Big Questions after "Fundamentals of"

[jupiterboy]

Yeah, people don't get science. In textbook publishing, you need 20% or so new content to do a new edition. I think most of this could be covered in a handful of videos. Done. It's just that there is so much variation and constant revision. Information age blues, I suppose.

In the end, who is the magician that makes the grass green?

 

[Sheep]

Yeah, people don't get science. In textbook publishing, you need 20% or so new content to do a new edition. I think most of this could be covered in a handful of videos. Done. It's just that there is so much variation and constant revision. Information age blues, I suppose.

In the end, who is the magician that makes the grass green?

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!

hahahah
Thats not how it works bru. hahahah
I love it when people say that stuff.

 

[timothy42b]

Because nobody cares about that. They want the quick pill, the instant fix, the hype. The "double move." or whatever garbage someone comes up with.

The quote feature confused me, hope I did it correctly.

Not disagreeing completely, there's a lot of that, but I see another side to it.
If you've struggled for a long time and it just isn't improving the way you'd hoped, you become vulnerable to believing in magic. It's called hope.
Without hope, you give up, so it's a good thing. But desperation leads to falling for the hype. And some of their hype has pretty good production values.

 

[timothy42b]

I'm going to take high speed of this sometime soon.
I just gotta figure out how to get the high speed setup, because lens length etc. Cause.. that's my hold up at the moment.

I don't have the money to buy some shortie lens for the kronos.

Maybe it's out there somewhere. I want to know direction and magnitude of velocity of the CG of the disc, relative to ground and relative to hand, in the last little bit before release.
It won't help me throw any better. Probably anyway. But it might let me say "told you so."

In engineering school (class of 1990 so it's been a while) the statics classes were trivial. Forces on every member and pin joint in a bridge? Just crank through, plug and chug. But four bar linkages were a different story. It usually took a full page of paper to write governing equations for position, then had to differentiate twice for velocity and acceleration, and only then did you know forces. There were graphical methods but we only got a glimpse of how to do that.

 

[Sheep]

Maybe it's out there somewhere. I want to know direction and magnitude of velocity of the CG of the disc, relative to ground and relative to hand, in the last little bit before release.
It won't help me throw any better. Probably anyway. But it might let me say "told you so."

In engineering school (class of 1990 so it's been a while) the statics classes were trivial. Forces on every member and pin joint in a bridge? Just crank through, plug and chug. But four bar linkages were a different story. It usually took a full page of paper to write governing equations for position, then had to differentiate twice for velocity and acceleration, and only then did you know forces. There were graphical methods but we only got a glimpse of how to do that.

I want to focus on leverage, rotation and angle with the high speed stuff.
Get some real data, not feel data.

I wanna see what the actual leverage on the disc is forehand/backhand. and how grip interacts with output angle. because I think the standard is a bit off.

 

[crd 81]

One emphasis that may have changed over time is working the kinetic chain as the basis vs working the hit. It seems to me that the old DGR pioneers really focused on arm and release, and expected the body to figure out how to add weight and momentum, and DGCR is now the reverse mostly. Could be my perception, and of course feel isn't real.

This is one of the reasons I wish Blake T were still around. I would like to hear what he thinks about the current state of disc golf teaching, good and bad. With that in mind, I do recall reading a post from him stating that he thinks there is a smaller percentage of power that comes from the legs. That's not to toss out the idea of bracing (or other mechanics) but it makes me wonder how much we may focus on the non-essentials or incidentals of the throw and what he would have to say about it.

 

[Brychanus]

Just to add the pile & if it stirs up questions or controversy:

Legs and power
I would say that legs matter insofar as they need to be limber and strong enough to be able to move you in balance, and I now suspect that you get diminishing returns from leg strength once you get past a threshold sufficient to manage the ground forces. This is still a nice science-informed discussion of these issues (I've looked into it since then). I think it's important to keep in mind that "strength" is not really just one thing in sports, which I didn't really understand until I read more.

I Stopped Strength Training and Went From 96 to 99 MPH at 31 years old

Tread Athletics Performance Coach Paul Schwendel shares his experience and training strategy from 2020, where he made his way back into pro-ball at 31 years old and gained nearly 4 mph to his average fastball.

treadathletics.com

On casual inspection, it looks to me like the physically heavier crushers on tour have clearly more hypertrophically developed legs and hips, maybe just proportional enough to their body mass. A lot of the lighter guys seem to have leg and hip mass pretty proportional to their overall size. Eagle has a pretty horizontal/very ground-leveraging form and it always looked like he actually has pretty well-developed legs and hips for his otherwise super slim body. Gannon's form looks maybe a little more "centrifugal" to me than Eagle's and I wonder how he'll look as he matures - I know he was putting time in the gym too. Wiggins and Brodie look like they have well developed legs, etc. Looks can be deceiving and hypertrophy is not always strongly correlated with slow or fast twitch or dynamic strength, etc.


Legs in the context of the tilted axis at the core of the swing theory***
Part of the swing theory in Fundamentals involves a complex movement on a tilted dynamic axis - that's the fundamental idea, really. Even just today I'm realizing how much centrifugal effects on the tilted axis can drive the "easy power" component of a swing (or be a rate-limiter if you don't have it). In terms of achieving maximum swing power output in the context of anything else, very interesting questions there. Legs need to be strong and coordinated and flexible enough to move you in balance (which not all of us have), but I wouldn't be surprised if the carry through of momentum + centrifugal force on the tilted axis is a large % of the power.

Admittedly I didn't really understand how this felt or how to do it at all in a DG swing myself until SW helped me with sledgehammer throws. The idea is that the low effort power swing uses the baseball-like axis, but further closed off for a backhand. Need the legs to be strong enough to handle whatever ground forces you're cueing up.

This pretty well sums up the dynamic I'm talking about:



Examples like Jarvis brothers + young McBeth are good "minimalistic" form examples of the swing theory in Fundamentals.

Proposed Answer
So what, "good enough" baseball-like legs relative to your body mass are the minimum you need to swing for "easy" force?

That's a lot of words to say "legs in the right shape and braced to leverage a disc out like Ken Griffey swings a bat."


***I think Coach Taylor for instance agrees about a version of a tilted axis, but disagrees about some areas of implementation/relative sources of power. Still getting caught up there when I get time.

 

[Sheep]

This is one of the reasons I wish Blake T were still around. I would like to hear what he thinks about the current state of disc golf teaching, good and bad. With that in mind, I do recall reading a post from him stating that he thinks there is a smaller percentage of power that comes from the legs. That's not to toss out the idea of bracing (or other mechanics) but it makes me wonder how much we may focus on the non-essentials or incidentals of the throw and what he would have to say about it.

I'm not quite sure I follow what your saying or referencing.

"smaller percentage of power coming from the legs."
Blake either smoked crack or just never actually braced or understood it.

To make any sort of real power, using the term power loosely, you need to have a firm foundation. If we look at the swing very mechanically, the better your foundation, the more power you can drive into the swing.
So to say "small" percentage only comes from the legs is hilarious, because technically if you create a strong foundation/brace, ALL the power comes from the legs.

When we don't have a foundation to resist against, we are throwing out weight around like a rag doll. Do we still transfer energy and create power? yes, but by pure resistance in our body. Which is actually a good way to get hurt. Which.. Is how most people DO get hurt. Muscling discs, because they are throwing with their arm and using their body as the resistive foundation, vs the ground.

This is why bracing is such a powerful term, as well as "plant."
Because we need to PLANT ourselves into the ground to brace against the energy generation, and that 100% comes from the legs.

This is also why the back leg disc golf hubbbubbb is a bit wonkey.
I've finally understood what he's doing and teaching, and while you can throw like this, you're not creating a solid foundation when throwing. So, if we want to look at a throw like that, then the answer of "small percentage of power coming from legs" is true, as you're basically just generating a little inertia but not using it much.

You gotta ANCHOR to the ground to create power.

Think of pushing an object or pulling it.
Are your feet hooking up and anchoring, or are they slipping?

 

[Sheep]

Legs need to be strong and coordinated and flexible enough to move you in balance (which not all of us have), but I wouldn't be surprised if the carry through of momentum + centrifugal force on the tilted axis is a large % of the power.

Admittedly I didn't really understand how this felt or how to do it at all in a DG swing myself until SW helped me with sledgehammer throws. The idea is that the low effort power swing uses the baseball-like axis, but further closed off for a backhand. Need the legs to be strong enough to handle whatever ground forces you're cueing up.

I think this is basically the tone vs muscle argument in a nutshell here.

Cardio vs strength training.
You can have insane muscle density without ever appearing to have muscle mass.

When it comes to the use of our legs in disc golf and sports in general, our legs must be strong enough to resist the forces we put on them, and in some instances, such as jumping, be able to work as fast twitch muscles and strength muscles to create massive opposing momentum.

luckily in disc golf we don't have to really do that as much. We need our legs to be limber, but tone. Strong, but flexible. Being muscle bound will only help you so much in disc golf. And we can tell this because... eagle would get beat by a toddler arm wrestling. But brodie is in insane shape compared to almost every other disc golfer.

It's a balance and harmony of what our body must resist and create.

So, essentially, "the legs to be strong enough to handle whatever ground forces you're cueing up" is exactly the right quote.
And one of the most amazing things when it comes to disc golf is that being such a core exercise, you dont actually have to strength train to do it. You're naturally going to build the tone through practice and play.

Though, I'd personally argue in anything like this. If the muscle use is to define as a number per say, lets say legs need to be a 5 for your swing, and you wanna do better, working out to put them at a 7 and over achieve, will benifit your game due to fatigue. Because the one downside with exercising the need is your body will only produce what you need, so if you push past it and try and build a bit more than needed, you'll have better engagement.

I ... I have no idea why i'm typing all of this.

 

[timothy42b]

This is one of the reasons I wish Blake T were still around. I would like to hear what he thinks about the current state of disc golf teaching, good and bad. With that in mind, I do recall reading a post from him stating that he thinks there is a smaller percentage of power that comes from the legs. That's not to toss out the idea of bracing (or other mechanics) but it makes me wonder how much we may focus on the non-essentials or incidentals of the throw and what he would have to say about it.

It seems to me that the defining drills of that era were the Beto and the Hammer Pound, while the defining drills currently would be One Leg Drill and Hammer Swing?

I've done a very large number of both approaches, haven't really got there yet with either, but I have hope. <smiley>

 

[Sheep]

It seems to me that the defining drills of that era were the Beto and the Hammer Pound, while the defining drills currently would be One Leg Drill and Hammer Swing?

I've done a very large number of both approaches, haven't really got there yet with either, but I have hope. <smiley>

I would not put Beto out yet.

 

[CoachT]

Just to add the pile & if it stirs up questions or controversy:

Legs and power
I would say that legs matter insofar as they need to be limber and strong enough to be able to move you in balance, and I now suspect that you get diminishing returns from leg strength once you get past a threshold sufficient to manage the ground forces. This is still a nice science-informed discussion of these issues (I've looked into it since then). I think it's important to keep in mind that "strength" is not really just one thing in sports, which I didn't really understand until I read more.

I Stopped Strength Training and Went From 96 to 99 MPH at 31 years old

Tread Athletics Performance Coach Paul Schwendel shares his experience and training strategy from 2020, where he made his way back into pro-ball at 31 years old and gained nearly 4 mph to his average fastball.

treadathletics.com

On casual inspection, it looks to me like the physically heavier crushers on tour have clearly more hypertrophically developed legs and hips, maybe just proportional enough to their body mass. A lot of the lighter guys seem to have leg and hip mass pretty proportional to their overall size. Eagle has a pretty horizontal/very ground-leveraging form and it always looked like he actually has pretty well-developed legs and hips for his otherwise super slim body. Gannon's form looks maybe a little more "centrifugal" to me than Eagle's and I wonder how he'll look as he matures - I know he was putting time in the gym too. Wiggins and Brodie look like they have well developed legs, etc. Looks can be deceiving and hypertrophy is not always strongly correlated with slow or fast twitch or dynamic strength, etc.


Legs in the context of the tilted axis at the core of the swing theory***
Part of the swing theory in Fundamentals involves a complex movement on a tilted dynamic axis - that's the fundamental idea, really. Even just today I'm realizing how much centrifugal effects on the tilted axis can drive the "easy power" component of a swing (or be a rate-limiter if you don't have it). In terms of achieving maximum swing power output in the context of anything else, very interesting questions there. Legs need to be strong and coordinated and flexible enough to move you in balance (which not all of us have), but I wouldn't be surprised if the carry through of momentum + centrifugal force on the tilted axis is a large % of the power.

Admittedly I didn't really understand how this felt or how to do it at all in a DG swing myself until SW helped me with sledgehammer throws. The idea is that the low effort power swing uses the baseball-like axis, but further closed off for a backhand. Need the legs to be strong enough to handle whatever ground forces you're cueing up.

This pretty well sums up the dynamic I'm talking about:



Examples like Jarvis brothers + young McBeth are good "minimalistic" form examples of the swing theory in Fundamentals.

Proposed Answer
So what, "good enough" baseball-like legs relative to your body mass are the minimum you need to swing for "easy" force?

That's a lot of words to say "legs in the right shape and braced to leverage a disc out like Ken Griffey swings a bat."


***I think Coach Taylor for instance agrees about a version of a tilted axis, but disagrees about some areas of implementation/relative sources of power. Still getting caught up there when I get time.

***call me anytime to discuss.

 

[CoachT]

I want to focus on leverage, rotation and angle with the high speed stuff.
Get some real data, not feel data.

I wanna see what the actual leverage on the disc is forehand/backhand. and how grip interacts with output angle. because I think the standard is a bit off.

It's slightly beyond the scope of this forum to elaborate on the force vectors and moments of inertia nearing release but I will try (slightly busy) to make a video that will provide some answers but it will likely garner more questions. But to "wet your beak" I measured DW's hand at 65mph an instant before release and the disc exiting at 85mph. So yes, the knowledge component of release is a bit off.

 

[Brychanus]

Though, I'd personally argue in anything like this. If the muscle use is to define as a number per say, lets say legs need to be a 5 for your swing, and you wanna do better, working out to put them at a 7 and over achieve, will benifit your game due to fatigue. Because the one downside with exercising the need is your body will only produce what you need, so if you push past it and try and build a bit more than needed, you'll have better engagement.

I ... I have no idea why i'm typing all of this.

General & specialized fitness is always good. Throws condition the body for more throwing over the time, and I think it is reciprocal with getting better mechanics over time.

I agree that Beto drill shouldn't be out to pasture, just would add/remind readers that it's important to have a good enough shift+leverage off the front leg to get its full effect. Some people misunderstand the lower body action & end up strong arming, or let the arm chicken-wing.

It seems to me that the defining drills of that era were the Beto and the Hammer Pound, while the defining drills currently would be One Leg Drill and Hammer Swing?

I've done a very large number of both approaches, haven't really got there yet with either, but I have hope. <smiley>

If my memory of Blake T teachings from DGR is correct, I think there are a few conceptual additions to the swing + drill landscape that Sidewinder made and applied from swing theory in other sports (or at least he more greatly emphasized them).

With all the time I've spent with his content, I would propose that you could isolate what his swing theory has in common with other sports moves and "chunk" it into a hierarchy. You can either start from the "big picture" end (which I will do here), or from the "details end" (what processes come to together cause the whole move).

I think many of these drills are fundamentally unified by maybe 4 themes (with individual drills often integrating more than one) & can roughly be reduced into:

(1) Dynamic Posture is the "container" for all ideal mechanics.
-Power of Posture

(2) Moving and swinging the entire body on a tilted axis like natural locomotion and other sports that minimizes effort relative to gravity. In the "drillscape," this is (probably) most easily trained working in the hyzer plane (and can be posturally adjusted to other planes). IMHO this is also one of the greatest "big picture" areas of struggle for players either in concept or in even if they make progress on the other areas.
-Figure 8 standstill
-Turbo Encabulator move series (& moves like skaters, sideways running 100 yards, etc)
-Tilted spiral move series/One arm Olympic hammer thrower
-Two-then-one-armed Hammer/sledge swings and throws
-Double Dragon/Can Can


(2) Using shifts in body mass leveraged off the rear foot along (1) as a major power engine of that throw in postures that naturally cause low-effort power.
-Buttwipe
-Door frame drills
-Loading the bow
-Hershyzer drills

(3) Coiling back balanced on the rear leg in the context of (2)
-Inside swing
-Open-to-closed drill

(4) Finding optimal leverage for your own body in particular to transmit the effects of shifts/ground forces in the context of (1, 2, 3).
-This is where the "detail work" and/or body's natural selection occurs (from student and/or coach over time).

Based on form reviews here and elsewhere, I think very many players never really get comfortable with or ever really integrate their swing along (1) above. Some of them still appear to get pretty high performance ceilings, but under swing theory one would hypothesize that it is not optimal in terms of their throwing output or for their body in the long run.

 

[Brychanus]

It's slightly beyond the scope of this forum to elaborate on the force vectors and moments of inertia nearing release but I will try (slightly busy) to make a video that will provide some answers but it will likely garner more questions. But to "wet your beak" I measured DW's hand at 65mph an instant before release and the disc exiting at 85mph. So yes, the knowledge component of release is a bit off.

If I follow, part of that doesn't surprise me as the disc leverages out of the hand as the last component of the chain of leverage (in the context of force vectors and moments of inertia). The size of that effect in DG backhand is likely multivariate like it is in golf (contributing to the late, clean spike in "smash factor" in that context), and much higher in pros than most amateur/advanced players. There are definitely interesting topics to talk about there.

 

[discerdoo]

I ... I have no idea why i'm typing all of this.

I call it Brychanusing. You got it bad, bruh.

 

[timothy42b]

It's slightly beyond the scope of this forum to elaborate on the force vectors and moments of inertia nearing release but I will try (slightly busy) to make a video that will provide some answers but it will likely garner more questions. But to "wet your beak" I measured DW's hand at 65mph an instant before release and the disc exiting at 85mph. So yes, the knowledge component of release is a bit off.

Just noting that the CG of the disc is about 4 inches farther than the hand and the far edge of the disc about 8 inches farther along some radius.

 

[Sheep]

It's slightly beyond the scope of this forum to elaborate on the force vectors and moments of inertia nearing release but I will try (slightly busy) to make a video that will provide some answers but it will likely garner more questions. But to "wet your beak" I measured DW's hand at 65mph an instant before release and the disc exiting at 85mph. So yes, the knowledge component of release is a bit off.

The problem with it is exactly the same issue as been this whole time we've all talked about it for years. We have a lot of "theory" and not much data to extrapolate from. We know the math to make the data, but there isn't any actual data to use the math on. So its all theory. I could make a video talking about it for a good 30 minutes explaining theory, kinetic chains, leverage. I can build examples to explain it and show many different devices that all use these methodologies to create speed.

These are all discussions that have been had in here multiple times.
But then again, this I rarely bother to even explain what I want or going to do, because someone else either just takes it and makes a video and gives 0 credit, or people pass it off really poorly not understanding or just assuming some other weird thing. Ugh.

If I follow, part of that doesn't surprise me as the disc leverages out of the hand as the last component of the chain of leverage (in the context of force vectors and moments of inertia). The size of that effect in DG backhand is likely multivariate like it is in golf (contributing to the late, clean spike in "smash factor" in that context), and much higher in pros than most amateur/advanced players. There are definitely interesting topics to talk about there.

This is a thing I try and use as a huge example from the disc golf swing and how your leveraging the club to basically snap the club through the swing. We dont wanna hold the club straight out and swoop it around. just like we dont wanna hold our arm out and swoop it around. its really inefficient. Were accelerating the club into a hit position for the club to snap through the ball, just as were doing in disc golf to the disc. The leverage point is far less.
But as well, we dont actually know how much were leveraging the disc, which is what Im more curious about.
Are we leveraging 30% on a backhand? 50% 80%?
How much on a forehand?

Things like this can help us understand spin implied based on the leverage.
Because we know that forehands fly different from backhands, which.. the only way I have ever been able to theorize that is how much we leverage the disc.

 

[Sheep]

I call it Brychanusing. You got it bad, bruh.

He's an academic writer, I'm a process writer.

I have engineer brain too. So it can get really bad.

Plus its the internet, people are outright looking to misinterpret what you say. Which I even do that on occasions thinking people are being rude, when they are just not using words very well. And I have a tendency to go out of my way to make sure things are explained because people no comprende very well.

The unfortunate part is that some people just wont read what you write, so your information gets overlooked.
And the fortunate part is, you can tell who has 0 comprehension or reading skills as they try and argue with you about things you've already clearly explained, which shows they didn't read what you wrote, but want to tell you how it is because they were triggered and with culture, people just knee jerk on everything (including myself sometimes) and forget to try and comprehend and calm down to discuss. Vs just screaming like "insert some trope here"

 

[sidewinder22]

It's slightly beyond the scope of this forum to elaborate on the force vectors and moments of inertia nearing release but I will try (slightly busy) to make a video that will provide some answers but it will likely garner more questions. But to "wet your beak" I measured DW's hand at 65mph an instant before release and the disc exiting at 85mph. So yes, the knowledge component of release is a bit off.

1.31 Smash Factor is higher than I thought, especially at top end speed. I would assume lower speeds might yield higher smash factors? Ball golf is a little different with smash factor as it can remain same at all speeds hitting the ball, while in disc golf we have to hold on to the disc while it pivots out. Wiggins does have a bit of a unique claw grip though.