The physical system known as spherical pendulum is usually taken as an example of the applications of analytical mechanics. This deprives those people who had no contact with this approach to classical mechanics of the complete understanding of how this system behaves. So, in this work, we use Newtonian mechanics to present a study of the motion of a spherical pendulum. To do this, we obtain its equations of motion, determine the quantities that are conserved during the time evolution of this system, analyze its effective potential energy and discuss the different motions that this system can have. We present several numerical results, and a qualitative comparison with experimental data is made
spherical pendulum; newtonian mechanics; trajectories
