Isaac Robinson's mechanics

[Brychanus]

Alongside Tattar, Robinson mopped the floor with MPO at Champion's Cup. His form is another case where he has some quirks, but clearly pulls it all together for good effect. I love watching this guy. He has a no-nonsense approach at the tee, and if you're not watching intently you might miss his shot. And his and Tattar's recent success got this formaholic thinking about mechanics and tradeoffs again.

Robinson's form is a case where many of the fundamental kinematics are there, but considering some of the details that are unusual among tippy-top players is instructive. A while ago, I had the sense that Robinson had built his form around the "shoulder at 90 degrees at the release point" advice, a concept that has been floating around for a while and e.g. what the Overthrow Box Drill teaches. While Isaac has made his swing exceptionally effective, when you look at him closely I think you realize there are a few consequences of that heuristic if it is not the natural way your body obtains the greatest leverage advantage through the top line (shoulders & arm) at the hit (release point).

Robinson is an instance of what SW termed a "side shuffle hopper" like Tattar where his knees don't really cross behind in his drive transition - not a complete x-hop. But it gets more interesting than that.

1. Robinson is side shuffle hopping into his move. Notice that his front knee is hanging a bit low relative to top crushers (which seems related to potential torque), and his feet are a little out of neutral position.

2. The bow loading just before the shift. Notice how his posture is a bit leaned away.

3. Compared to 2, notice that his shift "against the door frame" involves his upper body posture correcting to be more centered. If you watch it in real time, you also really can see his upper body "sliding" horizontally along the ground more than it is remaining centered. This is typically not the case in top distance crushers.

4. As a result, you can see some funk here. His pocket and elbow lead are slightly compromised as his shoulder angle looks darn near 90 degrees as he's about the redirect the disc back out. He's got that plant leg deep into it's swivel/buttwipe move clearing his hip and posture. His disc is unusually pitched heading through the pocket due to his move.

5. Heading into the hit, his shoulder angle is still similar - he has probably left some lag and separation on the table. He's nicely braced up and compressed, so he's making it work.

6. BIG decompression against the ground nearly completely vertical in follow through from a very horizontal approach before that point. Perfectly in balance, but perhaps not the most efficient motion from an absolute torque perspective.



Does Robinson throw on a "flat" swing plane for "flat" power shots? Most certainly not:

Fortunately there's a nice slow mo montage of him here:



Pros & cons:
Isaac is obviously killing it right now, and especially in the woods. Anyone who takes down a Major right now is in a league of their own from a physical & psychological perspective. His swing is obviously being used to good effect & as a fairly athletic but not hugely advantaged body type, it's even more impressive. Here are a few things that I think he's doing well, and others that make me thing he's leaving a bit on the table from an efficiency and peak power perspective.

Pros:
-Committing the shot: this guy knows where he wants the disc to go, and makes the disc do that. Immediately. I mean really - holy ****. Look at him put a move on the disc.

-This guy is light and quick on his feet and exceptionally coordinated and balanced. That helps no matter who you are.

-Despite some funk, his swing is actually pretty efficient (as it would need to be for 450'+). Despite coming into the drive move pretty low and horizontal, he's hiding a very powerful compression against the ground, which you can see given his dramatic rise vertically in the follow through.

-He's found a version of an inside posture swing, keeps that disc "trapped" with good head balance, and gets an excellent shift from behind to lead the swing despite some posture oddities.

-Dude smashes on a tilted axis embracing gravity.

Cons:
-I have speculated and SW seems to agree that in general, the (good) x-step provides a significant power advantage over a side shuffle hop. Some of that is the way mass countering and momentum work, and some of it is the additional torque that builds and unloads in the hips creating more opportunities for lag in the chain.

-I just can't see how that ~90 degrees at the hit move is mechanically optimal for him from a peak effortless power perspective. He looks like he has to shift a bit inefficiently against the frame and then get his upper body leading in an extreme tilt putting a lot into the plant leg move to maintain that pocket shape. It's not the same efficiency of Gurthie's move, which would pull a house down. Isaac's off arm looks like a sign of posture and balance compensation more than contributing to peak smash factor to me. Of course, even if I'm right, he's young and light and athletic and it's probably so deeply engrained at this point that it might not be worth it to tinker with for him. And if he can keep winning on the Pro Tour without getting hurt, maybe he already tinkered with it and discarded other options or just wouldn't care at this point.


When would you say "**** it, I'll go with a side shuffle hop"?
I'll be so bold to say I wouldn't advise the side shuffle hop as an "endpoint" for top form. It's not a coincidence that the farthest crushers let the knee cross behind. But you can't ignore how effective players like Tattar and Robinson are at hitting gaps and their overall line control. I'm cherry-picking the data with a recency bias of course, but I do wonder if their lack of the X makes it just a bit easier to control lines. There's just a little less that can go wrong in the Figure 8 action since it's slightly less complex and smaller and does not have as drastic West-East dynamics. You might be bringing in a little less force, but maybe you can get that force to be consistently "sideways" more easily. Of course, plenty of other players are killing it in the woods regularly with an X-step, so this is just musing. I think the side shuffle hop in an instructive learning tool in any case even if you seek the X.

 

[semisensei]

Love the write up. Isaac's form is so unique and at first glance, at least to me, looks awfully herky jerky and off rhythm… but ****, you can't argue with the results.
One thing about his form that you didn't mention is his quick pump as he goes into his shuffle step which, to me, is the strangest thing about his form. No one else does such an exaggerated and quick punch forward before x stepping and it just looks… strange. My hunch is that it helps him aim his body's momentum: he punches the disc down his target line, and when he stops the disc's forward movement, this creates a tug on the rest of his body that then catches up, moving down the line through the shuffle step and eventually blasting the disc forward.

 

[Brychanus]

Love the write up. Isaac's form is so unique and at first glance, at least to me, looks awfully herky jerky and off rhythm… but ****, you can't argue with the results.
One thing about his form that you didn't mention is his quick pump as he goes into his shuffle step which, to me, is the strangest thing about his form. No one else does such an exaggerated and quick punch forward before x stepping and it just looks… strange. My hunch is that it helps him aim his body's momentum: he punches the disc down his target line, and when he stops the disc's forward movement, this creates a tug on the rest of his body that then catches up, moving down the line through the shuffle step and eventually blasting the disc forward.

Yeah his rhythm is weird because if it were sheet music, I think it would have some interesting beats.

Good catch on the pump - having messed with a ton of pump styles at this point, I think that's directly related to his transition move and posture. He's aiming & aligning his posture and pulling momentum forward with the stabbing pump (good), but I think pump is also so quick because it's compensating for how he transitions in the hop. He also needs to get that backswing in position in time to do his slightly funny shift against the frame & it comes in tighter to him than e.g. PP or McBeth due to the side shuffle hop. He's so quick and coordinated that he can keep his balance doing it. It reminds me a lot of Doss' pump, but Doss has more centered balance throughout the swing coming off the drive leg/helping the drive leg forward, so his pump appears a lot slower than Isaac's.

 

[Sard0nyx]

I agree with your thoughts on his pump. Everytime I see it, it just feels off or weird. It's not a smooth pump like Mcbeth or many other top pros. Almost feels like he's rushing the pump a bit. But obviously it helps him time up his swing.

 

[Brychanus]

I suppose by exaggerating it in his posture it definitely helps get him moving forward and most people have the problem doing the opposite. I think it would be really tricky to build a swing around it intentionally especially without his quickness & coordination.

 

[blayed]

My unsubstantiated hunch on the pump is that he really naturally likes to be an "early" reachback-er but adopted a pump to help his timing as something of a "speedbump". But because of that he is essentially in a tug of war between his natural tendency to reach back early and his pump so he gets through his pump as quickly as possible.

 

[nothinbuttree]

One thing I have noticed on his drives is they tend to go high pretty fast, but then they stay there, almost like a hyzer flip, but on the vertical plane, not the horizontal plane. Noticed that at Idlewild last year too. I wonder how he does on low clearance shots.

I cannot really figure out how he gets the disc so high off the ground so quickly without the nose angle being ridiculous.

Whatever he is doing, it does allow him to throw super straight. His only real weakness is distance/power, but on woods courses, that is not an issue nearly as much.

 

[BrotherDave]

He reminds me a lot of KJ Nybo with the abbreviated follow through.

 

[Brychanus]

One thing I have noticed on his drives is they tend to go high pretty fast, but then they stay there, almost like a hyzer flip, but on the vertical plane, not the horizontal plane. Noticed that at Idlewild last year too. I wonder how he does on low clearance shots.

I cannot really figure out how he gets the disc so high off the ground so quickly without the nose angle being ridiculous.

Whatever he is doing, it does allow him to throw super straight. His only real weakness is distance/power, but on woods courses, that is not an issue nearly as much.

This effect might also be related to his exotic swing and I learned a few things trying to address these points.

Posture & pocket mechanics give Isaac a high line of attack with extreme nose down releases
Due to his posture and the way his arm redirects out from the pocket, I think he naturally swings the disc on a high "line of attack" - high trajectory (yellow arrow) - but the nose is actually quite down relative to the line of attack (white arrow) - maybe even more than most pros. So as the disc lofts I think it's going to tend to stay on a pretty vertical "slot" out to a certain distance even though it's flipping and penetrating forward while rising. Isaac must know this and obviously is using it well. This is super interesting.

If that's the case, he's actually an awesome example of using the gravity/hyzer swing plane and letting "the disc do the work."

If you watch Isaac on an open hole, you can see that he's using still this hyzer plane and high line of attack, and tending to use discs with a lot more turn. In this one he's trying to get a hyzerflip-to-turnover shot to the basket on the right of the fairway. Usually 405' would be a FH hyzer(flip) shot with something pretty (over)stable for the big guns:

If you see a few instances of coverage of Isaac on open holes you'll see he still favors this hyzerflip/understable play even if it's not a turnover. There are not many rounds of him on golf-style courses but there's a lot here. Notice that he's still using shots that ride up from hyzer to flat, then fade even on open holes. A little hard to tell but he seems to like to chip away at the course ~400' at a time if it can work. Serious placement & shot shaping mastery here. Discs are doing a lot of the work.


Low ceilings and distance
This was my favorite example of a "distance" shot. The guy does have some pop but it's important to see how the disc helps him get it. Here he's got a bit of a low ceiling right in front of the tee. He's swinging on a pretty steep hyzer, flipping it all the way up with significant turn, and getting that nice S-line back for a distance shot. Here it looks clearer to me that he's physically pushing his max relying on a hard final vertical compression directly into the ground out of his horizontal form, and his form might be a little rough on his body in the long run, but the shot shaping lesson from hyzer is gold:

Compare to Calvin, who is the poster child for smashing on a low line of attack even on wide open holes (and still usually throwing hyzerflips) but discs with more (over)stability (Eagles, Destroyers) so they tend to stay straight with minimal left-right movement. I'm increasingly convinced that he only can pull this off because of his body type, and he's another case where I increasingly worry about longevity. When you're in your 20s you can get away with a lot.

In the Bag
He embraces a few flippier discs and mentions getting a lot of distance with his most understable fairway driver. His drivers to tend to be listed as more overstable but he mentions the run variability too. I don't know Prodigy molds well but people do sometimes talk about a lot of driver inconsistency and flying more understable than expected, but I never know how well the commenters throw.



Interim Conclusions
For my money, I think if you aren't destined to be a ~74mph thrower like Calvin no matter how much work you put in, you learn from what Isaac is doing & find your version, perhaps without some of the form quirks. I recently started learning a lot more about my swing & why what Isaac is doing works so well for non-exceptional armspeed when I started to peruse the used disc bin and picked up more beat plastic fully embracing the hyzer release, flips, and shot shaping. I throw farther (if I don't spoil the shape, which is often in the middle of continuous form changes), throw cleaner shapes in the woods, and get more into the disc than my body. I'm especially paying more attention to examples like Isaac who let the disc do the work since I'm developing my swing past my physical prime. I learn from his course craft even if my swing is going to end up looking somewhat different and I won't throw even quite as far. I do think Isaac is doing a couple of things that would be hard for most people to do, and might have long run implications for his body. I worry about that abrupt redirection from a horizontal to vertical force as he plants. I think Sidewinder realized this a while ago and given how my body feels pushing & now finding what I think are my own real limits, I'm taking his advice on that one too.

 

[Brychanus]

He reminds me a lot of KJ Nybo with the abbreviated follow through.

For ease of comparison:

Since I'm on a theme of wear-and-tear recently, I was thinking about people like Nybo and Kallstrom since they have this apparent abbreviated follow through effect. It looks like Nybo maintains better center balance through the whole swing than Isaac and has a less abrupt horizontal-to-vertical decompression to me. I still do wonder if people like Nybo or Kallstrom have a little jerk stress somewhere at the end of their swings or if it just works out this way because of how their bodies are shaped...

 

[Sard0nyx]

Can you elaborate on your comments about Calvin above? I'm 6' tall and pretty thin. Also, throw lower lines with stable discs in my bag like Destroyers, Firebirds, Undertakers, stable mids. Maybe thats why I don't throw as far as I would like haha. But I'm curious about the longevity effects you mention because his form does not look very inherently violent like some other pro forms. He seems to use ground force and leverage pretty well to his advantage and he does swing in a hyzer plane.

 

[Brychanus]

Can you elaborate on your comments about Calvin above? I'm 6' tall and pretty thin. Also, throw lower lines with stable discs in my bag like Destroyers, Firebirds, Undertakers, stable mids. Maybe thats why I don't throw as far as I would like haha. But I'm curious about the longevity effects you mention because his form does not look very inherently violent like some other pro forms. He seems to use ground force and leverage pretty well to his advantage and he does swing in a hyzer plane.

Mind that this is at least partly speculation since we don't have any real DG science, but based on other sports, it's generally a little easier on the joints when they are acting a bit more vertically against the ground than horizontally. So that's one average & generic effect across sports I have my eye on. SW had also studied other sources on that closely at some point.

For Calvin in particular, I agree that there's a ton to like and a lot of his chain is exceptionally smooth and rhythmic. It's awesome. The thing that worries me a little is that he is so closed off relative to the release and gets so much leverage against his ankle moving horizontally. He's obviously getting tremendous leverage and torque into the disc, but watch his plant foot, ankle, and knee action as he plants then swings into follow through. As SW pointed out to me once, as Calvin lands his foot pivots very quickly so he doesn't blow anything out. Obviously he's getting a ton of what he generates up the chain to the disc, but it's possible he's putting a little more stress there than maybe necessary. I really feel this as a bigger guy when I land so I don't know if it's just body type etc. Or maybe it's something that he's going to pull of in his 20s and really feel in his 30s/40s. Just something to think about.



Off the cuff I think the advaice is still "go with your body." I'm 6'1'' but IIRC you look more long-levered and narrow shouldered than me. So speculatively when you "load the bow" you might naturally be able to get more power on a low line trajectory than me.

There I would just say that you can probably still get good leverage through the hips moving more horizontal but I might not initially recommend going after Calvin's extreme closed posture. Of course I'm open to other ideas on that from a power/longevity perspective.

Last, in general, it's important to remember that you can still use a vertical vs. horizontal transition move and convert it into either more vertical or horizontal in the swing depending on the form. I think Isaac's is a little extreme in a couple ways per above. Calvin's has a different extreme. Looking around between the two extremes and how the corresponding forms looks is informative.

Reflections on discs:
Interestingly, I used to like Destroyers and Undertakers a lot. I think many Destroyers really like ~450'+/~65mph+ to maximize them. I've never quite gotten there. I recently settled in to throw more Avenger SS, mellow Pharaohs, and the like. For me it was a combo of my form gradually developing a natural feeling hyzer release (interestingly close to that 20 degrees or so we keep seeing) where I get the lowest effort power. No matter my form, I always seem to naturally reach my 80% effort/momentum distance at that angle. It's always been interesting that the number has been similar - it's just about the effort part dropping over time as I learn to master momentum. After another bout of overdoing it recently I have slowly lost my gusto for pursuing my max distance out and have the funny feeling that I might not return to it even though I'd love to. This also means I am starting to relearn my releases and angle control and discs.

Again, I'm now 37 and shaped and move like a rhino, so what I am personally doing may not apply to everyone. For me it has just come down to what I can realistically summon on a given day, and as much as I dislike it, I think I'm personally running into some limits and I have a threshold where the wear-and-tear risk spikes rapidly even as my form keeps improving.

In any case, I think as most players develop they should just continue to find tradeoffs that work for them. But from a wear-and-tear perspective, please do consider learning in the vertical and working with gravity.

 

[semisensei]

I agree with your thoughts on his pump. Everytime I see it, it just feels off or weird. It's not a smooth pump like Mcbeth or many other top pros. Almost feels like he's rushing the pump a bit. But obviously it helps him time up his swing.

I think what looks weird about it is that it happens a half step early than most pumps. Mcbeth, Calvin, Feldberg, Philo etc all pump the disc forward with their weight on the right foot, so the disc moves forward as the left foot moves forward. Isaac pumps the disc forward with his weight on the left foot. He's not the only one that does it- Schultz also pumps in this way.
I also pumped off my left foot for the longest time and it's actually a habit I'm trying to break: for me, it makes me tend to start the backswing early, and then the downswing early, causing swooping and nose up issues. Before I figured this out, my concept of the pump was as a mechanism to get my momentum started, pushing into the x step. Now, I am trying to relearn it as a true pendulum: not as a push off the back(left) foot, but as a relaxed pendulum that swings freely, rooted in the front(right) foot. I've been seeing great results when I get it right (the "effortless distance" is finally starting to make some sense).
Perhaps ironically, Isaac's firm helped me learn this- it was only after trying his shuffle step did I feel the difference between what it's like to have the disc leveraged "within the frame" of your body (ie, disc is in front of or right even with left foot at top of backswing) vs too far behind (disc behind left foot because I started the backswing too early). HUGE DIFFERENCE THERE. The pendulum has to be timed right for that leverage to be there, or else I'm cooked.

 

[Brychanus]

I think what looks weird about it is that it happens a half step early than most pumps. Mcbeth, Calvin, Feldberg, Philo etc all pump the disc forward with their weight on the right foot, so the disc moves forward as the left foot moves forward. Isaac pumps the disc forward with his weight on the left foot. He's not the only one that does it- Schultz also pumps in this way.
I also pumped off my left foot for the longest time and it's actually a habit I'm trying to break: for me, it makes me tend to start the backswing early, and then the downswing early, causing swooping and nose up issues. Before I figured this out, my concept of the pump was as a mechanism to get my momentum started, pushing into the x step. Now, I am trying to relearn it as a true pendulum: not as a push off the back(left) foot, but as a relaxed pendulum that swings freely, rooted in the front(right) foot. I've been seeing great results when I get it right (the "effortless distance" is finally starting to make some sense).
Perhaps ironically, Isaac's firm helped me learn this- it was only after trying his shuffle step did I feel the difference between what it's like to have the disc leveraged "within the frame" of your body (ie, disc is in front of or right even with left foot at top of backswing) vs too far behind (disc behind left foot because I started the backswing too early). HUGE DIFFERENCE THERE. The pendulum has to be timed right for that leverage to be there, or else I'm cooked.

Good observations & this made me look around again. Check the sequence in each in the classic montage. Pump isolated here. Notice that relative to their posture, all the pumps are helping "swing" the rear leg in while committing forward momentum. Isaac's is still doing that, but I think his unusual rhythm etc. is giving it the sequence you're seeing there. I'd agree that one of the virtues of a pure pendulum is to help simplify this when learning. I have a forward windmill in my pumo now that I took from SW that is helping pull a few other mechanics in line for me. It has the same basic rhythm, countering, and forward momentum principle. In general it's helping me get my transition move in line bit by bit since it helps the rear leg and throwing arm talk to each other better.

 

[nothinbuttree]

This effect might also be related to his exotic swing and I learned a few things trying to address these points.

Posture & pocket mechanics give Isaac a high line of attack with extreme nose down releases
Due to his posture and the way his arm redirects out from the pocket, I think he naturally swings the disc on a high "line of attack" - high trajectory (yellow arrow) - but the nose is actually quite down relative to the line of attack (white arrow) - maybe even more than most pros. So as the disc lofts I think it's going to tend to stay on a pretty vertical "slot" out to a certain distance even though it's flipping and penetrating forward while rising. Isaac must know this and obviously is using it well. This is super interesting.

If that's the case, he's actually an awesome example of using the gravity/hyzer swing plane and letting "the disc do the work."

If you watch Isaac on an open hole, you can see that he's using still this hyzer plane and high line of attack, and tending to use discs with a lot more turn. In this one he's trying to get a hyzerflip-to-turnover shot to the basket on the right of the fairway. Usually 405' would be a FH hyzer(flip) shot with something pretty (over)stable for the big guns:

If you see a few instances of coverage of Isaac on open holes you'll see he still favors this hyzerflip/understable play even if it's not a turnover. There are not many rounds of him on golf-style courses but there's a lot here. Notice that he's still using shots that ride up from hyzer to flat, then fade even on open holes. A little hard to tell but he seems to like to chip away at the course ~400' at a time if it can work. Serious placement & shot shaping mastery here. Discs are doing a lot of the work.


Low ceilings and distance
This was my favorite example of a "distance" shot. The guy does have some pop but it's important to see how the disc helps him get it. Here he's got a bit of a low ceiling right in front of the tee. He's swinging on a pretty steep hyzer, flipping it all the way up with significant turn, and getting that nice S-line back for a distance shot. Here it looks clearer to me that he's physically pushing his max relying on a hard final vertical compression directly into the ground out of his horizontal form, and his form might be a little rough on his body in the long run, but the shot shaping lesson from hyzer is gold:

Compare to Calvin, who is the poster child for smashing on a low line of attack even on wide open holes (and still usually throwing hyzerflips) but discs with more (over)stability (Eagles, Destroyers) so they tend to stay straight with minimal left-right movement. I'm increasingly convinced that he only can pull this off because of his body type, and he's another case where I increasingly worry about longevity. When you're in your 20s you can get away with a lot.

In the Bag
He embraces a few flippier discs and mentions getting a lot of distance with his most understable fairway driver. His drivers to tend to be listed as more overstable but he mentions the run variability too. I don't know Prodigy molds well but people do sometimes talk about a lot of driver inconsistency and flying more understable than expected, but I never know how well the commenters throw.



Interim Conclusions
For my money, I think if you aren't destined to be a ~74mph thrower like Calvin no matter how much work you put in, you learn from what Isaac is doing & find your version, perhaps without some of the form quirks. I recently started learning a lot more about my swing & why what Isaac is doing works so well for non-exceptional armspeed when I started to peruse the used disc bin and picked up more beat plastic fully embracing the hyzer release, flips, and shot shaping. I throw farther (if I don't spoil the shape, which is often in the middle of continuous form changes), throw cleaner shapes in the woods, and get more into the disc than my body. I'm especially paying more attention to examples like Isaac who let the disc do the work since I'm developing my swing past my physical prime. I learn from his course craft even if my swing is going to end up looking somewhat different and I won't throw even quite as far. I do think Isaac is doing a couple of things that would be hard for most people to do, and might have long run implications for his body. I worry about that abrupt redirection from a horizontal to vertical force as he plants. I think Sidewinder realized this a while ago and given how my body feels pushing & now finding what I think are my own real limits, I'm taking his advice on that one too.

Great discussion, thanks!

 

[Brychanus]

Oh and I bumped into this old Reddit post about Feldberg's form and thought I'd share it here while we're talking about pump styles & related mechanics again. It looks like both HUB and SW commented that they liked it.

"Feldberg's shoulders, whether painful or not, are already visibly dysfunctional. I mean, McBeth slouches sometimes, but he retains good scapular mobility whereas Feldberg is permanently stuck in the rounded shoulder position. Ever watch Dave put his hands up in celebration? He's almost totally lost the ability to retract his shoulders and stabilize the head of the humerus.

Now, throwing orthodox style involves the shoulder being between flexion and abduction while internally rotated - this is a classically weak/impingement prone position. If you don't have prior conditions and your whole posterior shoulder is engaged working to pull your upper arm back and in, it's generally not a problem. For someone like Feldberg, it'd be almost impossible to generate good power in this position because his shoulder would lock down to protect itself.

The "swedish style compromise" allows him to keep his shoulder more neutrally rotated with the upper arm closer to the upper body with a flexion to extension pattern rather than flexion to transverse abduction. Because the disc is released closer to the body, it's not as efficient at translating rotational velocity generated by the hips into forward velocity of the disc, though the greater shoulder extension component does allow for prolonged engagement of the lats, partially compensating for his weak shoulders.

So, I'd argue changing to orthodox style would actually cause him additional stress on his shoulders as they are now. Swedish style is his work around for existing bad shoulder mechanics. I do agree his foot and hip work (which is the real engine of a backhand) is better than average, and everything going on at the shoulder is just how you transmit that power to the disc."

 

[Brychanus]

More thoughts relevant to Calvin's form and bracing and pivoting. This is a synthesis of some information gathered around this forum that I'm putting in Fundamentals:

"To convert purely horizontal motion into weight and force requires more work and is very inefficient and not natural to the body. It creates a lot torque through the leg and knee. The more horizontal you shift, the more you need your foot to pivot and earlier it needs to pivot, when it pivots during the swing it's technically spinning out of leverage. The knee is not designed to move horizontally, but it is designed to move vertically. Thus, the foot does not need to pivot as much while generating equal or more force. If the leg is acting vertically against the ground, it provides the front foot a more stable platform or fulcrum to leverage the swing from and transfer more force. This principle is why it is appropriate to think of the action of the legs as a process that sets up a lateral force moving from the drive leg that builds and then releases a torque force. As the lateral action of the drive leg ends, the body enters a brief controlled fall with a large vertical component as the plant leg swings reflexively forward to catch the body from falling out of balance, landing in the plant assisted by gravity. As the plant leg legs, it resists the ground with spring-like action in good posture to transfer the preceding momentum and add additional ground reaction force."

 

[Sard0nyx]

More thoughts relevant to Calvin's form and bracing and pivoting. This is a synthesis of some information gathered around this forum that I'm putting in Fundamentals:

"To convert purely horizontal motion into weight and force requires more work and is very inefficient and not natural to the body. It creates a lot torque through the leg and knee. The more horizontal you shift, the more you need your foot to pivot and earlier it needs to pivot, when it pivots during the swing it's technically spinning out of leverage. The knee is not designed to move horizontally, but it is designed to move vertically. Thus, the foot does not need to pivot as much while generating equal or more force. If the leg is acting vertically against the ground, it provides the front foot a more stable platform or fulcrum to leverage the swing from and transfer more force. This principle is why it is appropriate to think of the action of the legs as a process that sets up a lateral force moving from the drive leg that builds and then releases a torque force. As the lateral action of the drive leg ends, the body enters a brief controlled fall with a large vertical component as the plant leg swings reflexively forward to catch the body from falling out of balance, landing in the plant assisted by gravity. As the plant leg legs, it resists the ground with spring-like action in good posture to transfer the preceding momentum and add additional ground reaction force."

It almost feels like the more horizontal speed you put into your throw, the farther you have to plant. This will decrease the angle between your plant leg and the ground and allow the knee to bend properly (upwards local to the knee but really diagonally since your leg is tilted). I'm enjoying your pro form critiques. Hopefully sometime you might do Cole Redalens form? I'm intrigued by it because he doesn't have a fast run up and seems to be able to generate effortless distance.

 

[Brychanus]

It almost feels like the more horizontal speed you put into your throw, the farther you have to plant. This will decrease the angle between your plant leg and the ground and allow the knee to bend properly (upwards local to the knee but really diagonally since your leg is tilted). I'm enjoying your pro form critiques. Hopefully sometime you might do Cole Redalens form? I'm intrigued by it because he doesn't have a fast run up and seems to be able to generate effortless distance.

Yeah I think that's maybe the general relationship:
https://www.dgcoursereview.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3586534&postcount=23

Though you can definitely take it too far and the leg still needs to be part of the overall posture & axis. Failing to do so is why some people get weird and harsh braces. As SW has noted, Simon actually spends most of his time striding off the rear leg "falling" into the plant and the plant leg angle ended up similar when he went from vertical to horizontal. That's part of how the tilted axis works landing your body as a big unit:

I had been looking at Cole more recently too, especially since he also bombs and had picked some things up from Gibson. He also does a few little things that I suspect are robbing him of some consistency. On my stack.

Off the cuff, I think Cole is also a very tall guy and while he has put on some muscle recently, he's actually a beanpole body type like Gannon. He's got the levers and his shoulders are also pretty narrow relative to his arms and hips. You can do a lot with that frame and make it look effortless like does Tamm with his bombs. But there are lessons for everyone there too. You can maybe predict where I'll be going with that lol.

And thanks, I'm learning a lot doing this and it's more motivating if someone else finds it helpful!

 

[Brychanus]

Windy Jonesboro 2023 Hole 1 here with Robinson parking it on a slight overshoot:
https://youtu.be/z2hE0W4MRmo?t=211

I miss the radar gun!