Brychanus
* Ace Member *
Love "Shifting underneath" as the phrase. Adding something to the Repo!
@DWhitt I guess I'm kind of talking around it but I agree with @sidewinder22. Over two years he has gradually been turning me from a weightlifter into a thrower. I'm not perfect but somehow, it's working.
This may or may not help you, but if I didn't share before, my body intuition about grip, weight shifting, and power changed after 2-3 months with this exercise series. Then I started to figure out how to get it into the disc better. I was having a hell of a harder time before that because I was never really connecting my balance with what my arm was doing for a low-effort, high power move. I needed tons and tons of reps moving my body around and swinging in all directions for it to get the "point" of what my body needed to do to a disc thrown more horizontal(ish). Sometimes I needed to let the club pull me off balance to find new and faster balance. I don't owe David Weck any money (but I guess I owe him thanks). Everything I say below I think I 'understood' better after I started doing it in my own body. Do/see/feel first.
Tip-o-the-whip and avoiding bodybuilder-level "death grip": Normally I'd lead with a hammer but I think you have almost the opposite problem and you're just muscling the crap out of your grip, which means the arm won't have the right level of tension to throw. Watch a Graham Russell standstill. What's going on there in his hand and wrist at the "tip of the whip"? It's got something in common with hammer throws, believe it or not! Ignore his weightshift there.
Just a couple deeper context points you might come back to later:
1. To me, your grip looks like it's going to try and pull directly horizontal out of the backswing toward the target as flat as possible. I don't think I've looked at a single pro yet where the swing plane is truly that flat even when throwing flat(ish) for power [ref1 ref2 ref3]. Bodies just don't actually seem to really move that way in advanced motion. It's not like I just took Sidewinder's word for it - I think he had it mostly nailed down in the first ref there, and I have just been trying to understand how and why it interacts with other parts of form since then. I'm not sure if he agrees with what I'm trying to show/speculating in ref3 there yet.
2. I find grip still hard to completely understand in disc golf (it was way easier to think about in golf), but recently it changed fundamentally when I started trying to understand the grip/thumb action related to what the lower body and ground forces were doing in the move. Your action from the lower body goes "up" in the plant while the grip and arm apply force "down". The net effect is to provide a sudden spike in force out away from the body/center/chest. You generally see this in very vertical and very horizontal players so I am gradually starting to believe this is at least often a fundamental thing for power. I think there are probably a lot of acceptable grips that achieve this effect. Time will tell hopefully.
3. And actually, I think this image I just sketched alone helped me understand even better why my body always seems to respond way faster to more verticality than horizontality in my form. I have a very long torso and short arms, so I naturally benefit from more hammer "drop" out and away from my chest than even GG, with a relatively weaker leg base and poorer mobility in my lower body. My shoulder angle is ridiculously wide in the most powerful/fastest swings. Intuitively that's what I "feel" and accelerates the club head in the Weck drills too. I can probably get even more out of this in my own move, methinks. You can probably get away with more Klein. Just another semi-crazy Forces hunch. @sidewinder22 can probably whack me upside the head for that hunch if needed.
@DWhitt I guess I'm kind of talking around it but I agree with @sidewinder22. Over two years he has gradually been turning me from a weightlifter into a thrower. I'm not perfect but somehow, it's working.
This may or may not help you, but if I didn't share before, my body intuition about grip, weight shifting, and power changed after 2-3 months with this exercise series. Then I started to figure out how to get it into the disc better. I was having a hell of a harder time before that because I was never really connecting my balance with what my arm was doing for a low-effort, high power move. I needed tons and tons of reps moving my body around and swinging in all directions for it to get the "point" of what my body needed to do to a disc thrown more horizontal(ish). Sometimes I needed to let the club pull me off balance to find new and faster balance. I don't owe David Weck any money (but I guess I owe him thanks). Everything I say below I think I 'understood' better after I started doing it in my own body. Do/see/feel first.
Tip-o-the-whip and avoiding bodybuilder-level "death grip": Normally I'd lead with a hammer but I think you have almost the opposite problem and you're just muscling the crap out of your grip, which means the arm won't have the right level of tension to throw. Watch a Graham Russell standstill. What's going on there in his hand and wrist at the "tip of the whip"? It's got something in common with hammer throws, believe it or not! Ignore his weightshift there.
Just a couple deeper context points you might come back to later:
1. To me, your grip looks like it's going to try and pull directly horizontal out of the backswing toward the target as flat as possible. I don't think I've looked at a single pro yet where the swing plane is truly that flat even when throwing flat(ish) for power [ref1 ref2 ref3]. Bodies just don't actually seem to really move that way in advanced motion. It's not like I just took Sidewinder's word for it - I think he had it mostly nailed down in the first ref there, and I have just been trying to understand how and why it interacts with other parts of form since then. I'm not sure if he agrees with what I'm trying to show/speculating in ref3 there yet.
2. I find grip still hard to completely understand in disc golf (it was way easier to think about in golf), but recently it changed fundamentally when I started trying to understand the grip/thumb action related to what the lower body and ground forces were doing in the move. Your action from the lower body goes "up" in the plant while the grip and arm apply force "down". The net effect is to provide a sudden spike in force out away from the body/center/chest. You generally see this in very vertical and very horizontal players so I am gradually starting to believe this is at least often a fundamental thing for power. I think there are probably a lot of acceptable grips that achieve this effect. Time will tell hopefully.
3. And actually, I think this image I just sketched alone helped me understand even better why my body always seems to respond way faster to more verticality than horizontality in my form. I have a very long torso and short arms, so I naturally benefit from more hammer "drop" out and away from my chest than even GG, with a relatively weaker leg base and poorer mobility in my lower body. My shoulder angle is ridiculously wide in the most powerful/fastest swings. Intuitively that's what I "feel" and accelerates the club head in the Weck drills too. I can probably get even more out of this in my own move, methinks. You can probably get away with more Klein. Just another semi-crazy Forces hunch. @sidewinder22 can probably whack me upside the head for that hunch if needed.
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