Form: Self analysis?

[ChrisWoj]

I have some thoughts about my form that have come up as I've started throwing myself into rebuilding myself for Masters in 2025 this year... So I've found two big pieces that have made me super inconsistent the last few years. Wild how playing even just a little more helps open up the box over time.

1. I have truly struggled with making sure that I'm sitting on my back foot putting. It's got so easy to just randomly go from properly setting myself on my back foot to winding up over my front foot and just wrecking my putts.

2. I have struggled a lot with maintaining my hyzer angle and seemingly related (well it turns out absolutely related) late releases. And I tried really hard to focus on keeping my head down and again... I lose it just weirdly.

I was really getting frustrated and confused by the fact that I just could NOT seem to keep my head down on drives and sit on my back foot on putts. Like how could this become so unnatural to me? What the fuck? Have I let myself become so ADD that I can't remember to execute the simplest easy to remember things for 18 holes?

But... Solutions! Both problems, as it turns out, seem to have solutions in the pre-shot.

1. With the putts I was placing my front foot first. I never used to do that. I always set my back foot first at the appropriate distance back from the front foot to get the amount of weight shift I needed for the putt. And then I'd carefully place the front foot on line to the basket. And then I would just naturally sit down into the stance. By setting the front foot first I was often not adjusting the back foot and I had too narrow of a stance and really needed to make an effort to settle back on the back foot.

2. The drives I thought I solved last year by focusing on keeping my head down and thought the problem with inconsistency was just me rebuilding the habit. And it was actually on its own important to redevelop. But what I have realized is that the head needs to follow core orientation not the other way around. It can't lead your posture. If the torso is too upright keeping the head down still fails. So pre-shot I need to get to my hyzer angle by setting up how far forward on my toes I am. The more of my toes I am instead of my heel, the more my hyzer lines and thus angle of release are maintained.

I think I got away from that because sometimes I push the limits and go too far and my weight being too far forward leads to my foot coming out on full commit and scraping my knees up. But I think just gotta know my limits and live with the fact that I might not learn them. I mean, hell, whenever I scraped up my knee the slip happened after release and often the shot is great (I swear I can't remember scraping my knee on a tee and not being satisfied with the outcome of the shot, oddly enough.... probably bias).

I don't know if any of this will help anyone else. I don't know if any of it, especially with the drives, seems wrong-headed. If someone has critique of the way I'm self-analyzing please let me know, I fully acknowledge that being a knuckle dragger and doing copious reps has contributed more to my throw than knowing the technical elements of a throw has.

 

[Brychanus]

Since I think a lot about balance and work on most things in that framework, I've always found it interesting how much trouble I've had with my balance head to toe including the head relative to walking, dancing, or boxing. Motions that involve moving sideways-ish with your intent on a target that you then take your eyes off of is just a strange thing to do in the first place. I think that's part of why so many people struggle with it, and especially adults.

I'm also not sure the value or "true" ratio of self vs. other analysis. I had several dance instructors and only one of them had the kind of "chemistry" (and experience) that really helped me develop fast. I found it with sidewinder when other things weren't working at all for me. I simply couldn't get my body to do certain things on its own and I'm analytic enough that I had a taste for his style. When I "explore" now it's mostly trying to revisit things I already learned to see if it would improve how my body moves for whatever current cue he has me focused on.

I do like in general how you're picking out just a couple cues to focus on at a time. In general "paralysis by analysis" is a real thing for some people. Once my brain calmed down and I wasn't really thinking much anymore it became easier to adjust things on the fly, and return to old concepts more quickly.

If you can't do the best thing, do whatever next best thing you can.

 

[Brychanus]

2. I have struggled a lot with maintaining my hyzer angle and seemingly related (well it turns out absolutely related) late releases. And I tried really hard to focus on keeping my head down and again... I lose it just weirdly.

Can you say more about this? It sounds like you have almost the opposite problem I tend to have. I tend too be too hyzer and too early releases.*

I do so much form work inside on hyzer that when I get to the course I find out it was hiding bits of collapsing posture from me, and I have trouble achieving "reasonable" shallower hyzer planes for some shots. So even though extreme hyzers have had many mechanical learning advantages for me & I want to explore a wide range of angles, I started to make my indoor hyzer planes intentionally less harsh. Still not a flat swing, but between 10-20 degrees hyzer where I can still find a useable stroke at low effort.

This intentionality seems to be teaching my body something different and new. Part of it came from a chat with a friend who observed I was making some shots way too hard for myself and we had a heart to heart where we agreed I'd always probably be a somewhat hyzer guy, but there is a lot to be said for shallower angles on some control drives (I think of Simon throwing "flat" at 350 or 450 feet, still baby hyzer, but much less hyzer than max "flat" drive).

*usually I find that if I'm swinging hyzer and end up with a late release it means I was not fully braced up/on top of the front leg and either collapsing or overroating in the front hip.

 

[ChrisWoj]

Can you say more about this? It sounds like you have almost the opposite problem I tend to have. I tend too be too hyzer and too early releases.*

I do so much form work inside on hyzer that when I get to the course I find out it was hiding bits of collapsing posture from me, and I have trouble achieving "reasonable" shallower hyzer planes for some shots. So even though extreme hyzers have had many mechanical learning advantages for me & I want to explore a wide range of angles, I started to make my indoor hyzer planes intentionally less harsh. Still not a flat swing, but between 10-20 degrees hyzer where I can still find a useable stroke at low effort.

This intentionality seems to be teaching my body something different and new. Part of it came from a chat with a friend who observed I was making some shots way too hard for myself and we had a heart to heart where we agreed I'd always probably be a somewhat hyzer guy, but there is a lot to be said for shallower angles on some control drives (I think of Simon throwing "flat" at 350 or 450 feet, still baby hyzer, but much less hyzer than max "flat" drive).

*usually I find that if I'm swinging hyzer and end up with a late release it means I was not fully braced up/on top of the front leg and either collapsing or overroating in the front hip.

I can try to say more on it!

Focusing on the late release situation.... It feels like "late release" might be the wrong terminology, more so that the release is to the right of and higher than where it needs to be. The release may be "on time" but my body orientation at the time of release finds a balanced place more upright and to the right of where it should be. It is easy to call it "late" because the disc is coming out in that direction. I think what's happening is I'm trying to start out forward, torso forward, to enable a hyzer release that is level and more on-axis with the rotation of the body, but I'm not truly getting my weight over my toes. So as I rotated, my torso was pulling into a more upright position, rotating around my center of balance. If I'm really more forward with my weight over my toes pre-shot, the rotation seems to hold more down at the angle, enabling the intended release.

Does that help clarify what I'm going through?

 

[Brychanus]

Yeah, interesting. I think that there is a lot of recent chatter about the extent to which there are options in terms of the extremities (hands wrists arms etc) vs. adjusting components of posture. I still tend to prefer to work on my overall postural unit and balance but have found the little excursions into other ideas interesting. For me converting the lessons from e.g. really extreme hyzer angles meant that adjusting to less hyzer or true anny is challenging. As usual I benefit from working on it in standstills too but it doesn't always immediately transfer to x step. So even though I'm endlessly curious I mostly try to be a dutiful student to whatever main "cue" is active and search in that space ...

 

[jupiterboy]

There are things I can do to juice the throw, but mostly they also cause disruptions or quicker late acceleration that doesn't end up making a smoother effort. Right now I'm working on throwing downhill and uphill. There might be infinite variations.

 

[ChrisWoj]

Yeah, interesting. I think that there is a lot of recent chatter about the extent to which there are options in terms of the extremities (hands wrists arms etc) vs. adjusting components of posture. I still tend to prefer to work on my overall postural unit and balance but have found the little excursions into other ideas interesting. For me converting the lessons from e.g. really extreme hyzer angles meant that adjusting to less hyzer or true anny is challenging. As usual I benefit from working on it in standstills too but it doesn't always immediately transfer to x step. So even though I'm endlessly curious I mostly try to be a dutiful student to whatever main "cue" is active and search in that space ...

I would say that I play around with both the extremities and posture. I'm fully capable of comfortable extending to almost totally perpendicular vertical release in part because I'll use the shoulder and the wrist angles to get a few more degrees of verticality out of it. I can also do that with the torso alone, but the power loss due to how far you've removed yourself from the weight shift sucks. If I try to do it with wrist and shoulder alone, that is hard to accomplish, and it is where the worst of the arm forcing itself back into alignment with the torso comes in and I wind up with a ton of OAT more often than I'm clean. But put them together and you can do really vertical stuff.

For type of player - I've always tried to be a base neutral to slight hyzer player. I'm the same with my putt. And forehand. Barely any hyzer, but hyzer is where I want the miss to be off my baseline. I like being most comfortable with the middle ground but I want to still have a muted error-outcome relationship. I find it makes decision making a lot easier, and over time its helped with being comfortable going full anhyzer release or deep hyzer.

What is hurting me now is all the years away where I just lost all comfort with everything off my base flattish shot because that's what I trusted and used for everything because I didn't have time to practice lots of angles.

 

[HyzerRoc]

2. The drives I thought I solved last year by focusing on keeping my head down and thought the problem with inconsistency was just me rebuilding the habit. And it was actually on its own important to redevelop. But what I have realized is that the head needs to follow core orientation not the other way around. It can't lead your posture. If the torso is too upright keeping the head down still fails. So pre-shot I need to get to my hyzer angle by setting up how far forward on my toes I am. The more of my toes I am instead of my heel, the more my hyzer lines and thus angle of release are maintained.

I think I just found out what was wrong with my hyzers yesterday

It is interesting to read some self-reflection about form in here and to see how others go about thinking their misses through and looking for causes. I have to hold myself back from trying to go through all the different possible causes of a miss and trying tons of tweaks in the field that mostly end up not working out. You seem to have an easier time focusing on a limited cues to work through.

For type of player - I've always tried to be a base neutral to slight hyzer player. I'm the same with my putt. And forehand. Barely any hyzer, but hyzer is where I want the miss to be off my baseline. I like being most comfortable with the middle ground but I want to still have a muted error-outcome relationship. I find it makes decision making a lot easier, and over time its helped with being comfortable going full anhyzer release or deep hyzer.

Can you elaborate a bit about how getting comfortable with the slight hyzer play made you more comfortable with annys as well. Is it because you established a baseline throw and built from there to get better at annys?

 

[Brychanus]

Huh, interesting. I've found it kind of neat that I can now very independently control my arm and posture when needed in standstills for all kinds of weird shots on the course (I guess that's part of a "maturing" game). It's started to become more fun to figure out really weird shots in the heavy woods near me and find tradeoffs between ideal weight shifts/power shots vs. a scrappier/more extremity based move.

The x-step still requires me to mostly control the overall posture of the move, maybe because of my own movement limitations and the complexity in learning to do the move at all. I've been able to benefit from a bit of exploring "at the arm" recently again, but I think for the most part I have enough balance control issues that I'm content to just keep taking a "unit" approach (just saying it's been an interesting feature of my own development, appears to differ player to player).

Maybe one day I'll be more in the "Body English" phase there too if I'm at it long enough.

 

[ChrisWoj]

Can you elaborate a bit about how getting comfortable with the slight hyzer play made you more comfortable with annys as well. Is it because you established a baseline throw and built from there to get better at annys?

Oh, my bad - that's one of those paragraphs that gets chopped up in editing and you lose track of the fact that you removed important context. lol. The part about the slight hyzer was meant to be a tangent and it slowly took over the paragraph.

I was responding to his feeling a bit stuck by his base-hyzer feel for the throw by noting that I have always tried to be close to middle specifically for the reason he noted making his indoor hyzer shots less harsh. I'll take a slight hyzer where-ever the course gives it to me, but I feel like being able to access a wide range that crosses the hyzer-anhyzer threshold is important to a complete golf game (versus a wide range of hyzers and fewer anhyzers or the reverse).

The x-step still requires me to mostly control the overall posture of the move, maybe because of my own movement limitations and the complexity in learning to do the move at all. I've been able to benefit from a bit of exploring "at the arm" recently again, but I think for the most part I have enough balance control issues that I'm content to just keep taking a "unit" approach (just saying it's been an interesting feature of my own development, appears to differ player to player).

Maybe one day I'll be more in the "Body English" phase there too if I'm at it long enough.

I think my greatest benefits often come from periods where I'm willing to let my golf game suffer in the short term. I isolate pieces to change and even when a change proves to be a bad idea, there is an added proprioceptive benefit to really hyper-focusing on a small piece - wrist angle, head angle, torso angle...

Right now it's really easy for me to, bit by bit go through those things because I'm comfortable with the fact that my game on the course isn't really sharp anyway, so why not fiddle? I'm going to shoot shaky rounds because of my problems, so I may as well.

 

[Brychanus]

Oh, my bad - that's one of those paragraphs that gets chopped up in editing and you lose track of the fact that you removed important context. lol. The part about the slight hyzer was meant to be a tangent and it slowly took over the paragraph.

I was responding to his feeling a bit stuck by his base-hyzer feel for the throw by noting that I have always tried to be close to middle specifically for the reason he noted making his indoor hyzer shots less harsh. I'll take a slight hyzer where-ever the course gives it to me, but I feel like being able to access a wide range that crosses the hyzer-anhyzer threshold is important to a complete golf game (versus a wide range of hyzers and fewer anhyzers or the reverse).

I think my greatest benefits often come from periods where I'm willing to let my golf game suffer in the short term. I isolate pieces to change and even when a change proves to be a bad idea, there is an added proprioceptive benefit to really hyper-focusing on a small piece - wrist angle, head angle, torso angle...

Right now it's really easy for me to, bit by bit go through those things because I'm comfortable with the fact that my game on the course isn't really sharp anyway, so why not fiddle? I'm going to shoot shaky rounds because of my problems, so I may as well.

I mean I literally just had another mind-and-body-altering insight that @SocraDeez pointed out to me a year and a half ago that I clearly didn't fully encode or understand, then suddenly an "ah ha!" clicked in. I don't get many ah has in disc golf so when they happen I need to tell all of DGCR about it lmao. It's bizarre to me how certain body "blind spots" can be incredibly important in learning (and not learning). Weird, weird stuff man.

I think the hyzer wisdom applies there. Even if I always skew hyzer learning from versatile throwers is starting to teach me new lessons, and when the random friend on the course gives me an idea to test out watching me in live throwing in one situation or another it's a little easier to try on the fit for a day or two and then discard it if it's either tampering with the "long run" of my learning or just isn't working for me.

What I've appreciated about learning from Sidewinder is his hit rate for isolating a key variable is damn impressive, but of course if he's not there hands on I have to kind of fuss around to see if I can get what he's saying. I now understand that you can be analytic to your own detriment, too. Sometimes a little bit of "random search" around the main idea or move helps, sometimes not. I'll never fully understand motor learning for a move this complicated, probably. I'm just happy that more "body fluency" means that it's way easier to adjust a single thing and quickly determine if it has any promise, which was not the case even six months ago for me. Just a weird cycle of plateaus, sudden insights and accelerated learning, and then new plateaus.

I've just learned to be more patient overall and enjoy the ride and stay open-minded as to where I end up. Truly a journey and not a destination, this game.

 

[ChrisWoj]

I'll never fully understand motor learning for a move this complicated, probably. I'm just happy that more "body fluency" means that it's way easier to adjust a single thing and quickly determine if it has any promise, which was not the case even six months ago for me. Just a weird cycle of plateaus, sudden insights and accelerated learning, and then new plateaus.

I've just learned to be more patient overall and enjoy the ride and stay open-minded as to where I end up. Truly a journey and not a destination, this game.

I hadn't really thought of it in terms of 'body fluency' but I think a lot of what I'm able to isolate probably also comes from a lifetime of trail running, and being a highly technical runner. I started running cross country when I was 8, and never really stopped, and I like going fast, I like hitting corners fast, I like trying to accelerate when I turn to maintain speed coming out of it, and I've always been like that - trying to find edges where other runners slow down (hill climbs are another example), because I've never been a top-end speed guy.

With disc golf getting onto the plant foot and using it in a reflexive manner to accelerate in a new direction is relatively easy to feel because I'm doing it in a very controlled space, compared to identifying the best surface to plant in a turn and adjusting the body for that at speed.

An in-between step might be something like what I did last night. I ran a particularly strong 5K with my dog on sidewalks. If she catches me slowing down, she tends to overcompensate and slows down even more. So, on her 'fast' days, when I hit corners on sidewalk runs with her I try to completely pivot the foot and catch myself entirely on the outside of the plant foot, prepared to drive hard with the first step at the perpendicular angle. And she's a flat-coated retriever mix, highly agile, so that keeps her ripping around the corners.

So yeah... I definitely had not thought before how that kinda translates to the 'body fluency' side of things in disc golf, but it makes sense that I probably benefit to some extent from practicing that loading.

 

[HyzerRoc]

Oh, my bad - that's one of those paragraphs that gets chopped up in editing and you lose track of the fact that you removed important context. lol. The part about the slight hyzer was meant to be a tangent and it slowly took over the paragraph.

I was responding to his feeling a bit stuck by his base-hyzer feel for the throw by noting that I have always tried to be close to middle specifically for the reason he noted making his indoor hyzer shots less harsh. I'll take a slight hyzer where-ever the course gives it to me, but I feel like being able to access a wide range that crosses the hyzer-anhyzer threshold is important to a complete golf game (versus a wide range of hyzers and fewer anhyzers or the reverse).

I think my greatest benefits often come from periods where I'm willing to let my golf game suffer in the short term. I isolate pieces to change and even when a change proves to be a bad idea, there is an added proprioceptive benefit to really hyper-focusing on a small piece - wrist angle, head angle, torso angle...

Right now it's really easy for me to, bit by bit go through those things because I'm comfortable with the fact that my game on the course isn't really sharp anyway, so why not fiddle? I'm going to shoot shaky rounds because of my problems, so I may as well.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. Especially woods golf doesnt always allow for the hyzer flip to play a left to right line but requires flex shots and the like.

I think knowing your stock standard shot is valuable for learning form changes as it lets you just throw without thinking about angles and instead thinking about whatever you are trying to forge into your move. It also gives some baseline off of which you can think of more hyzer or more anhyzer as a mental cue for shots.