Thoughts.

At Dartmouth we’ve been advocating strongly for our cutters to work hard to set up their cuts: “Seven Hard Steps” is an oft-repeated mantra, a reminder of the time and effort needed to really set up your defender and, equally important, to create space to attack when one plants and makes a real cut.

But I still see bunches of guys who, when forced under, do what I’ll call the one-step cut–one hard step in one direction (usually right at the defender) and then a turn and commit cut in the other direction.

Oldest cut in the book, right? Can work for cutters like myself with a quick first step and good acceleration, but good defenders can keep up with this move–it’s a quick fake setting up a footrace.
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(Cu & T) (Fitness)

Phase 3 of the mass-linking is the other aspect of this blog: fitness and training-related info. Check back on Thursday.

The arm sock.

Underrated and under-appreciated, in my humble opinion.

Yeah, maybe you play in the s’th and you don’t have to worry about things such as warmth. But if you’re up in the still North, why, good insulation is the difference between a great practice on the turf or a frustrating one in the cold. Or more importantly, the difference between throwing with confidence as New England turns cold and stormy and shanking a flick because you couldn’t open your hand in time to throw it.

It’s an easy accessory to make. Get a friend (or don’t, if you want to cover both your arms) and split the cost of some long socks (soccer socks do the job very well). Cut the sock before it reaches the bend for the foot. Cut a small hole in the side that your thumb can fit through. Bam!

Keep your arm warm, throw with comfort. If you don’t like the thumb hole/partial hand cover, fold it down. Pop this bad boy on top of some underarmour, and you’ll never have to worry about cold hands again.

Talked about this a good while ago here, but you probably never read that one.

Do you like catching the frisbee? Do you enjoy stopping others from doing so? Would you enjoy doing both more consistently in the air?

Work on your jumping form. A couple things to keep in mind when you go up for the sky:

1. Accelerate into the jump. Part of jumping is redirecting your horizontal velocity into vertical velocity–this is why most people can jump higher off of a run than from a standstill (and those who can’t should be able to with a bit of plyometric training). Leave yourself space on a floaty disc to really accelerate into your jump and attack the disc at your highest point.
2. Lower your center of gravity. This occurs on the penultimate (second-to-last) step, and helps with the redirection of velocity (it also allows for more complete utilization of your plyometric ability, as the slight dip engages your stretch-shortening cycle to explode upwards on the next step).
3. Use your arms to help with takeoff. You’ll usually see some kind of windup going into a jump by the best jumpers–the extra force you can generate from your arms will help with redirecting your momentum as well as provide a bit more force to propel your body upwards. If you’re on the run, this will typically be a one-arm windup (whichever is in the backswing phase of your run); if you’re doing a two-legged takeoff, you should be able to get both arms into it a bit more (I find one-legged takeoffs far more common in ultimate, however. this may just be my own bodily preference made manifest, so your mileage and results may vary).
4. Reach for the disc with the arm opposite your takeoff foot. This will vary depending on the specific situation, but as a general rule you can reach higher with the opposite arm. Keep this in mind when you practice your jumping and it will become more natural for use in-game.
5. Absorb the impact of landing in your hips, bending your knees. This is more of a recommendation for the weight room, but landing stiff-legged will lead to a lot of force being applied to one’s joints. The more you can absorb on landing via squat (incidentally, the muscles you use to take off are also the ones that should be used to slow you down on landing–you’re simply using them eccentrically, to slow movement in one direction, rather than concentrically, to create movement in the other), the less likely you are to have aches and pains accumulate.

Keep an eye out for these things in these clips. Really, watch anything, observe the pros. You can do a lot worse than imitating the best.

Also note the comments. As Dusty points out, your athleticism can only carry you so far–also think about positioning and preventing the other guy from doing the sorts of things that let him comfortably make a jump to make a play on the disc as you try and set yourself up for success. Remember, if you’re on defense, all you have to do (barring multiple receivers or unpredictable winds) is keep your man from catching the disc to get the turn.

(Part 1 | Part 2)

Supplemental work, in my mind, refers to work or mini-workouts that you do in addition to your normal routine(s).

This can refer to grip training, for instance–not enough to be called a “workout” in its own right, really, but it goes great as a finisher after a lifting session. Other things you might consider supplemental work:

• Forearm work. Slightly different from grip, but also very important for putting good snap on your throws. Think forearm curls, with the palm facing towards or away from you. Think wrist rolls, and bar twists (with extra leverage as you improve–hold the bar further and further off-center). A good ultimate player, more often than not, has well-developed forearms, or at least one on his throwing arm.
• Core work (but see here for a discussion of what core training really is, and give some thought to the work you’re doing)
• Single-leg work (this can make its own workout as well, but things like stability ball squats, while good for balance/proprioception/etc, generally tend to be followed with heavier/more intense work)
• Working on your weaknesses, for instance your posture–lot of fun reading to be had there, if you’re interested…otherwise, short version–you probably need to do more external rotation work for your shoulders and develop range of motion in your hips and thoracic spine so you can stabilize your lumbar (core) more. The latter range of motion comes from practicing proper squat form (I opt for olympic style squats more often than not–the extra range of motion and getting more strength from less weight both mean fewer injuries in the long term). If you’ve been benching for years and years and your back is lacking as a result, you might consider doing pull-ups or rows to try and deal with it as supplemental work (ie, a little every day) rather than as a part of your regular workout.
• Practicing lifting technique. Seriously. If you haven’t squatted or deadlifted before, practicing the form should precede any lift, and you should start light–and even after you’ve gotten a good hand on either/both, a bit of extra work on the range of motion will only help. Similarly, if you’re looking to get into olympic lifting (check snatches and the clean & press on the crossfit exercises page), practicing the form before you get into working out proper will go a long ways towards keeping you healthy.
• This also refers to recovery work…foam rolling, yoga, whatever suits your fancy. I call it “supplemental” but really it’s pretty essential stuff to do if you’re at all serious about your performance and health. Stretch before bed.

As for overtraining…this ties in to doing recovery work. Keep in mind that “overtraining” has become something of a buzzword to be avoided in fitness these days, but that overtraining (or, rather, over-reaching) can and should be part of any good exercise plan–you have to push your body beyond what it’s used to if you want to see good results. The trick is not to over-reach for too long–that’s when the physical symptoms appear, your testosterone level drops, and you start to see symptoms like mild depression, a loss of motivation, and a decrease in training returns, all of which can take weeks or months to adequately recover from. Again, the occasional period of under-reaching–intentionally doing less than you are capable of to give your body room to recover and grow–will go a long way toward ensuring you aren’t taken down for the count by overtraining. PLAN on under-reaching and recovering. And be willing to be flexible if your body tells you to back off sooner.

Again, when I talk about over-training I really mean over-reaching, a temporary plateau. If you’re curious about physiological overtraining, which is a treatable medical condition (requiring more than just rest and recovery, though that is also a big part of it), the NYT has a nice article on it you might find interesting.

Finally, applying training more specifically to ultimate. When you condition, seek to incorporate more game-specific work–you’ve surely done drills that involve lots of running along with catching and throwing. That’s the sort of thing I mean.

Outside of conditioning, or outside of using a disc, you can incorporate visualization–seeing game situations; for instance, when you do speed work envision running down on the pull or chasing a huck; when you do plyos, see yourself covering a defender and having to keep quick feet to respond to her, or leaping to sky for the disc. When you do track workouts, consider starting your reps with a quick one-two in the direction opposite your sprint, to emulate the stop-and-go of actual cutting. Practice accelerating from the dynamic positions you will be in in-game rather than the same old starting stance you take every time on the track.

In the gym lifting, you can gear your training more towards ultimate–this flows as a consequence of your goal setting. If your goals include catching or throwing, it would probably behoove you to work some grip work in to your training (stability for your head while running will also help with catching, as I recently posted about).

If you’re a baseball fan, watch the outfielders closely next time you catch a game. If you’re not a baseball fan, watch a game and pay attention to the outfielders anyways.

EDIT: CP brings up an excellent point–this applies not only to catching, but to throwing too. Check the comments.

Visualize, visualize, visualize.

Simple? Depends.

Visualization is a SKILL. Former teammates or blog readers should know that I’m a big proponent of visualization as a means to success.

So, you’ve hopefully read the link above and/or are familiar with visualization, generally. How does that apply specifically with regards to layout training?

For me, there are a couple crucial points to master if you expect to lay out successfully in game situations:

• Pre-layout–anticipate, be ready
• Disc is in the air–go for it!
• Layout execution–technique
• (minor point)Get back up and play!

Now, to touch on each individually…

Pre-layout–anticipate, be ready: A huge part of defense is anticipation (more on that later this week). If you’re laying out on defense, before you ever get horizontal you need to know when you should be ready to bid and when you should be priming other actions instead(again, more on this later). You can help yourself to recognize some of these situations more quickly and effectively through visualization, but some degree of in-game experience is also necessary here. You can think up simple situations which lead to layouts (you’re on defense, right on your man’s hip, as he cuts in for the disc), but invariably there are other situations where you might want to bid that you won’t anticipate. Learn to see these opportunities when you miss them, and prepare yourself mentally to pounce on them in the future. Offensively the situations tend to be more clear-cut, but if you always expect perfect throws to your chest you’ll find yourself surprised by the rare errant ones. Try to err the other way in your expectations and you’re liable to catch a lot more that comes your way.

Disc is in the air–go for it!: So, you recognize the situation. You’re right there, ready to go. The disc is thrown…what do you do? It’s not at all uncommon to pull up or choke in this situation when you’re just learning to lay out. Why? You’re still uncomfortable with executing the layout. Maybe some situations–big game, you’re really fired up–you go for, and others you don’t. It’s normal to have a threshold for this sort of thing, but you want to make that threshold pretty low–so that you laying out or not laying out is not a matter of how revved up you are, but whether you decide to lay out or not. Again, visualization can help here. Run through situations in your mind–remember to perceive these situations in detail, focus on the disc coming your way–and get the reps you need to get over the mental block with some mental effort.

A friend of mine got over his mental block by mixing visualization with physical practice–he would have me throw a frisbee to some target–he started off with a trash can, and worked up to progressively faster-moving human targets (they started off at a walking speed, worked up to 50/70/90%, etc), running up and laying out past the target to get the disc. You might have success with the same.

Layout execution–technique: I’ve already gone into the physical components in last week’s post, so give that a look. The key is to visualize these components in slow motion–you absolutely will not be able to focus on all of these things in the heat of the moment (in fact, focusing on anything other than the disc is likely to hinder your performance), so you have to do the mental legwork well beforehand if you’re to get it right without thinking later. Again, visualize detail–see (or feel) yourself exploding into your takeoff, extending forwards, flying through the air, and absorbing the impact through your torso while keeping your head, knees and arms all out of harm’s way.

Get back up and play!: Successful bid or no, you need to get up. This is particularly important on defense, when a missed bid means your man is getting off an unmarked throw–or on offense, when a missed bid means your man could now be sprinting deep uncovered or picking up the disc to get off a throw while you’re preoccupied on the ground. This is partly a visualization exercise–recognize (anticipate) the need to get back up before you hit the ground–but this is also part fitness. Upper body strength is underrated for importance in ultimate, and it is in exactly this situation that all those pushups/bench presses/burpess (the third is my personal favorite, as it actually trains pushing up into a standing position) will come in handy. I take pride in my bids, and I also take pride in recovering from my bids.

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.