(no subject)

[learnedax]

I was feeling manual and it was too wet for outdoor stuff, so I spent a while brushing up my ball juggling skills, with a diversion into some contact. Enjoyable as that was, it lead me to realize that my core juggling level has been almost static for 6-7 years at this point, after going from nothing to just barely seven in 2 years. Oddly, my occasional forays into devilsticking, contact, diabolo, and even clubs have continued to yield measurable improvements, but not balls. I may even have regressed slightly, because I dimly recall getting 15 with 8, and several runs of 30-35 with 7, whereas now the former is laughable and the a good run on the latter is perhaps 21. It's not so clear with the lower-numbers stuff, because I'm clearly rusty on some of the more obscure siteswaps etc. but e.g. my 5-ball Mills Mess is still halfway decent, and maybe even a bit better than before. Presumably what this suggests is that the physical demands of the big numbers are more than I can sustain with occasional practice, and that if I wanted to go up another notch I would need to devout some serious time to it.

It's odd, though, because I certainly have a much better overall arm strength and endurance than when I was 17, and my speed is probably about the same... I guess it's hyper-precision muscle memory, which unfortunately implies that focused training might well gain me little in the long-term, either in terms of numbers capability or in terms of overall dexterity. It somehow feels defeatist to give it up as wasted effort, but if I've reached the practical limit of personal betterment from it... well, at least I've still got 5 clubs to work on.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I've found that practice has tremendously more impact now than in my teens (specifically in this case, piano, which is a roughly comparable brain-growth-actiivity). I'm a better piano player than I was then, with about the same amount of practice, and I'm not sure what to chalk it up to. Perhaps one gets more precise after childhood.

My action speed is about the same, but my reaction speed is down a bit from my early 20s. It's kind of odd. My brain gets confused easier, but my body knows what to do...Of course, juggling is a lot of rhythm, so you may not have to react quite as much, just put your hands in the right spots. And it holds out hope that if you practice now, you'll be a holy terror soon enough...

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, I have found that crosstraining can help individual skills significantly, and can help dramatically in new skill acquisition... but there are limits. Pen spinning and piano playing may benefit each other, and both might even help me when I pick up fencing, but if I've already hit a watershed in a given activity, in this case juggling, the benefits of crosstraining for it seem to be relatively small. Of course, I could realize in five years that I've gotten a lot better at juggling through some other factors that I haven't considered yet.

The action vs. reaction thing is somewhat of a schism in juggling skill development, in fact, in the form of throwing vs. catching. If you make perfect throws, you just have to put your hands in the right places, but on the other hand if you can catch anything you only have to worrying about throwing for height, not precision. In point of fact most people find that there's an optimum amount of training energy to apply to each, which at least in my case is about an even split.