Thoughts.

Oft lauded, much coveted.

The bid. How?

There’s a mental side to it. But, as with most skills, the mental merely enables the physical–you still have to do the work. What are the fine points of such?

Please keep in mind that I’m talking about ideal layout technique; circumstances may dictate a more reckless bid (with regards to your own body; I do NOT advocate laying out into other players) in order to ensure success, but if you want a long career as an ultimate player more of your bids will be like what’s described below.

The Essentials
If you don’t care for nitty-gritty you check out some of the example bids I size up at the bottom of this post to get a sense of what I mean.

LANDING is perhaps the most important component of a good layout. Sometimes you’ll sacrifice this for the sake of the big play, but honestly, in the big picture you’re going to want to get up and walk away from any bid you make (without an arm held to the side, to boot).

The landing:

• Should be absorbed primarily by your stomach and chest. Ancillary components of impact absorption include your arms and (upper) legs, but both of these have their risks. With arms, keep them extended in front to avoid landing ON them or torquing them in such a way that you might tear something/absorb the brunt of the impact with them. The arms are more for guiding the landing pad that is your torso, and for assisting in keeping your head up. With legs, you might get SOME force here, but this is an injury risk for the knees, so they should not be the primary absorbers at all (ideally they won’t absorb any impact).

  Bend your knees and lift your head before you land, and the resulting position you hit the ground with should force your torso downward so it hits the ground first.

• Should be done at speed (i.e., not from a standstill): My biggest issue with the fall-over layout (and I’ll touch on this more in a little bit) is that it forces your torso on a downward vector when it impacts the ground. Ideally, your impact vector should have a much larger horizontal than vertical component. Ever wonder why layouts hurt less in the rain? It’s partly due to give of the mud, but largely it’s due to being able to slide further–by extending the duration of your impact (sliding means your impact is spread over more space, and therefore more time), the overall force on your body is lessened. This means less achy, quicker return to action. (UPDATE: See the comments for some dispute on the matter–details of the physics notwithstanding, I stand by my point).
• Should have you hit with your chest flat to the ground. Sorry, ladies, but this is the easiest way to ensure you get maximum surface area for impact (again, the more you can spread the layout impact over space, the less force any one point will experience). You’ll see sidewise bids, rolling bids, but there are a few risks in such layouts, number one being the shoulder. You do NOT, under any circumstances, want your shoulder(s) taking the brunt of the impact. This is why I encourage caution with using the arms to cushion a bid, and this is a large part of why I discourage rolling or sideways bids. Even if you lay out sideways, you can torque in midair to avoid the shoulder and encourage more chest/stomach impact.

  Soccer goalie types will be familiar with the sideways/rolling/fall over bid to absorb impact, but doing so is pretty technical (and beyond the scope of this post). Roll at your own risk.

The TAKEOFF is where the real trick to laying out comes. Landing properly ensures you live to bid another day, but a good takeoff makes a good landing a LOT easier.

My main thought with regards to takeoff:

If you’ve swum, or have been watching Phelps dominate the Olympics, you’ll know what I’m getting at here to some extent. What I don’t mean is jumping upwards and out with your body arcing (think gazelle bounding through the African Savannah–explosive? Yes. Impressive? Sure! Efficient for laying out? No). 

What I do mean is exploding straight towards your target in much the same way you would jump upwards for a sky–only instead of exploding vertically into the air, your torso is tilted such that your momentum and thrust direct you horizontally toward the disc.

A simple drill I like to do to teach this kind of form, with which I’ve had mixed success (about as much as I’ve seen with all manner of layout drill–this is a tough skill to teach, and to some extent you can only guide your athletes to a point where they will figure it out for themselves):

Hold a frisbee several feet in front of the athlete. Have them get in a “starting” position as they would for a race (no hands on the ground)–lowered center of gravity, weight on the front foot. If that’s not a good cue, have them get in the position they might when jumping off one foot–again, weight on front foot, lowered center of gravity. Have them tilt their body forwards until their upper body is directed toward the disc (perhaps not completely horizontal, but as close to it as possible–they’ll need to feel it out for themselves a bit with trial and error). In this position, where their weight is pulling them forwards to the point of falling, tell them to explode forwards and grab the frisbee (you can also do this without a disc, but it’s good to have a carrot for motivation). It’s critical to hold the disc far enough in front that they have to get forward momentum before impact, otherwise they’ll flop straight down and it’ll hurt (and that doesn’t particularly encourage further practice!).

The tilt of your upper body directs the force of your legs, so really emphasize the direction the upper body is pointing in (i.e., horizontally) as a means to ensure good takeoff form along with arm drive. Encourage them to explode forward (not upward!) as much as you can.

This drill teaches the critical last takeoff step.  The penultimate step is also critical for lowering the center of gravity going into the last step, but to add that complicates the drill a little; I’m a fan of simple progression. That said, I’m still searching for an ideal drill here; your own experiments with adding an extra step might yield better results. 

I vastly prefer this drill to more brute-force approaches which simply tell players to run and lay out without much guidance (but with a lot of pain along the way). You can get to doing the real thing eventually, but train the components first!

For the landing, fall-overs from one’s knees can help with getting used to taking the impact on the torso (make sure they get the legs up on every fall, so they’re not learning to hit their knees first).Then I’d suggest doing the no-step drill I’ve described above, and then perhaps add in a one- or two/three-step approach before shifting to a full running start.

Remember: horizontal jump. Not a flop. Not a gazelle. Perhaps “horizontal explosion” is more accurate a description. I would add video here, but my means are currently limited–perhaps in a later post…

THE CATCH/D (Arm use while in flight). I’ve already mused about layout grabs a little bit. Short version: you might want to teach two-handed grabs to rookies to encourage proper body position. In the long run, however, the one-hander allows for a bit more arm guidance/cushioning on landing, which also helps a lot. Almost universally, you want to grab with fingers underneath or be prepared to roll your hand over to ensure that the disc isn’t stripped from your grip on impact with the ground (thumb facing the ground on impact=generally too weak, unless you’re two-handing).

Keep your arms extended in front of you! Under no circumstances should your arms be caught under your body (off to the side is acceptable). If you’re doing a close-to-the-chest pancake grab or likewise more of a fall-over bid, landing on your shoulder (BAD! BAD!), try and roll as much as you can to avoid crushing your arms and to spread the impact so your shoulder isn’t completely hosed (I’d suggest avoiding this sort of grab entirely if you have shoulder issues).

Other common means of learning/practicing layout technique:

• Laying out onto a soft surface, such as a bed or high jump pit. Rainy days also make wonderful layout practice days. The dirt and mud add an extra degree of “cool” to the proceedings.

• The pool. Careful not to belly flop! But you can layout into a dive to work on takeoff technique and getting comfortable in the air.

• Visualization. More on this elsewhere on the blog.

• Gratuity/overzealousness on the ultimate field. You’ve all known that guy who lays out for everything. I feel like it’s a phase for a lot of layout learners–building confidence in the skill and testing one’s limits–but sometimes it comes too early, before technique is good enough, resulting in frequent injury or injury risk, and other times this phase never ends and you get guys who routinely lay out for discs they have no chance of D’ing or catching. Whoops.

Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts and ideas here. More than anything else in ultimate I’ve found layouts to be very difficult to get a good universal teaching method for. Sometimes people take to layouts like a fish to water, and others like oil. How do you reconcile the gap between what we think we’re capable of and what we’re actually capable of?

Layout Examples
Pulling on some of the’08 College Natties photos, which capture a LOT of great bids…

This I would characterize as a painful landing. You can tell (look at the previous pic) that he’s curling instead of extending for his impact (likely due to the looming collision with Robin), meaning he’s probably going to hit knees first. Extend your torso into your landing…though he might be in the right here bracing for impact instead of the landing.

This sequence shows a good takeoff. You can see pretty clearly that Dermo is extending off of his left leg, explodes forward with a good body tilt (torso forward), and his trajectory is such that his torso is thrown directly towards his target (that might be harder to tell in the initial two photos, but you can tell by the follow-through in the third and fourth). His left leg winds up staying a little low for impact, though sometimes that’s the sacrifice you make when you really put all your effort in to getting the disc as soon as possible (but note that Dermott has suffered from consistent knee issues from bashing them on layouts. Note the pad on the right knee).

This is more of a fall-over bid (though done from a run). You can tell by the way his entire body moves downwards in the second picture, rather than his chest carrying from takeoff. Note the awkward-looking landing there, where his right leg is clearly going to hit the ground first (and not just any part–the knee gets full service). Also note that a layout in which he explodes more directly towards the disc instead of falling over is likely a D, given how close he is on the fall over.

This is me laying out (I got my hand on it, but guys don’t win Callahan awards without knowing how to go to). I wish I had a sequence so I could analyze my own layout technique (and so you could better decide if I’m preaching what I practice), but in this picture you can at least note the curvature of my body–thrusting my torso forwards, legs are curling so they won’t impact first. The momentum of exploding forwards with my torso means it’ll come downwards to hit the ground before my legs do–and you can hardly tell this in the photo, but my right arm (that isn’t reaching for the disc) is already positioned such that it can help absorb impact when I do hit the ground.

This sequence is a wonderful example of a bid at height. You’ll note the right arm moves on descent, preparing to cushion impact out of the way of the torso and that, for having laid out to reach above his head height for the disc, there’s still a torque throwing his torso down faster than his legs as they begin to come up out of the way.

Another great sequence of a bid at height.

This is something close to what I think of when I think of a perfect bid. Full extension, great technique.

There are most assuredly countless other great layout pictures. But don’t just look through pictures or watch video with a mind for “wow,” watch with a mind to learn. Key in on the little details. Make your own judgments. Use the images as tools for visualization (!).

UPDATE: Jamie Nuwer’s guide to layout safety is worth reading, along with the rest of the injury timeout site.

Related posts:

1. Catching Thought: Layout Grabs
2. The Mental Components of Layout Training
3. Catching Thought: Receiving Under Pressure
4. Revisiting Old Thoughts: Jumping and Skies
5. Catching Thought: Focus on the spin