I’m trying to work on the accuracy of my tosses. I was reading a book last night that talked about efficient learning strategies, and it talked about focusing on specific aspects of the process. Ideally these are aspects that are measurable, which is hard with juggling, so I just focused on finding specific aspects of the juggling process that I thought could use some work.
The aspects need to relate to how you do something, not goals like “100 tosses in a row” which say nothing about how to get there.
So, as I juggled on my way to work today (I walk), I decided to focus on where the ball is in my right hand when I throw. I chose this because is stands to reason that the toss is less likely to be consistent if the position I’m throwing from is not consistent. I noticed that I was not very consistent here, sometimes I was tossing from the palm, sometimes from the fingers. I decided to go for tossing from the palm of the hand, the part right at the base of the middle two fingers. If anyone’s a better juggler than me, and knows where is the ‘correct’ place to toss from, I’d like to know.
I don’t know if my overall juggling improved, I’ll need to find someway to measure that. But I did succeed in making the toss position in my right hand much more consistent.
I did a similar thing yesterday with my contact juggling. My left elbow stall had not been working nearly as well as my right. I stopped and analyzed it, instead of just practicing, and found that the muscles were slightly different on that arm, and a slightly different hand position produced a more stable balance point. A useful result for only a few minutes of effort.
We’ll see how much improvement this method produces.
