Throwing Thought: Balance for Short and Long Throws
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!)
Loading ...I’ve written about the importance of balance before, but it’s a very broad concept, its applications diverse, and bears revisiting.
In the context of throwing, balance comes in to play a few ways–generally speaking, you want to keep your torso balanced by using your core. A good example of this is throwing with your non-pivot foot picked up off the ground. Can you still throw a forehand and backhand on target? How dependent are you on your legs for not just power, but the general trajectory of your throw? Can you balance without your legs? Work this from standing at first, and then mid-pivot–don’t wait for your foot to set down, but throw midway.
You should be able to make passes at 10 yards with touch, without using your legs. This is a pretty essential skill to grasp, as throwing without your legs leads to throwing with touch from any position your body is in. It will vastly improve your dumping efficiency (and resets are the most important thing in ultimate).
Balance comes in to play from your legs, too. One of the best nuggets of wisdom I received when working on my hucking (I was trying too hard, muscling up, and hooking my attempts to throw 60+ yards outside-in instead of the nice float I was looking for): “try to hold your body position at the end of your throwing motion.” I was stepping out to huck, but continuously moving through the whole step and throw–by forcing myself to wait at the end, to find balance in that final, extended position, my throws improved immediately.
Part of it was still that core balance to gain touch, but a lot of it was finding a balance point through my legs–a lunge position I could hold (incidentally, lunging is an underrated component of ultimate training–more on that later).
Find your balance points to master your throwing.
A little training tip I picked up from my team leader at the San Jose RKC–imagine you're at the final step of a 12 or 16kg TGU (Turkish Get-Up), with a non-light 'bell pressed above your shoulder, legs in lunge position.
When you go from lunge to standing, don't scissor back, go straight forward… I noticed the best handlers at our school (the ones who have been to Nationals a couple times) can do this pretty well, throw from a lunge position, and then move forward to run or sprint, without stepping back.
Turkish Get-ups and KB swings (done properly) have helped my lunge and core stability soo much.. ever tried KBs or TGUs? (the KB offset center of gravity gives your rotator cuff & core quicker feedback about unstable positions..)
Pictures of the Hard-style TGU
Walking lunges (or otherwise pushing up through that front leg to stand) are great.
I’m a big fan of bulgarian split squats to train the glutes for that kind of extension, progressing to step-back lunges and eventually to walking lunges, carrying the trail leg through your step without letting both feet meet under you.
Definitely worth developing that kind of hip strength–obviously it’s a little different in your standard lunge (barbell on back or dumbbell in hands) than in a TGU, when you have a KB pressed overhead, but the hip function has similar transferability to ultimate.
I’ve played around with KBs in a few workouts (mostly doing conditioning work with swings) and TGUs are a favorite core exercise that I’ve never done nearly enough. I saw a lot of my core improvements through glute-ham situps and russian twists off of the same (along with the natural improvement you get from deadlifting, squatting etc).
On the topic of 175g-weight training
I taught a girl to do 175g Hard-style Swings and was practicing 1-legged deadlifts with an Ultrastar on the side of the field.
I ordered this DVD on posterior chain / backside training recently and learned a lot about Gray Cook's core-specific functional screening… one thing I like about the 175g 1-legged DL is that it's a nice L/R symmetry test. You gotta wonder how many Ulty athletes have left/right asymmetries due to lunging/bidding only one way (I did).
Makes me want to build a 175g workout routine:
Disc-Goblet squat warmups for hip mobility
1-legged Ultrastar deadlifts for stability&strength
175g RKC arm bars to open up the shoulders, 175g TGUs to develop grip & lats & core, screening for movement weaknesses.
5 minute interval disc swings, throwing practice, then 5 minutes VO2max-type snatch workout.
Disc-Goblet Squat mobility cooldown
Pavel meets Ultimate
Okay, so I actually don’t know if you can really snatch an Ultrastar, but then again we might as well throw in a huck drill there and a 175g Ultrastar pistol (one-legged squat) for the hard-core.
& Re: "try to hold your body position at the end of your throwing motion",
I find it's interesting to think about the dynamic between tension (strength) and relaxation when it comes to athletes & throwing.
Pavel has said that "Mastery of relaxation is the hallmark of an elite athlete. Soviet scientists discovered that the higher the athlete's level, the quicker he can relax his muscles. The Soviets observed an 800% difference between novices and Olympians. Their conclusion: total control of tension = elite performance."
Although not always applicable, I often think of throws (hucks) as strikes, where a flick is not unlike a "one-inch punch". Now, it turns out that when expert strikers hit, there are not one but *two* spikes in muscular tension. First to initiate the motion (punch), second on impact (hit).
But perhaps more interestingly, expert strikers show states of muscle relaxation in between these two points! In other words, in a matter of milliseconds, a true master tenses relaxes and then tenses again.
I'd posit that this applies to what you say about throwing, "try to hold your body position at the end of your throwing motion" as that enforces the second endpoint of the strike.
Rookies often don't understand tension and throw wobbly flicks and backhands. As they learn to add power, they gain distance. But as you say (or imply
, there are two "end"points to a throw, the initial motion and the actual strike/release. I bet advanced throwers do this without thinking about it, but as I think about it now, it might help me master the high-release I/O bh thrown down whilst popping up that someone mentioned on the Huddle (re: breaking the mark for give&go) and other non-random throws.
Funny, I was watching kids (okay not kids), guys throw today and I saw a couple of Bay Area older handler types, some ex-MIT / Stanford / Penn / UW post-college athletes, and threw with a kid who I correctly guessed played baseball previously (!) cuz his hammer was spot on whereas he didn’t know how to reach out with a fh or a bh.
Pavel’s great, being coached or trained by him in person is a great example for how I might want to coach or train others more some day.
I skimmed through the Naked Warrior today, since I’m not training just reading, and the section on “corkscrewing” to add power to your press (karate punch as the canonical screwing example, but it applies to one-arm pushups too! and a reverse punch corkscrews right-arm clockwise just as a good rh flick might).
Still don’t know about this load the scapula deal for non-hammers… it might add an extra bit of oomph and makes sense for hammers, but I fig an expert thrower should be able to throw a 6-inch fh flick the length of the field (like Bruce Lee could hit a “1-inch” punch), without needing to load the scapula but just staying tight and tensing for only the pull and pop portions of the snap, adding rotational torque with the corkscrew lat etc engagement.
And anyway, as they say, ain’t it all in the hips?
This popped up on my GOOG reader just now, as I’m up late le sigh once more:
http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2009/03/its-all-in-hips.html
Indeed throwing is more about technique than it is about power. You don’t need to be able to lift a mountain to be able to throw a disc over the length of the field!