Am I going to tell a 60 year old dude that he needs to adduct his rear leg more to counterweight in a lesson? Nope. Im gonna tell him he needs to get his swing plane flat and stop over activating his back muscles to throw. Everyone gets a cue for them specifically. As Brychanus said not much of the minutia is going to come up for most people, unless they happen to be already at pretty solid form and are trying little cues to optimize...
I appreciated you saying this, because it cued something that I'd been meaning to mention for a while but then I forgot about it. Since the average temperature around DGCR is unfortunately hot recently, I'll just remind any readers that my goal is always to encourage rather than shut down discussion. Curious what you or others would say. You also made it interesting to me to talk about e.g. older players & concessions in form when necessary.
In part I'm bothering to write this because I myself usually do all form mechanics work initially on a pretty aggressive hyzer angle, but am gradually learning to tone it down somewhat when I hit the course for various shots, and because there is such a thing as making things too hard for myself not throwing certain shots at a closer to flat angle (I'm personally still a hyzer guy for control and distance drives since my form has responded better to gravity-recruiting more than anything else & it's so much easier to power my shots).
However, I want to call out a potential general issue in instruction and player comprehension.
I think a lot of people have trouble distinguishing postures and swing planes when they watch people move. At the top of this thread, Sidewinder had confronted the "straight and flat swing plane" concept to show that aspects of an advanced move involved curvature, using gravity and parabolic flights, and related phenomena.
Flat release angles and flat swing planes/posture are critically dissociable concepts
I wanted to return to the notion of a "flat" swing plane, and why the flattest-looking swing planes still do not involve "flat posture." I also want to distinguish a "flat release angle" from a "flat swing plane."
If you watch Avery Jenkins showing his motions to throw "flat," they nevertheless involve his posture adjusting back and forth and his arm relative to that posture in a tightly coupled system. He still looks like he has a form of weight shift we tend to discuss around here. You can watch for how his whole body has a bit of tilted axis moving back and forth from backswing to swing:
One difference between him and some other players is that he uses relatively minimal side bend on most shots I've seen, but his posture is still using a bit of side bend and tilt as he moves back and forth to commit the flat(ish) shots. He also shows his elevated reachback (gravity trick) in a couple drill motions. His throwing pattern still involves a flattened wave-like motion, which you will notice is preserved when he throws. Look and see what you see. I chose him on purpose because his move used to confuse me as "flat", but now his motion itself looks anything but despite a relatively flat release angle and deceptively athletic posture.
Paul Mcbeth (his poor shoulder :-( ) is one high level example who uses a lot of legitimately near-flat or flattish (around 0 degrees) angles, and has emphasized throwing a disc "as flat across a tabletop as you can."
His reachback/backswing phase still looks like classic "battering ram" posture to me. This is athletic and not flat posture:
He sometimes throws slightly flatter than this, but is often actually using baby hyzers to throw flat(ish) (as he powers down he uses any number of angles and often throws putters or control drivers etc. very close to exactly flat, but that is not exactly my point here). My main emphasis & observation is that he posturally still recruits his battering ram chain initially to achieve this result:
Here's a recent example of him throwing very close to a true-flat control shot in athletic posture (4:10):
Player implications? At a certain age and body range, people are not able to move like GG or Paul, and Jenkins' move always seemed deceptively athletic to me despite him standing tall like a statue (which others have told me about). They're all using similar posture tricks even in their flat(ish) shots, many of which involve gravity-efficient moves. As I had pointed out on the Repository thread, for high power shots often players are often actually using posturally hyzer angles at the release, including when they are asked to throw "anhyzer" shots. I do not see this commented on frequently anywhere else.
Something for everyone, or only a few?
I tend to look for conserved principles across scenarios and players, but also acknowledge that not everyone will aspire to be on the pro tour.
Can I expect the average 60-year-old to move like that? 50-year-old? 40-year-old? Deskbound 30-year-old? What should stay and what should go in each case? Etc.
What do
you (treb or anyone else) do with this information?
Please discuss.
