Keegan Smith argues that juggling, dribbling, and footwork drills with different balls build agility and vision across all sports. He recommends daily micro-sessions starting with your non-dominant hand, rotating between basketballs, soccer balls, and tennis balls to keep challenging your brain.
Juggling does have a lot of special carryover to vision and complexity of being able to deal with lots of things at the same time. But it's not a fetish about juggling, it's about being a master of balls, the baller archetype. We want to work across all the balls. So if you've worked a lot with your feet, then progressing into working more with the basketball. Something I've been working on the last six months or so and I'm not a high level basketball player, I'm not practicing every day, but it has improved a lot. There's three main areas to think about when you're juggling. When you're bouncing, a basketball is like in front of the body and working on the non dominant hand. Same as we do with it with the juggling and bouncing between the legs. We've got all the different variations going between the legs and then behind the body. So if you're progressing, if we're progressing behind the body, in front of the body, in between the legs, then we're going to have a bigger foundation. Basketball is one of the most international games, just like soccer. It's good to have a foundation in it, feel comfortable with it. It's also going to have some transfer. Every sport has some transfer to another sport. Basketball players who've played more soccer are more likely to be higher level basketball players because they're more balanced on their feet, they've got better footwork. Same way the basketball is going to donate to your tennis, to your juggling, to other abilities. The first development over the, the first weeks that you do it, if you haven't done it ever before, or you haven't done it a long time, your development over that first period is going to be the most exponential and therefore the most valuable. And it gets rid of that block that some people might have of like, I can't do that thing. So use the same mentality and methodology that we have for developing the juggling to develop a foundation with all of the different balls that you can imagine. Same with the handball, with doing baseball throwing with both hands. These are all things that we can slowly piece together. There's no rush to do it. You'd have to do it all at the same time, at the same, in the same sentence. You can do five minutes of, you can do one minute basketball, one minute of soccer, one minute tennis ball, one minute table tennis. And that also works. There's no rules with this. What we want to see is that over time it progresses and it will progress. If you continue to challenge yourself. Get your brain out of bed with everything that you're doing. What I mean by getting your brain out of bed is doing something that is different to what you've done in the past, doing something that's on the edge of your comfort zone. This is the beautiful journey of the baller.
