Introduction

“Inside” & “outside”, sometimes also called “under” and “over” are common modifiers of juggling throws. In a normal cascade pattern all throws are considered inside throws. For many jugglers, the first tricks they learn are half shower, tennis or reverse cascade, in which you change some or all of the throws to outside throws.

I believed that almost every throw in a juggling pattern was either inside or outside. But how does one know which of the two it is? It turns out to be much more complex than I had ever anticipated it to be. So complex that I had rewrite this article multiple times, and ultimately needed to split a part off to be finished in the future.

Ideally we want solution that is both intuitive and unambiguous. I have a solution for the second, but to get something that I consider to be intuitive may be out of reach for my research at the moment, as is discussed briefly in the chapter Relative to the pattern.

Defining inside and outside

It is difficult to find a definition of “inside” & “outside” in juggling.

I’ve opened many instructional books that describe the patterns mentioned above, but although they use the words “inside” & “outside” or “under” & “over”, they never go into the detail of such terms.

Luckily I have seen them used in some notation systems, and I find 2 different interpretations of “inside” & “outside”. One would be what I consider to be “relative to the body”, coming from MMSTD and one that is “relative to the pattern”, coming from Pretzel Hand.

Relative to the body

So far, the best description of “inside” & “outside” that I could find comes from this Juggle Wiki page about MMSTD and appears to have been written by Alex Lubker:

…“I (for “inside”) means the ball you’re throwing is to the left of the incoming ball if it’s thrown by the right hand, or to the right of the incoming ball if it’s thrown by the left hand. An arrow with an O (for “outside”) means the ball you’re throwing is to the right of the incoming ball if it’s thrown by the right hand, or to the left of the incoming ball if it’s thrown by the left hand.”

In this definition a mills mess pattern would be described as “inside-outside-inside” (if you start with the arms crossed, top hand is first to throw), which is consistent with how it has been described by MMSTD inventor Mike Day.

The MMSTD definition is what I call “relative to the body”. Inside and outside is defined by what is left and right as seen from the juggler.

For the purpose of simulating juggling and generating new patterns we need a definition that is can be understood by a computer model, one that does not rely on human intuition to figure out whether a throw is inside or outside. Therefor I will now use a lot of words to slightly further clarify these definitions.

Refining the definition of inside & outside

I define “inside” to mean “throw on the left side of the incoming prop when using a right-sided body part” (and vise a versa) and “outside” means “throw on the right side of the incoming prop when using a right-sided body part” (and also vise a versa of course).

To “throw on a side” can mean either that the outgoing prop is flying under the incoming prop to that side of the outgoing prop, or that the outgoing prop is already on that side of the incoming prop at the moment it is released. Below are some example animations.

In the animations we look at the red ball, which responds to the green incoming ball. It is always thrown from the left hand, so to make an inside throw it either needs to be passing under the green ball from left to right, or it should already of the right side of the incoming ball from the start.

330 in
Red goes inside, passing under from L to R
330 in crossing
Red goes inside, on the right from the start

It’s the opposite for the red ball making an outside throw, either the red ball is already on the left side, or the ball passes under the incoming green ball from right to left.

330 out
Red goes outside, on the left from the start
330 out crossing
Red goes outside, passing under from R to L

When the pattern is in an orientation where there is no obvious left or right side, we can imagine ourselves rotating towards the pattern so that we can define it. For example here is a side facing cascade:

front cascade
Side facing cascade

In this case the juggler can mentally rotate towards it in the way that uncrosses their hands, and now the left hand throws on the right hand of the incoming ball thus it throws “inside”, and the right hand throws “inside” too.

Similar logic can be used when juggling for example a cascade combining a backcross and a reverse backcross. However in this case, when rotating towards the pattern the hands will cross instead of uncross.

Relative to the pattern

It is also possible to look at “inside” & “outside” relative to the pattern, rather than relative to the body. This is for example used in Pretzel Hand.

I believe that in many situations this could possibly be more intuitive to understand than the current definition of “inside” & “outside”. For example when having the arms crossed, an “inside” throw points neither to the center of the body or to the inside of the pattern, which I find confusing.

Looking at “inside” & “outside” relative to the pattern would allow similar looking patterns to have throws with similar “inside”/“outside” modifiers. For example, these two cascade patterns have the same shape, but one of them is all inside where the other one is all outside:

cascade
Normal cascade, inside
crossed normal
Crossed cascade, outside

And similarly here are their opposites:

reverse cascade
Reverse cascade, outside
crossed reverse
Crossed cascade, inside

In a relative to pattern definition of “inside” & “outside” the first two could perhaps both be “inside” and the last two could both be “outside”. This is how Pretzel Hand seems to treat it as well.

However, after many many tries of mine I have accepted that it is too difficult for me to work out a proper unambiguous definition of relative “inside” & “outside”. To give an example of a point of confusion, when juggling 2 balls in one hand, how does one know which side is inside and which side is outside, when only looking at the pattern itself and not the body?

I may write a more detailed article about the challenges of this in the future.

Zips, slams & defaults

Often we consider inside throws as “default” and outside throws as “modified”. But with this new clarified definition, outside throws are more common than we think and inside may not always be default.

A throw after zips (aka 1s & 2xs) would typically be thrown on the outside. If the zip is the incoming throw, then a normal outgoing throw passes over it. Remember that it is possible for the outgoing throw to be thrown before the incoming throw.

Thus, a shower pattern is thrown with the sequence outside-inside. If both throws were inside we would get what is known as a reverse slam, very difficult to perform!

shower
Shower, L outside R inside
reverse slam
Reverse slam, both inside

In the pattern 441 there are 3 throws. Normally it is juggled inside-outside-inside. Let’s abbreviate that to IOI. When people talk about 441 with outside throws they are typically referring to OOI, in which we now see that only 1 throw is actually different from the original pattern. Now that we know how to name these throws and define them we can create 2^3 = 8 different combinations of inside and outside throws when only varying the 3 beats. Let’s go through all of them, they sorted by their IO sequence but also have been given a more common name:

III
III (reverse slam)
IIO
IIO (lid)
IOI
IOI (normal)
IOO
IOO (slam)

OII
OII (outside reverse slam)
OIO
OIO (outside lid)
OOI
OOI (outside normal)
OOO
OOO (outside slam)

Default tosses

Now that we’ve seen that III is not at all the easiest or “normal” 441, I want to know how we can best use inside and outside in trick notation or shorthand. Before this new definition I always considered I to be default, and only wanted to mention it when there was an O throw. But this would no longer work, because 441 without any mentions would then suggest the complex reverse slam version. Are we now forced to always clarify if a throw is inside or outside?

I think it is useful to have some basic rules to prevent this, and have those rules follow the current common sense of the juggler rather than the logic of this new system.

I propose the following:

Default is normally an I throw, unless the incoming throw is not thrown before the outgoing throw. If the cases where the incoming throw is thrown after the outgoing throw, the outgoing throw is thrown O as default. This means that every pattern with a zip is executed in the “normal” way, without slams, reverse slams or lids.