling forums, because their largest drawback is that juggling is something that has to be done and not written about (says me while writing about juggling…) Many juggling forums i know don’t draw the crowds because of that reason.

But diabolo.ca is different, mainly because the active participants are sharing their knowledge in the form of diabolo videos, featuring the latest innovations from all over the world. They have, just like us on this blog, a video of the week featuring every week the best video that users have uploaded to the forum. The really good one make it to the front page.

here is how they describe their site:

“Diabolo.ca began in 2003 as a site to host Sean’s personal videos. In November 2004, a group of diaboloists, unsatisfied with the current lack of international communication, started the diabolo.ca forum.

4 years later, at over 2,400 members, 3,400 topics, and 60,000 posts, the forum has become the world’s most active diabolo forum and a wealth of knowledge for any topic related to the diabolo.

We envision the forum as an all inclusive place for diaboloists from around the world to share their videos, inspire each other, and announce meetings.”

So, if diabolo is what you love doing most or even if you never picked one up in your life, we recommend you check out diabolo.ca

Hello everyone, and welcome to Sondre’s written tutorial on why it is a good idea to use larger beanbags!

Especially beginner jugglers are probably going to wonder how this could be a good idea, and say to themselves that it makes more sense to use smaller beanbags, because they make everything lighter to run, and they leave more space in the air – this making collisions more rare. But these are not the only factors playing in – here are more important ones:

Muscle efficiency

When you are using larger beanbags, will need to spend a lot less energy working with your triceps to pull your arm back down after a throw. This makes the entire juggle more relaxed, and you will actually save energy from this particular advantage.

Also relevant is the fact that heavier beanbags will “injure” you in a far greater way if you have bad technique and posture, because inefficient muscle movement combined with a great energy requirement is more likely to give you for instance injuries from overloading your muscles over a short period of time. But luckily, your body will compensate on this by itself by making your technique better. You don’t really have to work to do it – all you have to concentrate on here is to try to relax muscles that feel irrelevant to the juggle, and everything will straighten out a whole lot. This is not only my own personal experience, but also confirmed by many other jugglers. This makes inefficient muscle use mostly eliminated, and the result is that you are saving even more energy. This goes especially for your shoulder and neck muscles.

By the way, efficient technique is better for you. If you have a Dietz syndrome (watch his posture in this video) or you are tilting your head or anything else, you are much more likely to develop muscle problems in one way or another. You don’t want that.

Accuracy

You would think that smaller beanbags make your patterns less collision prone because of the added space, but this is not true. Well, in itself it is, but this benefit falls away by great margines because small and also light beanbags have the down side of

1. Being able to land anywhere: If a small beanbag lands on your fingers, or in your palm, or other places in your hand, it will stay there until you throw it – this means your throws will not be the same because your beanbags are launched from various places with less than necessary time to concentrate on how to make the throw.

2. Not filling the hand: This goes together with being able to land anywhere on your hand, but a problem that small beanbags have is that they do not fill your hand: you have to spend some time and energy closing your hand around it. This might seem irrelevant, but it really does matter.

These two points are both eliminated by larger beanbags – and especially beanbags. They don’t bounce out of your hands if your throw would after all happen to be a bit misplaced, and will fit more nicely in your hand since they can be a little bit squishy and your closed hand does not have a perfectly round space inside of it. When you consider all this, larger beanbags will make your juggling more relaxed, your technique better, and your tricks and patterns more consistent – though keep in mind there is a certain upper limit to what there is a point in trying (larger than 3″ (82mm) is basically pointless almost no matter what) – and remember that if you do indeed want to work with as large beanbags as 3″ 185g ones and also do more than just a couple tricks with 7 balls as well as 8-9 and perhps even more balls, you should consider the strength of your biceps and other upper body muscles when you have brought in the efficiency advantages. Maybe 2.75″ (70mm) is better than 3″ – and it absolutely probably is in almost every case. How many jugglers can do 7 ups and db97531s with 3″ beanbags anyway?

Those were the points for now, but they are important to consider. My personal experience is that nothing is heavier to run with 3″ 185g beanbags than with 2.5″ 110g ones, perhaps except for 8+ objects – though if you are using 2.75″ 145g beanbags, it will probably be easier with those if your technique is good. My record with 2.5″ (63mm) beanbags juggling 7 was about 200 catches, but with 3″ ones it is now a bit over 350. I do however believe it could be improved if I switched to 2.75″ ones. I’m not that strong.

However – important to consider is of course what kind of tech-juggler you want to be. The two basic categories based on jugglers we all know are, you could say, Doug Sayers and Matthew Tiffany. If you are still wondering what I mean by this, ask me – perhaps another entry will be written about this and the advantages of SMALLER beanbags.

Sondre

A few weeks ago at the european juggling convention I had the pleasure to meet a young Danish juggler by the name of Lauge Benjaminsen. If was especially fun to play club combat with him (or watch him play), watching him do the shoulder roll trick repeatedly to evade the other combatants. He is a raising star in the world of juggling, a world where to become a “celebrity” mainly means lots and lots and lots and… yes – lots of endless hours of practice and slow improvement. Lauge posts every now and again an Improving# movie. Here is his latest, #5. Enjoy and comment…

want more? head over to lauge’s YouTube channel now!