Thanks, I’ll give that a try!
Do you have any thoughts on the rounding, in particular, or should that sort itself out with better posture? I think in trying to feel “golf swing” I was swinging my back arm more than my front arm, and it was actually a little painful on my elbow how trapped my front arm was, especially if I tried to put any effort in whatsoever. Tried to close off as much as I could, but it usually resulted in riding my extended back leg too far down and going over the top.
Good Q!
Maybe. Like all good questions it's probably "it depends." I was thinking about this again after SW just gave me feedback so let me try to integrate a couple concepts about posture and mechanics as part of my Monday morning homework.
Like SW or many of the golf instructors, I've become a big fan of any use of natural objects and moves that help square posture up, especially when they involve moving/shifting your weight around etc. I keep learning more about them.
In general, the better posture gets, the less people tend to round or get stress at the shoulder or elbow. There are good reasons for why that can happen. But you (& your body) need to understand/learn what is dynamic about the postures for it to work.
Remember that a lot of improving posture in the context of the X-hop helps improve the space you have to swing out-in-out wide from your body like Paige and McBeth here. Naturally, that also likely means you tend to get less jerk redirection force at the shoulder or the elbow because it's more of a spacious, smooth process.
I personally still needed to put a lot of work into finding a good path for leverage through my arm, but if the posture sucks you can develop all kinds of bad arm habits and we've seen people get stuck chasing symptoms and not causes basically forever. Conversely, if your arm doesn't know the task (hammer/leverage out the disc), it's hard to get posture squared up to the task.
So I wanted to also mention a couple things that are directly related to my own swing development. As I started adding momentum to my own swing again, I now always am willing to slow down and fix posture issues since failing to do so has inevitably led me to worse swings and more pain, if not injury. I definitely want things more squared up when throwing 10lb+ sledgehammers because adding commensurate momentum to my throws risks injury in addition to leaving easy power on the table. In general it has
always been harder for my legs to do what they need to do when my dynamic posture gets askew in one way or another. I have learned more about where and how to condition my body for the demands, but swing-wise, a lot of it just comes down to figuring out how to swing the arm/disc unit "out from your center."
The jug should be "trapped" in your center of gravity. When you clasp the jug, the jug/body unit's center moves out farther from your belly because the ~40lb. jug has plenty of mass. If you shuffle walk around with the jug (like Battering Ram), it starts to help your body connect the ground pressure and leverage to the natural task of slogging a jug around. If you find a "sweet spot" for the jug like SW, you will be able to haul that jug longer more easily, and toss it further more easily if you want to. It's because the mass of your body and jug work harmoniously when you move, and then slinging it with the correct counterbalance means that your body mass does most of the work.
But what about throwing with the **** arm and rounding (collapse at shoulder)? I find that the sledgehammer gives me really important body feedback. It turned out that I could always manipulate a lighter hammer with my arm unconsciously once I started swinging for more power. A short-handled mallet could even be several pounds and with my upper body muscle mass I could find a way to muscle it a bit. But if you do that with a long-handled sledgehammer, I don't care how strong you are - you will probably dislocate something.
Notice that Eveliina, Simon, the Olympic hammer guy, Jarvis (I think) and Sidewinder all effectively have the same swing process stacked on the front leg in tilted axis. There, I'm (bottom left) not destroying my arm because I'm still swinging out relaxed from my CoG, but
like SW critiqued, I'm never really getting the whole process tight "inside" my posture and well-grounded stacked fully on top of my plant leg in the pivoting move, so I'm still swinging "over the top". Doubtless part of that is contributing to the funk in my DG swing when my feet get moving.
Now, go back up to the jug posture image and then look at all those hammering folks. The "imaginary jug" would be seated comfortably inside their posture like SW holding the water jug in the previous post as the disc was coming in toward each person's center. As the arm/disc swings out, the mass of the arm/hammer should be doing almost all of the work with just enough tension/contraction reflex to fire out the disc following the body's mass. Compared to the other 5 people, if you put the imaginary water jug in my posture there, I would start swinging more wildly out of control leaving some easy leverage on the table which we also see in my sledgehammer releases.
So, if you get better "jug bearing" posture, and if I get better control over the same in my sledgehammer swing, the body will naturally want to swing the arm out wider from the out-in-out pattern (or whatever backswing). It's because it should just be following the rest of the body and CoG swinging the arm into the release,
that you or I currently have. To throw the sledge out from my body is always mostly about my body - my arm follows its lead!
I personally like working with the sledgehammer again because it forces me to get loose, and let my body and gravity do more of the work. I can't think about much when I swing a sledge because if I do I'll get hurt, and my body knows it and takes over! I can take the little tips I get from SW, then set up to work on them, and just get swinging. I also have had more spontaneous field "easy distance" breakthroughs throwing like this than almost anything else because it truly helps me access the "freewheeling" thing we talk about around here much more easily. Also important to note that I have finally learned to allow adequate rest and focus on quality over quantity in my fieldwork.
And throwing sledgehammers is exhilarating and just plain ****ing fun.
