For those wondering: to juggle 4 balls, you either have to decrease the time between catching a ball and throwing it again or increase the time a ball is in the air.

Unless you start throwing feathers or balloons, the latter requires you throw higher. That requires you to either spend more time launching them up (bad for the ‘decrease time between catching and throwing’) or use more force (bad for throwing accuracy.

Also, even assuming you juggle 4 balls keeping “time in hand” equal, you have to throw it higher by a factor of (4/3)². That’s almost 2.

And even if you manage to make those throws with the same accuracy in angles, the errors in location by the time you catch the balls scale by the same factor.

▲

crystal_revenge 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> you either have to decrease the time between catching a ball and throwing it again or increase the time a ball is in the air

I think you might be thinking of 5 ball juggling.

4 ball juggling (or at least it's most common variant, "The Fountain" [0]) is fascinating because it's really juggling two balls in each hand in a way that makes it appear similar to the standard cascade. Though this may sound "less hard" than what people initially imagine, it's a very different feeling than all the basics you learn using only 3 balls.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(juggling)

	▲	rantallion 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They're not wrong. Assuming alternating hands are doing the throwing (rather than both hands throwing a ball simultaneously), 4-ball patterns mean each ball is in the air for 4 beats, while 3-ball patterns only take 3 beats each. And once one realises that many juggling patterns can be understood by the number of beats each ball takes to return to a hand, one can then think in siteswap (https://juggle.fandom.com/wiki/Siteswap).

▲

dsclough 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience people can’t even tell how many balls you’re juggling after 3. 4, 5, 6, 7 all get “how many balls is that”, silly stuff like 3 ball factory blows more minds than 5 ball site swaps

▲

munificent 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also, with a three ball pattern, most of the time there's only a single ball in the air. With four, there are almost always two. The odds of a mid-air collision increase significantly, and go up as the number of balls increases.

That also forces you to have much more consistent throws which, as you note, gets harder because you also have to throw higher which scales up any error in the force you're applying.