You’ll Never Guess What I’m Doing for Workout Recovery in 2026
This story is part of our ‘Habits to Embrace—and Ditch—in 2026’ series. Read the whole list here.
Last month, as I was recovering from a streak of tough workouts, I picked up three tennis balls and started to juggle. I wasn’t exactly sure why I did—maybe I was influenced by a video I stumbled upon of a shirtless guy doing the same on his balcony; maybe because the ball tube was there, on my shelf. But I did know it felt shockingly good. After a couple minutes of throwing the balls up in the air and catching them, not moving my hands and maxing out my peripheral vision, I felt calmer. Later, doing some pull-ups, I noticed I had a more discrete command of space. Was this simple variety, or novelty, or was juggling actually good for me? More importantly, did I just stumble on a New Year’s resolution?
I looked at the pros and cons. Juggling—or, in my case, learning to juggle—is a practice that looks less cool than doing a muscle-up, and, at my skill level, is best done at home. Before I picked the tennis balls, I thought of the habit of it as somewhere between Cirque de Soleil behavior or a silly party trick, maybe a bit showy—definitely not tough, or the genteel behavior typically associated with GQ. But after a few sessions it felt more like meditation or tai chi. And after a week of daily toss practice, juggling seemed to vault past a calming practice into something athletic. I began to see it in a different light. And so I got an expert on the phone to tell me whether I was fooling myself.
“Juggling is unusual, in that it’s a visual-motor whole body ‘thing’ that you’re training,” says Dr. Heidi Johansen-Berg, professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford. In a 2009 study published in Nature Neuroscience, Dr. Johansen-Berg and her colleagues found that juggling enhances connections in the brain’s cerebral cortex, where the skill is held, so to speak, and in the white matter pathways that connect different parts of the brain to each other.
In Dr. Johanesen-Berg’s study, adult volunteers who did not know how to juggle learned the skill over six weeks, receiving a brain scan before and after. Those results were measured against a control group, which did not practice the skill. The study’s “novel at the time” discovery, Dr. Johansen-Berg says, was that the white matter pathways, or the fibers connecting different brain regions, became more robust as a result of juggling. In her words: “The pathways involved in juggling training had been strengthened as a result of the training.”
Such benefits have been touted, if indirectly, and in different wording, by influencers, athletes and trainers. Juggling, the argument goes, is good for improving spatial awareness and coordination—things that matter for people trying to get in shape. In the aforementioned instructional video I saw, the movement-based strength trainer Roye Goldschmidt recommends juggling as a low-impact way for individuals to move better and more fluidly. In another he shows the results with a highlight reel: snatching tennis balls from midair, juggling four balls, spinning a ball on one finger, punching them into a wall.
It also translates to much more athletic individuals; in pro sports, juggling is something between a legend and a poorly kept secret. There’s a sports-vision doctor’s appeal to different world-class athletes’ juggling habits, which includes Roger Federer and an NHL goalie who juggled before games during an all-star year. (The reel is a tip of the iceberg: the list of athletes who juggle, available on the International Jugglers Association’s website, is exhaustive, and reads like a who’s who in sports.)
