Working Stiff's Bag

[Working Stiff]

I'd like to see a video of you throwing to see if we could find some way for you to throw farther.

Basic athletic coordination issue: My upper body and lower body don't coordinate. It was a big problem for me in baseball growing up. The timing of when I stepped into a pitch and opened my hips was always waaayyy in front of my hands, so all the power from my lower body was wasted and I just hit little cans of corn with my arms. I was way too big and slow to be hitting singles, ended up catching because it was the only place a big slow singles hitter could play, but washed out of catching due to a weak arm that had more to do again with not being able to get my lower body into the throw and relying all on my arm. I spent more hours than any of you can imagine trying to fix that as a kid because I desperately wanted to play baseball more than anything. I never did and had to play football because it takes very little coordination to ram into somebody in front of you.

From my experience working with people on my disc golf throw, it again is an issue of being all arm/no ass. I'm not very optimistic that I'm ever going to get that particular bit of coordination worked out.

[PMantle]

Sounds like my golf swing. I don't use my hips much at all.

[JR]

JHern once put arm usage nicely by referring them to strings. The arms will whip somewhat without any arm muscle usage. How about putting a shirt on not inserting the arms in place but dropping them inside the shirt putting the hands in trouser pockets and standing still pushing forward with the left leg and back with the right in the stance you have when the plant step lands? Observing the shirt sleeves fly out differently with different leg and hip use might be interesting. To be able to push with the legs requires some bending in the knees. A straight leg cannot push at all so a straight leg cannot produce much power. The only power from a straight leg would come from moving the leg from the hip joint. That kills the power of two out of three moving joints and more muscle groups of the leg.

Jay Reading is large and played football and he still gets the discs out nicely using the legs too.

[Working Stiff]

It's been raining here for weeks, so I have not really been able to try any lower body work. It's "stand and deliver" or "fall on your ass" right now.

Football actually requires a lot of footwork which I was pretty good at in that setting. The timing was just different I guess. Not so precise. I didn’t have this “you opened your hips a ½ second too early” problem. You stepped and hit the fucker. So long as you got your head over on the correct side when you hit him, you were probably going to be OK. You could actually get the crap smacked out of you make the blocks; you really just had to get into a guy for a second on the interior line and the running back was gone. Even on a pass block all you really had to do was stop his momentum at some point and the ball should be gone. There was one game in particular I remember where the guy really beat the crap out of me, but he was slow so the ball was gone before he could shed me. There was a really big margin for error there.

[JR]

I remember seeing an instructional video for newb bass players where the instructor said to play right no matter how slow it is and that the speed will come eventually. In disc golf it is a totally different thing as in football because it is finesse vs brute force. You can get surprisingly far by throwing right without power so the same go slow advice applies with the speed and muscle power usage coming later. Steady and slow is the name of the game when one changes form. You can train in front of a large mirror indoors without using a disc. I recommend also stopping in different parts of the throw with different forms to compare the timings of the different body positions. And starting from the mid throw stopped positions too to see which version generates the loosest most powerful throw from then on. That should illustrate when to use power from which body part in which order so the timing could be found that way too. I cannot guarantee anything but it helped me.