Pop on your putt

[BenjiHeywood]

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!

---

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.

 

[BenjiHeywood]

Part 2 - i went over the character limit lol

---
But in the third example, the thrower has taken their time, started the stroke nice and slowly, and ramped up the acceleration to be steepest only at the end,4 so there will be very significant inertia for your wrist and/or fingers to fight against, and a quick load-and-release of the spring.

You don't need to flick your wrist open to generate spin. Even if you just try to keep your wrist straight, fighting the inertia of the disc that is trying to pull it back, then the decrease in arm acceleration — when you have 'run out of arm' — will give you plenty of snap. You'll get all the pop you could hope for, and you'll find that getting the required distance on long putts is suddenly a great deal easier. Just by starting slower!5

A few interesting things are now fairly easy to explain. If you're wondering how your favorite pro can push-putt 60 feet without apparent effort, this is the key. They're taking their time so that they can smoothly build up speed and still be accelerating right up to the release. Sure, they're doing lots of other things right too, but without doubt the way they accelerate is giving them extra zip.

And if you're wondering how they precisely and repeatably fire the fingers or the wrist at just the right time, it's because they don't actually need to be so precise. They can't snap the wrist straight too early — in fact, trying to snap the wrist back to straight early is precisely how they store up power in the system! The inertia will prevent them from actually straightening the wrist, and then the pop will always and repeatably happen when the arm stops accelerating the disc.

And they can be accurate, because the wrist isn't being flung open – it's just trying to spring back to where it started, which is infinitely easier to control.6 If you think about the classic 'shake hands with the basket' advice, that's a motion where you're never deliberately cocking and uncocking your wrist. It just happens automatically due to the inertia of the disc – the wrist only bends slightly, but unbends very quickly, and the disc spins at release, even though you're making absolutely no conscious effort to spin it.

Maybe we can also explain some aspects of your own putting. Perhaps you can putt fairly well in casual rounds, but find yourself constantly shorting putts in a tournament, even when you're consciously trying to make sure you throw a bit harder each time. It's because you're worried about leaving it short, so you rush the start of the throw. You're throwing too hard too early in the throw, getting fully up to your release speed way before the actual release, and then the disc dribbles weakly out of your hand at the end. The answer is not to putt faster and faster, but to start slower, be patient, don't panic about missing short, and let the throw accelerate all the way to the release.

When people talk about 'timing' in putting, this (whether they know it or not!) is usually what they mean. Bad timing is accelerating too soon, and having nothing to give at the end, even if your arm speed is actually 'correct' at release.

For many people, and perhaps for nearly everyone once the pressure ramps up, the putting stroke is actually an exercise in patience.

---+

Dammit - the footnote formatting didn't work even though it was visible as i typed it. Everything below here is footnotes.

1.Though I should admit that spin putters almost never struggle with the timing issue discussed here – the whippier nature of the spin putt makes it almost inevitable that you'll be accelerating up to the release point. ↩

2.Obviously, the arm speed will affect the overall disc speed. What we're saying is that arm speed won't impact your ability to build up some springiness and tension in your muscles and tendons. Only acceleration does that. ↩

3.And at very different spin rates too – more snappy releases get more spin as well as more speed. ↩

4.Obviously not so incredibly violent or jerky that you can't hold on to the disc – it is only a putt, after all. Up to a point, more acceleration approaching the release will increase the available pop factor. But you don't want to go mad with it! It has to be repeatable, and jerky motions generally are not. ↩

5.Down here in the small print, we'll be a bit more precise. Obviously, the inertia of the disc still applies when our wrist or fingers accelerate it, just as it did when our arm or body was accelerating it. So it's not really as if we get extra pop for free; it still requires energy to accelerate the disc. What we're saying is that because we have the inertia (caused by the accelerating arm) to push against, we can build up some power in the wrist and/or fingers, just like when we plucked and snapped our finger down onto the desk. We can move faster and/or more powerfully by letting the energy be built up — and then suddenly released — than simply by firing our muscles. This extra power can then be used — with automatically perfect timing — whenever the arm stops accelerating.

But if you get up to speed too early, your wrist will snap back to neutral before the release point, and you won't get any pop. ↩

6.The fingers are, sometimes, more deliberately opened than the wrist, but they don't bend past the straight anyway! You can't accidentally over-rotate in the fingers. ↩

 

[HyzerRoc]

Dont have much to contribute other than to say I have never heard anyone talk about putting in this way and I gotta try it.

And they can be accurate, because the wrist isn't being flung open – it's just trying to spring back to where it started, which is infinitely easier to control.6 If you think about the classic 'shake hands with the basket' advice, that's a motion where you're never deliberately cocking and uncocking your wrist. It just happens automatically due to the inertia of the disc – the wrist only bends slightly, but unbends very quickly, and the disc spins at release, even though you're making absolutely no conscious effort to spin it.

Have you taught this to yourself in your putt? How did it go and how did you get that sensation to build off of?

 

[BenjiHeywood]

Have you taught this to yourself in your putt? How did it go and how did you get that sensation to build off of?

It's a work in progress on my own putt - i still tend to default to starting too fast. With patience and a late acceleration, i can push-putt out to about 70 feet - with a berg lol (overbalancing/half-stepping but not a jump putt).

I just keep on reminding myself to go slower, knowing that my brain won't actually let me go slow at the end, so if i can delay the acceleration then it'll be that much sharper at the end.

I'd hesitate to draw too much from my own experience. But I think the physics/biomechanics ideas of storing up that power and releasing it are solid. At least, i hope so!

Dont have much to contribute other than to say I have never heard anyone talk about putting in this way and I gotta try it.

The only thing i thought of was this: There may be other things i haven't seen of course.

He had completely different goals and different reasoning, but the idea of being aggressive over the last few inches is pretty similar. My addition is just the idea of starting slowly so that you have the headroom to be aggressive up to release.

 

[Kennets]

Thanks for the thread bud, found it very insightful.

I've always known that I could putt far, but I've never measured it. Went straight out, put the basket 90 feets away (ish), slightly uphill.

This is the result, first take:



Completely air balled it over the house, instead of getting it to the basket next to the swing lol. Came with ton of wobble out of the hand too. Just posting it for the fun of it.

The further I putt, I get less and less control of it. I'm not sure, but I do think I can putt around the 90 feet's without steeping and might be able to push it a tad further whilst still having a feeling of where it's gonna go. Ish

I'll write my two cents another day, it's getting late here.

 

[Sewer bill]

It's a work in progress on my own putt - i still tend to default to starting too fast. With patience and a late acceleration, i can push-putt out to about 70 feet - with a berg lol (overbalancing/half-stepping but not a jump putt).

I just keep on reminding myself to go slower, knowing that my brain won't actually let me go slow at the end, so if i can delay the acceleration then it'll be that much sharper at the end.

I'd hesitate to draw too much from my own experience. But I think the physics/biomechanics ideas of storing up that power and releasing it are solid. At least, i hope so!


The only thing i thought of was this: There may be other things i haven't seen of course.

He had completely different goals and different reasoning, but the idea of being aggressive over the last few inches is pretty similar. My addition is just the idea of starting slowly so that you have the headroom to be aggressive up to release.

70 feet push putt with a berg is no joke. I think I'm good to about 80 with a challenger before I start thinking throw vs putt.

 

[HyzerRoc]

Going out the other day and fiddling with tension in my wrist I had the most power just keeping it really relaxed, not pre tensioning it against the pull of the arm at all. I gotta take some slo-mo video of it but my rationale would be that a loose wrist just allowed the putt to whip out at the very end without me needing to do anything. I also gotta try to be more patient with it similar to a drive and see where that would lead.

I'll write my two cents another day, it's getting late here.

Please do, I wanna learn how to bomb some putts.

 

[BenjiHeywood]

Going out the other day and fiddling with tension in my wrist I had the most power just keeping it really relaxed, not pre tensioning it against the pull of the arm at all. I gotta take some slo-mo video of it but my rationale would be that a loose wrist just allowed the putt to whip out at the very end without me needing to do anything. I also gotta try to be more patient with it similar to a drive and see where that would lead.


Please do, I wanna learn how to bomb some putts.

Interesting, thanks, that makes me think i need to rewrite it.

My point is really only about accelerating up to the end, not about having an especially stiff wrist. But i can see how the later parts of the article could be read that way.

 

[HyzerRoc]

And if you're wondering how they precisely and repeatably fire the fingers or the wrist at just the right time, it's because they don't actually need to be so precise. They can't snap the wrist straight too early — in fact, trying to snap the wrist back to straight early is precisely how they store up power in the system! The inertia will prevent them from actually straightening the wrist, and then the pop will always and repeatably happen when the arm stops accelerating the disc.

It was this part that made me fiddle with the feeling of tension in the wrist. I dont think you advise it here but I thought it was something to play around with for a bit.

 

[Kennets]

I had some time to test out my range and "how" I putt. I think I spush (ish).

By no means am I a good putter, quite the opposite tbh, lol.
I can putt pretty comfortably to around 82 feets without stepping or jumping and it's on a "putting line" (flat with fade in the end) with some height though. Above 80, I need to release the putter with some anhyzer and/or take a step forward after the disc is released. It starts to get shady with accuracy at that point. (The accuracy is always shady, even from 10 feets)

When I get to 45 and out my motion changes a little and I start to emphasize more on the "push" motion. My arm drives upwards and I feel resistance on my fingers under the disc and if I get it right, I do a finger "pop" just as the tension on my fingers starts to release. (Peak arm extension? Upwards motion peak? English is hard). If done to late, I get a ton of wobble out of the hand with less power, so I'll rather be a tad to early.

Wrist action: this is hard, I don't think I actually think about the wrist THAT much on longer putts, it just follows the flow of the arm, curls and uncurls naturally.

On shorter putts, I do feel like I actively uncurl it. It might just be because I release it earlier/flatter compared to longer putts..

 

[BenjiHeywood]

Yeah - i don't think about the wrist either. What you and hyzerroc are making me realise is that i was describing what the wrist does from a physics perspective rather than a coaching perspective. I need to make some edits.

I think of it more like the way many of us can have a very loose grip on a full-send throw, knowing that we'll automatically grip it tighter as it starts to feel heavier. In this putting idea, you don't need a stiff wrist, but rather the wrist will naturally have only the tension that's needed to resist the pull off the disc, and if you accelerate correctly the wrist will compensate automatically and that will snap it back nicely and pop the disc out. This is a much better reason why the third speed/time graph is better than the second. I'll add that idea in.

 

[disc-golf-neil]

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!

---

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

View attachment 338896

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.
View attachment 338897
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.
View attachment 338899

Great read. I need to try the slower start / delayed acceleration more deliberately.

Lately, I've been oscillating between perfect pop and releases with no wobble and then some where I'm clearly trying to hard to get that release and getting some less clean releases with wobble. This is with a low backswing near the knee spush putt. I realized today actually that when I start getting less clean releases, I start focusing too much on shaking hands with the basket and end up not creating that stop point to let the disc pop out and instead hold on to it too long and then have to more forcefully push it out of my hand causing wobble.

Instead, if I focus on releasing it earlier in my stroke, what feels like too early, it actually comes out so clean and with effortless pop. And I can do what feels like rapid acceleration with this and putt with a lot of speed with the 'early' release as well. I might also be creating an earlier stop / rapid deceleration when doing this to create the 'early' release.

I suspect the shaking hands with the basket cue could actually mess a lot of people's timing up because it's easy to over do it when focusing on it.