Form analysis to reach nuke city

[newsyk]

Hello,

I Posted a year ago a form review, since then I've done a lot of fields works and bunch of revamps and form changes with no luck until I stumbled on this golden thread: drk_evns Backhand Form Thread and thanks to the @sidewinder22 , @HyzerUniBomber, @slowplastic advices and explanations in the thread it got me to a form where I can reach 300ft with putter.
Thank you!


Now what?

Would love your input guys on what to work on next in my form and how to get to the nuke city.

Behind 0.5x speed:
Side 0.5x speed:

So far what I know what I need to improove is:

1) Disc nose angle is up in the sky
2) Dipping elbow
3) Shoulders opening too much before releasing the disc

Unfortunatelly I don't know how to adress these problems =/

 

[Brychanus]

Welcome!

I can tell you've put work in.

Might attack your posture first. You are a bit pretzeled up at the legs and already tipping over through your upper body in your X-step. We call that tipping instead of shifting properly through the hips. Notice that Simon's posture keeps everything closed in with his spine in the opposite direction, more "seated" into his glutes/hammies in transition hinging at the hips. This allows him to stride off more laterally like the Hershyzer drill. His butt (mAss) is leading more aggressively relative to yours. In addition to your spine angle, notice that your head is already tipped way forward of center balance, which contributes to slowing down your X-step transition relative to Simon's because otherwise you'd fall down.




These can help:










Need to move more like turbo encabulator moves in transition off the X-step overall.




Do & post drills for maximum learning benefit. I might start with Hershyzer and Swivel Stairs.

 

[newsyk]

First image is really good, it shows me perfectly what i should try to achieve. I will experiment with that and will let you know in upcoming days! Good stuff!

 

[newsyk]

So this is my attempt to do hersh hyzer drill:



I don't know If I did it correctly, hard to tell.

Hard to imagine doing that in x-step, shouldn't the rear foot in x-step be just a quick step/ hop to just carry the momentum towards brace, maybe I should be leading with the hip when I'm doing already the front foot launch step right before x-step?

 

[Brychanus]

I think your rear leg is possibly too straight/closed to locked out in the Hershyzer setup. Try hinging back into it a little bit more - should feel the load a bit more in your glutes and hamstring. Watch his posture and setup closely from the butt view:


That should help you move such that when you land, it feels much more like your body is leading you into the wall. Notice how he lands with that leading hip/butt into the wall, and his front hip is still closed whereas yours looks more open to me. He is also stacked much more stable with his ankle, knee, and hip aligned.



It will get easier to see how it works in the x-step when the posture and balance improve. It probably won't solve it instantly. I can get off my rear leg more or less quickly now proportional to the momentum/shot power, but I will caution you that it has taken significant ongoing work to undo my bad habits. IMHO drive leg move/balance/transition is one of the hardest things to optimize in form.

Also, just relax and learn to do the move. How they relate to the throw will be more obvious later. Eventually you'll realize that seabas moves literally are just the throw isolating one part at a time. Hershyzer is the way to get off the rear leg into the plant. Most people don't do it right, and they have the same problem in their form. Take it from an analytic guy who is over 1000 posts into his form development here. Form is mostly solved by moving your body, not in your head ;-). Hundreds of reps over 2-3 weeks after you get it the first time, usually.

 

[newsyk]

So,

iI did some hershhyzer drills and decided to take a look how it could look like in a throw and did some field work. I think the Idea of bending more rear leg helped me. Now that I compare to the @Brychanus first image, it seems a bit better. It seems that i'm not tipping that much now. Unfortunatelly it seems that now I am crazy open to the throwing line...

Side 0.5x:
Behind 0.5x:

 

[Brychanus]

A little better. Show the new drill. You are not getting the full force of the body swing/gravity off the rear leg and your front leg is reaching/acting like a break more than like an abrupt crush and lever. Leading leg should swing in more as a reflex to catch you quick from falling, not reach out ahead of you tentatively. That's why his plant leg is blurring here:

 

[newsyk]

My attempt on hershyzer. Trying to take into account, rear leg more bent and leading with butt more closed.

Hershyzer drill:

 

[newsyk]

Todays field practice felt terrible. I'm not understanding how can I achieve this braced position where rear knee is turned in and I'm braced at the same time. It is the position HUB has mentioned in different threads and his analogy with skier going backwards and going into hockey stop with lead leg.

When I try to do it I feel stuck and there is now way I can throw from that position.

So this is my normal throw.

First pic. I'm finished striding.


Aferwards try to rotate and brace and it seems that my brace is giving in, I keep mooving towards the brace and the rear leg stays behind, it does not want to come in with rear knee turned.

This me trying to figure it out:

 

[Brychanus]

Todays field practice felt terrible. I'm not understanding how can I achieve this braced position where rear knee is turned in and I'm braced at the same time. It is the position HUB has mentioned in different threads and his analogy with skier going backwards and going into hockey stop with lead leg.

When I try to do it I feel stuck and there is now way I can throw from that position.

So this is my normal throw.

First pic. I'm finished striding. View attachment 313678


Aferwards try to rotate and brace and it seems that my brace is giving in, I keep mooving towards the brace and the rear leg stays behind, it does not want to come in with rear knee turned. View attachment 313679

This me trying to figure it out:

Been there, done that. I think you may need a conceptual intervention. I want to give you something you can refer back to in the coming weeks & months if you stay commited to form work. I'm writing more now so I can write less later. Splitting into a couple parts.

Then I'll help you fix your Hershyzer drill.


Stop trying to throw "flat"
It looks like you're trying to throw pretty flat. You're not going to get very far doing that. Stop reading that advice on the internet and tune out your friends. Even when top pros are mashing on distance lines, their body is making dramatically more use of gravity than you are. This is why almost every amateur has crappy line control and tops out somewhere well short of where they could theoretically end up if they learned better mechanics. Or they end up hurting themselves throwing hard against rather than with gravity.

Human locomotion involves everything you need for a good golf swing. A good golf swing has every main fundamental you need to throw pretty far move, load/coil, and unload your body like a golfer:


Learn to walk and stop focusing so much on "bracing" out of context
You need to keep in mind that the reason players throwing 70+ miles per hour aren't destroying their plant knees is because they have learned to move sideways the same way you have learned to move forward from birth. What you really need to learn his how to walk/run/gallop sideways, and let the legs act the way they normally would. There's really no magic here. I promise. But unless you have been moving sideways since birth or started at 2 years old like Simon. you're going to need to retrain your body to move. It's as simple and as hard as that. Babies learn to walk by letting themselves get off balance, and their legs learn to keep them from falling. Adults fail to learn to X-step because they are constantly trying not to "let go".

Do your knees jam up or your rear leg drag behind you like a zombie's shuffle when you walk forward? Why not?

MOVE into the brace like walking or running. Don't "brace." I'm not going to name names right now, but I see more and more players learning crappy leg mechanics from people out there. And they are starting to get hurt. I did too. Please, for the love of your knees and hips, stop for a moment to think about what I am saying.

 

[Brychanus]

How do the pros throw so far?
I have a feeling you watch a lot of pros throw. You need to understand how the shift off the rear leg works to retrain your body, and why the Hershyzer drill and Swivel Stairs are two of the best drills ever made to work on your move off the rear side.

I didn't see you do Swivel stairs. It's literally the same motion pattern as the X-step when you do it correctly. You are on the internet reading me type and looking at stillframes. But we want you to learn to move. That means you're going to need to get comfortable with uncomfortable changes in balance. I promise. I didn't write/show 108 pages on this with my coach for no reason.

Simon is not a great model to copy frame for frame because he started as a baby and moves like a ninja and does a few things few people can. But you need to learn the big parts of the move from him and what the Hershyzer drill has to do with it. This will help you find your own move.

You are using analysis software - great. But padawan, you don't see balance yet. In Post 7 I showed you how the move off the drive leg works. That's literally how it works. One of your problems is that everything is flat, flat flat. Flat hips, flat shoulders. Spine too perpendicular to the ground and to your own legs. The reason that Simon gets his leading shoulder loaded waaaaay back farther behind his rear hip and that his elbow is swinging up whereas yours is losing leverage pointing down are the same reason - you are not getting any leverage off/"inside" your rear foot, so all your front foot can do is reach out impotently to brake your momentum. That is exactly the opposite of what you want. Simon is walking/running/striding through the X-step. You are zombie shuffling. Simon is swinging his arm through like a battering ram with his shoulder loaded aggressively, so his elbow appears to swing more "up" toward the sky. It's because he is moving in harmony with gravity. His balance in the rear leg is more like I show with the yellow line, and it shifts dramatically to the front leg in the plant. Yours is trapped between your feet. Let's ignore all that for now and fix your drill. You need to learn to MOVE.

 

[Brychanus]

Fix your Hershyzer- it is part of why Simon's move is so much better than yours
You are still not setting up like Sidewinder in the middle. You are all "pretzeled" in the legs like I used to be.

1.You've got the shoulders looking better in the setup (Sidewinders are the same but notice he is deeper back than you into the posture.

2. Look at where your knees are - pretzeled up, and not crossed like an X-step. I think you are trying to copy something like the frame of Simon on the right without understanding how it or the drill work. If we rotated the camera on Simon slightly, you would actually see that his posture is leveraged just like Sidewinder's here, but simon is light and limber and doing an X-step, so his balance is more titled.

3. Sidewinder and Simon are both finding extreme leverage off their rear foot instep with their body mass ahead of their foot (again, you need to look at more angles of Simon to see this easily***). You have no leverage because your rear knee is actually leaking behind your leading ankle, and your plant leg knee is pointing more forward because it's trying to compensate for the fact that you are not fully balanced feeling "seated" comfortably on that leg. You are going to feel it more in your glutes and hamstrings exactly like you feel if you go to sit down on a chair on one leg (literally go try that).

4. Your rear shin should actually be more vertical to the ground to start because you're doing it out of a balanced upright position, not through the X-step. Again, you should feel a ton of leverage coming off of that rear foot. Importantly from there, you should feel like you are falling/dropping much faster into the wall doing very little work with that rear leg. DO NOT RESIST - EMBRACE THE FALL. Let the wall catch your fall until you are getting it, then take the wall away. This is exactly how pitching and baseball batting work, and it is how Simon's (or McBeths, and so on) X-step works. You're just learning to do it in that weird sideways-ish direction. I promise - it's the same as walking, just with a lot more momentum/force.

 

[Brychanus]

You can't build Rome in a day (or a week, or a month), so enjoy the process
I'm talking to a (super tall, super coordinated, super fit, super flexible, super coordinated, super competitive) guy throwing somewhat over 500' who still has this problem. But he knows it's a problem because he has serious consistency issues. He keeps floundering trying to fix it. He's also impatient with drills or trying to commit to one change for more than an hour or a day at a time. He has been stuck for more than a year. It's all related.

Phew! I continue to require many interventions along the way too. Much love.



***BONUS from Sidewinder and I's Fundamentals guide ~p. 79:
"One of the challenging aspects of learning the X-step is maintaining the proper leverage of the hips forward because bodies naturally resist falling with more momentum and posture is essential to the fastest action off the rear leg. For instance, observe the relationship between Simon Lizotte's form and a stride drill setup:

In the left image, Simon's front leg (right leg/the one that will plant) is deweighted as his CoG flows forward ahead of it into the X-step. At this angle, the green triangle makes it obvious that as his rear leg (x-step) is about to inherit weight, the rear hip is ready to inherit leverage from the ground. The rear ankle is "outside" the rear knee relative to the direction he is moving and his momentum along the ground. The triangle shows that the rear knee is leveraged just outside the rear hip, so as soon as that leg inherits his weight, it can start to laterally transition his butt-led stride directly into the plant in a (controlled) free-fall, further building up torque into the rear hip in the backswing as the CoG is moving forward. The camera parallax problem is e.g., when you look at the Overthrow Disc Golf montage of Simon throwing at different distances, Simon is moving at ~20 degrees along the teepad to throw "flat and straight" (which is really 20 degrees to line of play and 20 degrees hyzer like most other high-level throwers). This makes it a little harder to eyeball where the leverage comes from relative to the hips and position of the CoG unless you already know what to look for. See the dashed white arrow for the relative trajectory Simon is moving along the ground and how his x-step scales with the distance he's throwing while the relative position of the triangle remains the same. Gregos shows the same idea in the stride drill in the image on the right."

 

[newsyk]

That is a lot of information, thank you. I've gone through all of it and I think I will start adressing the hershyzer first and see what happens from there.


I tried to adjust the drill based on the notes. To be honest I dont think I quite understand what do you mean by being pretzled in the legs.

Hershyzer drill:


For the stair drill I'm having problems finding stairs... I will try to figure out something.

 

[Brychanus]

Pretzeled - before your balance was trapped between your feet (like your current throws) and your knees are at odds (your front knee was forward, your rear knee was back in setup position). Impossible to shift correctly if you start that way.

Your new drill - you almost fell off balance there - that is a good thing, it means it's making your body adjust. Posture looks a little better there.

1. See if you can get in a posture more similar to Sidewinder. You may need sit slightly deeper into it hinging into your rear hip, which should bring your posture a little more coiled back and butt a little more leading toward the wall. Most people (even if young and otherwise fit) have trouble with this at first. The pros have excellent flexibility, dynamic strength, and range of motion in this direction.

2. As you start to shift forward from the setup, let your upper body coil back more toward your rear leg like Sidewinder does. That "counterrotation" is part of how Simon gets loaded back.

3. Landing looks better there.

I guarantee it's going to take a couple weeks - do it daily a few minutes at a time - before it feels easy since it's retraining your fundamental balance. Adult brains resist that. Hundreds of reps over time. Source: hundreds of form critiques, academic studies on motor learning, and putting my dumpy ass through it myself.

 

[newsyk]

So,

I've been doing some drills and I wanted to know how do you think they look?

Finally found some stairs, this is my first attempt on swivel stairs drill:


This is my hershyzer drill:


I've been trying to do without wall hershyzer into brace, but nothing good comes out of this.

What do you think could be next drill, step to add to all this?

 

[newsyk]

Additionally I was wondering how being ER dominant affects these drills?

 

[sidewinder22]

ER just means your rear foot should be turned further back.

Looks like you have very long legs and small feet, so I think you might need to move another 6-12" or so further away from wall in Hershyzer. Also try landing the front foot lightly just before the butt hits, hit wall with butt and then move your butt back and forth from the wall just a couple inches and feel your rear foot driving the butt into the wall - shake the house.

Swivel Stairs looks like you need taller steps. Your rear foot is moving around a lot during your throw instead of just pivoting in place.

 

[newsyk]

I'm back!!! Still trying to learn to throw far backhand.

So I've been doing a lot of fieldworks last season and drills and still I could tell that something is not clicking, the timing is all wrong and the throw is terrible.
I decided I'm gonna mess with some hammers early in this season to try to figure out where I feel the most powerfull.

I did some hammers throws 500g(1 lb 2 oz). I wanted to hear your opinion on them @sidewinder22. I know I kind of roofed them since it is heavier object and Im kinda swinging high to low to high.

Hammer throw:






I tried to apply same feeling I felt with hammer to my dogs frisbee, so here are the disc throws:



I'm really hoping on hearing some good news to keep me going

Thank you a lot !

 

[sidewinder22]

Need to move your chest/head stacked up over your front leg. This will probably "feel" very over the top to you at first. Your head is falling down and backward behind your front leg. A bigger heavier sledgehammer should help you gain this feel. It should also help to swing/release a little more horizontal(more perpendicular to spine) instead of totally vertical.