This is a great drill for working on marking and faking.

The key to advancing from short throws to long throws is not about using more effort, it’s about using more of your body. In your throwing practice you should think of your arms as being loose like the strings of this monkey drum (http://www.hungrylion.com/images/klak.jpg). Seek velocity and distance in your throws not from the strength in your arms, but from the motion of your hips and core which transfer kinetic energy to your arms the way rotating a monkey drum handle swings the beads to hit the drum.

Convince your hips to give you the motion you want by starting them pointing in the right direction when you start your throw. Though this is a video of disc golfers, their pulling has many things in common with pulling in ultimate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iff8S0Q-DAY). If you watch the footwork of these disc golfers, you will see that their front foot is facing backwards as they plant and throw. Simply mimicking the footwork of these disc golf pros will go a long way in helping to get your hips more involved in your pulls and hucks.

You can also see how these players wind up with shoulders leading, then hips. They then unwind and rotate in the opposite direction with hips first, then shoulders and arms.

In order to get the most rotation around the axis of your spine, it is important that it be in the correct position. Let’s do an experiment to see how spine position affects ease of rotation: Stand with your arms out by your sides as if you are the letter “T”. Next imitate a hunchback or a turtle and bend at your waist keeping your arms out. Now, changing nothing else, and keeping your arms in the “T” position you started with, try to rotate so that one hand goes to your toes and the other goes in the air. How far can you go? Now stand up in the “T” position again. This time pull your belly button in toward your spine and make yourself as tall as you can. Now bend at the waist and try the rotation again. Has your range of motion increased? (If you did it correctly, it should have.)

Unfortunately the tendency of many players is to bend at the shoulders or in the back when trying to throw an inside-out backhand which inhibits rotation around the spine. Bending at the hips is what you want to do. Telling yourself to stick you butt out a bit can help you to bend at the hips and maintain the correct spine alignment. Also, throwing a few outside in backhands before practicing your inside-out backhand hucks may help because an outside-in backhand produces the best spine posture more naturally.

Though it may seem that there are an infinite number of variables to think about when throwing, you can gain distance in your throws if you are able to control just two things:

1. Plant your feet so that your hips are forced to become involved in the throw and
2. Keep your spine tall rather than rounded

Keep practicing!
Melissa

Bobo plays ultimate in Halifax and I was lucky enough to meet him this summer at the Parlee Beach Ultimate Tournament in Shediac, NB. Bobo is a young up and coming player and is super passionate about the sport. He was playing in a recent indoor tournament and after a tight point, scored and promptly spiked (well kicked the disc). He wrote an article based on that incident and more generally related it to the sport in general. That article follows below.

Celebrations in ultimate are a very touchy subject. Spirit of the Game is, and should be, a tradition of Ultimate. SotG is what separates Ultimate from other sports, making your own calls in the heat of the moment is hard, but the success that you feel from making the right call is its own reward. But what I don’t understand is why celebrations are considered unsporting. Admittedly the acceptability of celebrations depends on the situation. This issue is subjective, I’m just offering my opinion.

As with all discussions we have to put this one into context. Depending on whether you’re playing in a pick up game or universe point at the UPA club championship the game will be different. Picture the following, you cut deep and the thrower left you out to dry. They put the disc really far in front of you and you are running it down. At the last possible minute you launch yourself at the disc and manage to catch it just before you hit the ground. If this is a pick up game or this is a tournament final, imagine your reaction when you get back up. Keep this in mind when you go through my arguments.

There is a caveat on my discussion though. I disagree with violent or revenge spikes (those that are directed at opponents or in reaction to what they thought was a bad call). These have happened to me and I generally just walk away because fighting and arguing are not in my nature. I understand why some people do that, but I disagree with it and therefore won’t do it. If somebody skies me or goes horiztonal for a huge play for the point, they have earned that spike. They kept their team in the game and I’ll congratulate them even after the spike. They made a play, credit to them.

I do not believe that spiking is indicative of unspirited play; on the contrary. Spiking the disc shows intensity, energy and passion. When I’m playing on defense and a team scores and spikes that is a compliment. It says that they were not confident that they were going to score. It tells me that we were playing good defense and they had to make a play. It gets me excited as a defender. It makes me want to come out that much harder.

It surprises me when people call me unspirited for spiking. I do not make calls that I do not feel are justified; I will never contest a foul call that I agree with, no matter the game or the circumstances. I love ultimate way too much to abuse the rules. I put my heart and soul onto the field. This passion and energy comes out of me after I score. Spirit of the Game is useless if the score of the game becomes meaningless. If I don’t care about the outcome of the game then why would I bother to play? I want to play because I want to win. If passion, enthusiasm, energy, and excitement for Ultimate are not part being a spirited player, then something is seriously wrong.

For ultimate, there are many elements which will contribute to your success and nothing will be a substitute for having good disc skills (throwing & catching) but the one skill that you can control absolutely is your fitness.

There are tons of different workouts (P90X, Crossfit, Air Alert, etc) but really the one(s) that will work best for you are the ones that you enjoy, that you have time for and that work for you. Listen to other people for sure but ultimately it’s your body and noone knows it better than you do. Some people don’t need to do much off season training and can get fit for the season very quickly while others aren’t so lucky. Find out what works for you and do that. Don’t burn yourself by training too hard in the offseason so that by the time outdoor season comes you’re too tired or already hurt and can’t play. Make sure that you’re taking care of your body – yoga, pilates, stretching – as I said, whatever works for you.

I do find a few things will be important to your training success:

1. Eating enough – especially important when you’re training is to eat healthy. I wouldn’t recommend going on some bullshit diet (ie cut out XX for a few weeks). Eat a balanced diet (you should ideally know what you need to eat to feel healthy by now) and if you’re not sure what that is, go talk to a nutritionist. There are a ton of books that give you suggestions but again, it will be the meal plan that works for you.

2. Proper technique – this is huge. I’ve seen so many people who don’t have good form and they’re not as fast, they get hurt more often and they’re not in as good shape as those with good form. Watch videos that teach you the proper technique, go to a track coach who can help you or talk to someone who have good form. You will notice an immediate difference in your performance. This also applies to doing weights and any sort of training

Above all, enjoy it. Just like a job, if you commit to a workout program that you don’t enjoy then you don’t be putting all you have into your training sessions. I’ve tried to keep this brief for the sake of attempting to reiterate a few key points that I find are sometimes easily overlooked when considering offseason training.

Brain science tells us that the brain uses different processes and different parts for gaining different types of knowledge. The type of conscious, or explicit, knowledge we learn in school is controlled by the prefrontal cortex. The logical prefrontal cortex can quickly solve rational problems and learn step by step tasks. Using the prefrontal cortex, we can analyze what we know, we can show our work in math problems, or explain to someone else how we performed a task.

However, the prefrontal cortex is easily overwhelmed by complex problems with many variables. Motor skills falls into this category. This unconscious, or implicit, learning takes place in the older part of the brain. It is about doing what “feels right”. Processes are learned by trial and error. Even the simple act of walking requires a complex, precisely timed, pattern of muscle contractions. Fortunately we don’t have to think about it, but most of us have become quite good at it. Walking on a flat surface, motion is controlled so precisely that the heel clears the pavement by only a few millimeters. But can you explain to another person how to walk? Do you really know what muscles you’re using at what intensity and in what order? Most likely not.

Learning motor skills can be frustrating because the part of the brain that learns these things doesn’t do it as fast as we might want. And it doesn’t necessary learn things in a linear fashion. We can consciously take steps in the beginning to help us learn motor skills but to gain real expertise, the learning must take place in a part of the brain that is unavailable to our prefrontal cortex for analysis and influence. This also explains why some players with the greatest skills cannot tell you how they do it. It’s not that these players are keeping their secrets from you, it’s that their brain is keeping its secrets from itself!

Coaches then face a conundrum. In order to teach, a coach must excavate their own implicit knowledge and bring it to the prefrontal cortex for analysis. Only then can we explain to another player how a skill is done. But given what we know about the brain, how can we best tell players what to do if motor skills are learned by parts of the brain that don’t deal in verbal logic?

Most researchers agree that as we learn a motor skill the movements start with some amount of conscious control and end up, after much practice being controlled automatically. As this process occurs movements become more fluid and coordinated. The skill requires less mental effort.

As coaches we want to get players to this point as quickly as possible and yet we try to use explicit instruction to achieve this goal. For example, if you’ve ever said “this time, try flicking you’re wrist harder” you are encouraging conscious control over a process that you want to become automatic. I don’t believe that all forms of verbal instruction can be eliminated, but thinking about how we give instruction can greatly influence how well a player learns a task.

In “Attention and Motor Skill Learning” Gabrielle Wulf describes an experiment in which participants learned to balance on a balance board. The research compared the effectiveness of an internal vs. external focus in motor skills learning. There were several groups receiving different instructions. Those who learned the fastest and retained the most after several days were the students who were given the instruction to keep the markers on the balance board horizontal. These participants were focusing on external factors or results. In contrast, students who were told to keep their feet horizontal (internal focus) performed no better and retained no more learning than participants who were given no instruction at all.

Balancing on a balance board versus completing a discrete task may be different enough that these results are not directly applicable to learning how to throw a disc. Still, these results may indicate that having players think about what their body is doing while learning how to throw may be completely ineffective!

Clearly some amount of verbal instruction must be given for a player to learn how to throw a forehand. I’m not suggesting that coaching is ineffective. I am suggestions a de-emphasis on verbal instruction of motor skills and at a decoupling of conscious cognitive processes from the performance of motor skills. Sometimes this can be done just by changing a few words. Instructing a player “Now see if you can throw the disc without any wobble” may produce the desired outcome without resorting to a focus on what the specific body parts are doing.

You may ask, is it desirable for players to learn motor skills with little idea about how and why they are doing what they’re doing? This is debatable, but there is some research showing that players who cannot articulate their knowledge perform better under pressure. The act of “choking” under pressure is widely understood to be a result of the brain trying to regain conscious control over the motor skills in an effort to improve performance when it matters most. This strategy is a complete disaster as our conscious knowledge is inadequate for the task. Players who have little articulate knowledge of their motor skills are not able to execute this strategy and so their motor control remains more consistent under high pressure situations. It is sometimes said that “those who can’t do, teach.” That may be a little harsh. It may also be true that the best performers are unable to teach. The inability to articulate their knowledge is actually a benefit to their performance. And the coaches’ ability to teach motor skills may inhibit performance under certain circumstances. So, as a coach, painful though it may be, you may have to decide whether you want to make players who can teach or players who can perform.

If you are a coach, what does this mean for your own performance as a player? Are you destined to be on the bench while the real clutch players take care of universe point? As a player who has flirted with greatness but not quite been able to establish herself there, I fear that this might be the case. Fortunately, there is good news. The prefrontal cortex we use to learn and to teach is also an extraordinarily creative problem solver. I’ve bought my sports psychology books and am ready to roll!

Keep Practicing!
Melissa

This video, requested by Simbadwashere90 on Youtube, talks about the various grips for throwing a disc and which ones I recommend using. Let me know if you grip the disc differently to the ones I show in the video!

I discuss what I think the elements of Spirit of the Game are. Knowledge of the rules, willingness to discuss a call, respect for the other team/your own team and more.

Let me know what you think Spirit of the Game is all about!

This is part II of the summary I began last week (located here). Today’s discussion has important implications for how we instruct new players in learning to a forehand.

In case you’re just joining us, I’m reviewing an article published in Sports Biomechanics called “Biomechanical analysis of the sidearm throwing motion for distance of a flying disc: a comparison of skilled and unskilled players.” (Being a scientist, I should make it clear that my analysis of the work reported is very similar to, but not exactly the same as the conclusions arrived at by the authors of the paper. So this is not a direct summary of the paper.)

In this study ten skilled and seven unskilled players were taped throwing forehands as far as they could. The angles of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist were analyzed. The initial velocity of the discs, spin rate of the discs, all angles of the disc, and distance of the throws were measured. The skilled groups produced throws around 50 meters while the unskilled group produced throws around 30 meters.

The main point of last week was that of all the things measured about the disc, the only things that differed were the angle of attack of the disc at release, and the spin rate of the disc at release. The velocity and everything else about the disc were essentially the same for both groups.

First we have to use words to describe some human motion. If you can hang through these next three paragraphs, you’ll understand the rest okay. Put your hand out as if you were going to shake someone else’s hand. Now freeze your elbow and pretend you are shaking their hand using just your wrist. When your pinky is going toward the floor, that’s called “ulnar deviation” and that’s what you do as you’re about to release a forehand. When your thumb is moving up that’s called “radial deviation” and that’s what you do prior to ulnar deviation when throwing a forehand. We’ll call all of this the “hand shaking” motion for short.

Now put your hand out as if you were holding a pie. Freeze your elbow and pretend you are flipping the pie into your own face. Yum! What your wrist is doing is palmar flexion. When you are throwing a forehand, do you think you are doing more hand shaking or more pie flipping? How would you expect the skilled vs. unskilled players to differ in their hand shaking vs. pie flipping motions?

Last one: you are holding the pie again. This means your forearm is in the supinated position. Now turn your hand over to drop the pie directly on the ground. You are pronating your forearm.

What is most surprising about the motion analysis is that there was rapid pronation occurring in the forearms of the skilled throwers just before release of the disc. The magnitude of pronation was small (about 6 degrees) but it’s effect is large. The unskilled throwers were actually in the act of rapidly supinating their forearms at the time of release. So there are diametrically opposed difference in motion between the skilled and unskilled throwers. This motion is occurring about 0.016 seconds before the release of the disc.

So what? This slight pronation of the forearm allows the palmar flexion (pie flipping) motion to add forward velocity to the disc. (without pronation, the pie flipping motion would put the pie/disc in your face). The pie flipping motion is definitely important in imparting spin to the disc. Skilled players moved 22 degrees of pie flipping vs. only 13 degrees of hand shaking. Unskilled players actually used 41 degrees of pie flipping motion but the forearm wasn’t oriented correctly. (They used 11 degrees of hand shaking.)

What does this mean for your practice and for your instruction? Well, these skilled players had played 2-4 years. I’d say chances are if you are an intermediate level thrower, your wrist has already figured it out. But there may be some implications for how we teach others.

Theory 1: A traditional way of teaching new players is to tell them to put their forearms in the supinated position and keep them there. From this position, the “flick” of the disc is generated only by the hand shaking motion. But we really want them to learn to use the pie flipping motion as well. That is where the speed (and spin generation) of the flick really comes from. Perhaps less instruction is better and players should just be told to start with the forearm in the supinated position and keep the disc in the same plane as they throw. Or, it may be useful to use an actual baseball in explanation because a baseball cannot be thrown sidearm without pronating the forearm.

Theory 2: The problems for unskilled throwers may be beginning a whole 0.1 seconds before releasing the disc. The wrist motions described were the most divergent motions between the skilled and unskilled groups but there were differences in shoulder motion as well. Fortunately, one of these problems is an easy fix. If you stand with your hands hanging by your side and then with your elbows and wrists frozen, raise your arms- that is called abduction. The angle created by the line of the elbow and the line of the torso were measured for both groups. For skilled players this angle remained constant throughout the throwing motion at very nearly 60 degrees. For the unskilled throwers, this angle fluctuated by about twenty degrees throughout the throwing motion. The pattern was large to small to large angle in a kind of swoopy motion. This motion at the shoulder joint is what allows for easy supinating of the forearms as the disc is realeased. But remember this is the opposite of the motion we want! So, eliminate the swoop, eliminate the supination, increase the effectiveness of pie flipping in spin generation. This, I think, is the better of the two theories.

Please try these out on all your friends and let me know what works!

I hope that this article summary has been helpful. At the very least, I hope that you now have a better understanding of what is actually occurring (or should be) while you are throwing your forehands. I hope that you also have gained an appreciation for the utility of biomechanical analysis.

As I find more articles or as more are published, I’ll be attempting to translate them from kinesio-speak to English right here!

See you on the field!
Melissa Witmer

I am going to attempt a summary of an article published in Sports Biomechanics called “Biomechanical analysis of the sidearm throwing motion for distance of a flying disc: a comparison of skilled and unskilled players.” I am hoping to offer something brief, easily understood, and practical. If you want experimental details, or are looking for something more erudite, please read the paper : )

In this study ten skilled and seven unskilled players were taped throwing forehands as far as they could. The movements of their shoulders, arms, and wrist were analyzed. The initial velocity of the discs, spin rate of the discs, all angles of the disc, and distance of the throws were measured.

The skilled groups produced throws around 50 meters while the unskilled group produced throws around 30 meters. Can you guess the cause of this difference? Were the skilled players able to put more force into the disc and release it at a higher velocity? Could they put more spin on it? Or was it a combination of velocity and spin rate? Some other factor like releasing the disc with inside-out angle?

One of the surprising results (to me anyway) of this study is that the velocity of the disc at release was the same for skilled and unskilled throwers. All of the test subjects were physically active Japanese males between around the age of twenty-five. It’s probably fair to say they can all throw a baseball (a standard projectile) reasonably well. Somewhat surprisingly, prior studies by this research group show that throwing a baseball overhand and throwing a forehand are biomechanically similar. This just highlights what we already know- that throwing a disc is different than throwing a standard projectile. Still I would not have expected the initial velocity for both groups to be totally the same.

There were only two factors about the disc at release that differed significantly between the two groups. The first factor was the spin rate. The average spin rate (in rounds per second) for the skilled throwers (12.9 rps) was 3.2 rps more than the average spin rate for unskilled throwers (9.7rps).

The second factor was the angle of attack. A slightly positive angle of attack generates more lift for the disc. Having zero angle of attack generates the least amount of drag. (Explanation of angle of attack: Angle of attack is the angle between the plane of the disc and the vector of velocity. So, if you lay a disc flat on a table and slide it across the table, the disc plane and the velocity vector are parallel. Angle of attack equals zero. But if you place a book under the front rim of the disc and slide it forward, there will be a positive angle of attack.) The angle of attack for the trials of the skilled thowers averaged 0.2 degrees and varied from -1.1 to +1.3 degrees. The angle of attack for unskilled players averaged 1.0 degrees and varied from -2.6 to 4.6 degrees. It would appear that having less drag on the disc at release is important so that drag is minimized and velocity is maintained.

So, which one of these two factors, spin rate or angle of attack, is most important to master in order to gain the most distance on your throws? …the answer is… I have no idea. (I was the one surprised by the velocity thing, remember?) Anyway, let’s be practical. The maximum variation in attack angle in this study was 7.2 degrees. If you are throwing a disc at any velocity, do you think you will know when your angle of attack is off by 5 degrees? Good luck! In truth, you will figure out how to do the angle of attack correctly with practice. You will be seeking the minimal amount of drag approaching your release point and your body will learn how to do this for you. I cannot imagine that this is something you can work on at the level of cognition unless your angles of attack are very far off. If you can throw an air bounce backhand, what you are seeking is the absence of how that feels. An air bounce purposefully has a large difference between the velocity vector and the plane of the disc. It slows down because of the increase in drag, and it lifts (the bounce part) because of the increase in lift generated by the larger positive angle of attack. As a word of caution, can be difficult for players to know when they are throwing air bounce. Because you do NOT want air bounce on most of your throws, I would recommend learning to throw an air bounce only after you have a certain competency with your regular backhand. If you become competent at creating a throw with extra drag (the air bounce) first, I believe your body will have a more difficult time feeling its way toward the optimal minimal drag creating angle.

All that is to say, that deliberately working on increasing your spin on the disc may be the easier way to go. And how do we generate spin on the disc? And how do we help new players get the whole spin thing? In my next installment I’ll discuss more surprising findings! Sorry to keep you in suspense.

Or you can just read the paper yourself:

Sasakawa, K. and Sakurai, S. (2008). Biomechanical analysis of the sidearm throwing motion for distance of a flying disc: A comparison of skilled and unskilled Ultimate players. Sports Biomechanics, 7(3), 311-321.

See you on the field!
Melissa Witmer