Juggling: Balancing a Club

Video Transcript

"In this video I am going to be talking about a club balance. Now this is a medium to hard club trick. Really you can incorporate it into a ball pattern, but you can balance anything you want. Jugglers do it as, like traditionally jugglers will do it in a pattern. They'll balance a juggling club on their chin. A lot of jugglers do skits where they'll balance like a table, a chair, like a ladder on their chin. All this crazy stuff. Really balancing something on your chin does not take as long as you might think. To learn how to do it, well first off I'll show you what it looks like. This is a chin balance. You can see I'm constantly adjusting myself so that I keep the club balanced straight on my face. It's also pretty common to do one on the nose like that, or the forehead like that. Now to learn how to do this, what you might want to do is find something longer than the standard juggling club. The longer it is, the slower it falls down and the more time you have to respond. Another helpful thing is if there's more weight concentrated on the far end. A lot of people learn how to balance with a broom. Like a broom head on the far end, it's tall, it's heavy on the far end. It'll fall down really slow. So you can just like run over underneath it and pick it back up. A good way to learn how to do it with juggling clubs specifically, is put a bean bag on the top of the club. What this will do, this will give you something to focus on when you're looking at the tip of the club and it will slow the fall down a little bit. So what I want you to do is put a ball on the top of the club, look at that ball. Look at the furthest point you can possibly see, and try and get that balance as clean as you can. Then we can work this into the pattern and do some pretty awesome things with it."