BenjiHeywood
Par Member
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2023
- Messages
- 188
I saw this this morning, and found it very interesting -
I think the concepts here have lots of relevance to the disc golf throw - the idea that muscles can't directly apply enough force to a light object like a disc, but they can be used (with tendons etc, and the momentum of our bodyweight) to build and store power and then unleash it suddenly.
It also made me think of an article i wrote for ultiworld a while ago but which Charlie has not gotten around to publishing, and i thought folks here might a) find it interesting and b) suggest changes where they disagree. Have a read if interested and let me know what you think. It's obviously aimed at a more general reader rather than the knowledgeable crowd that hangs around here, so the writing style may not suit you!
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There are a million different ways to putt well, and no two people have quite the same putting stroke. But whatever your putt looks like, there's a little bit of physics you might need to utilize if you're going to make putts from deep.1 If you're one of the many players who struggle to even reach the basket with your normal putting stroke from circle 2 and beyond, you probably need to slow down the early part of your putting stroke.
That might sound a bit odd, so let me explain. In a previous article, we discussed how the body could act like a whip. But the body can also act like a spring or an elastic band, and that can be crucial in generating easy power.
If you push against a resistance, and that resistance suddenly disappears, you'll generally move much faster and/or more powerfully than you could otherwise have done. That's how you click your fingers, for one thing. Or try putting your hand flat on the desk, and then raising just one finger and hitting the desk with it; now try plucking that same finger, using the other hand, and see how much harder it smacks down.
If we want some easy extra speed and spin on our putts, we can do the same thing. We can build up a bit of extra push or pull, against a resistance of some kind, and then we'll get that extra bit of snap when the resistance disappears.
So if we want more 'pop' on our putts, one way would be to hold the back of the disc with the off-hand while we build up some power, and then let go and allow it to spring out. You can actually do this, I suppose, to try and feel the effect, but I wouldn't recommend it as a putting stroke! I don't think it would be very consistent.
We need to find some other form of resistance to push against. But what else is there? There is inertia.
The concept of inertia is often used metaphorically, describing for example the lumbering slowness of large government departments, and so some people think of it as resistance to movement or to speed. But inertia is actually resistance to acceleration – resistance to a change in speed.
Every object that has mass feels inertia, and that clearly includes our putter. If we accelerate the disc (which we're very obviously going to have to do when we want to throw it), then the inertia will resist that acceleration and give us something to push and pull against. But only while it's accelerating.
In terms of inertia, it genuinely doesn't matter how fast our arm is moving at the release point. It only matters how much our arm is accelerating to the release point.2
Look at these three speed/time graphs, showing how the speed of the arm changes between the start of the putting motion on the left to the moment of release on the right. All three throwers will release the disc with the same arm speed, but they will have very different amounts of 'pop' and therefore the disc will actually come out at very different speeds.3
In the first, the arm is up to speed early, so there is absolutely no inertia to 'pop' against by the time we get to the release point. Any snap you put on the disc has to come solely from deliberate muscular effort, which a) would have to be very well timed and is probably going to be inconsistent and b) is slower and less powerful than using muscles and tendons together as springs.
In the second, the disc is accelerating smoothly throughout, and still accelerating up to release, so you'll get a bit of 'free' pop as the inertia turns your wrist and fingers into springs. But not as much as you might like, because a) there's only a limited amount of inertia to fight against, and b) your wrist or fingers are under the same tension throughout the throw, so you can't take advantage of a quick stretch-shortening cycle [link to Wikipedia or similar]. The elastic response is generally stronger from a fast load-and-release than if you hold a position for a while.
I think the concepts here have lots of relevance to the disc golf throw - the idea that muscles can't directly apply enough force to a light object like a disc, but they can be used (with tendons etc, and the momentum of our bodyweight) to build and store power and then unleash it suddenly.
It also made me think of an article i wrote for ultiworld a while ago but which Charlie has not gotten around to publishing, and i thought folks here might a) find it interesting and b) suggest changes where they disagree. Have a read if interested and let me know what you think. It's obviously aimed at a more general reader rather than the knowledgeable crowd that hangs around here, so the writing style may not suit you!
---
There are a million different ways to putt well, and no two people have quite the same putting stroke. But whatever your putt looks like, there's a little bit of physics you might need to utilize if you're going to make putts from deep.1 If you're one of the many players who struggle to even reach the basket with your normal putting stroke from circle 2 and beyond, you probably need to slow down the early part of your putting stroke.
That might sound a bit odd, so let me explain. In a previous article, we discussed how the body could act like a whip. But the body can also act like a spring or an elastic band, and that can be crucial in generating easy power.
If you push against a resistance, and that resistance suddenly disappears, you'll generally move much faster and/or more powerfully than you could otherwise have done. That's how you click your fingers, for one thing. Or try putting your hand flat on the desk, and then raising just one finger and hitting the desk with it; now try plucking that same finger, using the other hand, and see how much harder it smacks down.
If we want some easy extra speed and spin on our putts, we can do the same thing. We can build up a bit of extra push or pull, against a resistance of some kind, and then we'll get that extra bit of snap when the resistance disappears.
So if we want more 'pop' on our putts, one way would be to hold the back of the disc with the off-hand while we build up some power, and then let go and allow it to spring out. You can actually do this, I suppose, to try and feel the effect, but I wouldn't recommend it as a putting stroke! I don't think it would be very consistent.
We need to find some other form of resistance to push against. But what else is there? There is inertia.
The concept of inertia is often used metaphorically, describing for example the lumbering slowness of large government departments, and so some people think of it as resistance to movement or to speed. But inertia is actually resistance to acceleration – resistance to a change in speed.
Every object that has mass feels inertia, and that clearly includes our putter. If we accelerate the disc (which we're very obviously going to have to do when we want to throw it), then the inertia will resist that acceleration and give us something to push and pull against. But only while it's accelerating.
In terms of inertia, it genuinely doesn't matter how fast our arm is moving at the release point. It only matters how much our arm is accelerating to the release point.2
Look at these three speed/time graphs, showing how the speed of the arm changes between the start of the putting motion on the left to the moment of release on the right. All three throwers will release the disc with the same arm speed, but they will have very different amounts of 'pop' and therefore the disc will actually come out at very different speeds.3
In the first, the arm is up to speed early, so there is absolutely no inertia to 'pop' against by the time we get to the release point. Any snap you put on the disc has to come solely from deliberate muscular effort, which a) would have to be very well timed and is probably going to be inconsistent and b) is slower and less powerful than using muscles and tendons together as springs.
In the second, the disc is accelerating smoothly throughout, and still accelerating up to release, so you'll get a bit of 'free' pop as the inertia turns your wrist and fingers into springs. But not as much as you might like, because a) there's only a limited amount of inertia to fight against, and b) your wrist or fingers are under the same tension throughout the throw, so you can't take advantage of a quick stretch-shortening cycle [link to Wikipedia or similar]. The elastic response is generally stronger from a fast load-and-release than if you hold a position for a while.