Thoughts.

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.

Catching. Such an essential, fundamental component of ultimate, non? Jesus Christ, just think–250 thousand hits. Already! I hit 2,500 last month and thought I was doing well.

I almost always catch in stride on a small hop for “good” passes that hover from chest to head height for me to run onto. This prevents any ground-up turbulence (uneven fields, while not ideal, are not uncommon in this sport) from throwing off my catching motion, and generally allows me to continue at the speed I was already cruising at to make the catch. Sometimes you want to accelerate through the catch, but I have yet to find myself caught and D’d up because I catch this way. Perhaps I just need higher-level competition, though. Small, but significant when you consider the sheer volume of catches you make.

I don’t know that there’s a player in ultimate frisbee who’s sucessful that doesn’t have confidence. More often than not in surplus; occasionally fragile and easily broken, sometimes shelved for the appearance of “spirit’s” sake, but always there.

You NEED to have confidence to be successful. But you also need to be successful to have confidence, don’t you? How do you develop one without the other?

A few thoughts to this end.
1)You can learn it elsewhere. Even without much success as an “ultimate player,” prior success as an athlete is transferable. Being successful outside of the athletic field can also be transferable, but in such instances the transfer of confidence has less to do with your body’s performance and more to do with your ability to plan, work, and execute (perhaps more important to long-term success in this sport).

2) You can get lucky (or have some natural talent). It’s astounding how much of our lives are decided by a couple fluky moments. Gamblers–”beginner’s luck” is not so because all beginners are lucky, but because the lucky beginners wind up sticking with it and getting hooked. Same with ultimate, or any other endeavor you pursue. Think back to your first experiences with this sport. It’s very unlikely that you struggled greatly out of the gate–too much discouragement would’ve sent you packing. It’s much more likely you found some fascination in your ability to throw a frisbee the right way every once in a while, or played in a tournament early on and caught or threw a goal or something similar.

3) You can persevere. Typically if you don’t get lucky, and don’t have another field to draw confidence from for prior experience, you’re in it for your friends, or the girls (guys), or some other extrinsic reward (perhaps another successful player inspired you to aspire for similar heights). This leads you to playing and improving.

Ultimately (pun intended), you work. Natural gifts are not the rule, and there are so many dimensions to this sport that nobody steps in with a complete toolset. You work, and you improve, and seeing this improvement gives you confidence. You know, when you step on to the field next–”I have worked and I have improved, and I will see better results as a consequence.” And this positive mental feedback often leads to better performance.

Issues come when adversity or bad luck gets our mental cycle off track–a few bad throws, you get burned deep despite feeling faster than you ever have, etc. Doubt creeps in, failure continues to grow, and a negative feedback cycle leads to diminished performance.

You MUST develop a strength of mindset to weather these rough patches. When I talk about confidence, THIS is what I’m really referring to. A lot of it comes from experience, but you can compensate for a lack of experience with a healthy mindset. By “healthy” I don’t mean “positive;” only a fool or a hopeless romantic will continue to see daises when the weeds are growing. But you cannot let the weeds dominate the landscape, either. Simply get to work removing them, eliminating negative thoughts and taking action to correct for perceived shortcomings.

I feel as though one of my best assets as a player is my mindset; as a very analytical person, I typically remain emotionally detached with regards to my performance–sure, I want to do better, but I don’t ever get too high or too low on myself, merely motivated to do better.

In times of struggle, find something to latch on to that you know to be true about yourself. If you find your throws failing you, invest more in your legs. If your offense is suffering, redouble your focus on your defense. Draw from one well of confidence and don’t dwell on your drought elsewhere; while you can tend to the drought directly and, slowly, refill the well that has emptied, it only needs a little guidance to get on the right track (if you’re self-aware enough, you can diagnose what needs to be done yourself; otherwise, get some coaching or let it be). You can channel your emotions more productively into a different aspect of your game, instead of struggling against the force of those emotions in the aspect that’s created it.

Apologies if I’m getting too metaphorical. Know that confidence is a skill like any other; it can be practiced and improved. Being confident in your own capabilities will always lead to better performance; it may not always manifest in success (this is an important distinction), and there may come a time when you need to re-evaluate your approach and change it to get better results for your team. But never lose confidence in your ability. Work hard, develop confidence, and hold it tight.

As I alluded to in previous pots, you can hose your defender by getting him on his heels, or by getting him to commit his hips and then going the other direction.

I’ve also alluded to the notion that it’s possible to compensate for being off-balance (ie, having your hips committed) by having a good degree of strength. It is often (or occasionally, depending on your level of play) not enough to simply get your defender to have her hips committed.

You have to catch him accelerating.

If your opponent is still speeding up in the direction her hips are committed, she will not only have to turn those hips, but fight the force she’s just been applying in order to change direction. This is in contrast to cruising at a constant speed (or accelerating/decelerating slowly), where all force applied is going to change speed and direction. There is an inertia to an accelrating defender that you won’t see at rest or when cruising.

So, how do you create and exploit such an opening?

This is where the beauty of the juke comes in, of the chop-step, the two-step feint. It’s all about a quick change of motion. Particularly if you are already in motion, a quick one-two in a different direction will have your defender scrambling to keep pace–accelerating harder than you–and you’ll have an easier time changing it up than they will at that point.

I’ve already touched upon this briefly in my post about juking, but with a bit more time and a bit more thought I feel like I can phrase it more clearly now. You really should be getting your opponent accelerating as hard as he can here–the harder (faster) he can accelerate, the bigger the potential to exploit it when they’re going all-out. If you’re sub-maximum, your opponent is more likely to be accelerating under control–and while you might still be able to exploit the gap in acceleration between you, it’s less likely to win you big separation. Some knowledge and feel for your opponent is necessary here (as is often the case).

This works especially well if you are a fast/explosive cutter (or at least, if you are relative to your opponent/she thinks you are relative to her). If your defender knows that she cannot keep up with you in a footrace, when you set up footrace-type cuts (i.e., taking what she gives you–running straight in from the back of the stack without faking or with a quick chop-step) she’ll compensate for the speed gap by pushing hard to accelerate to top speed in the first few steps while you’re still in a lower gear to try and get ahead of you. This is what I really mean by using your opponent’s acceleration–know what will cause her to speed up too much and lose control, if only for an instant, and be prepared to exploit it when she does.

The Huddle already beat me to this, but I’ve been sitting on this thought for a while now.

Athletic position means being on your toes, knees bent, ready to uncoil. Keep it in mind on the ultimate field. Keep in in mind when you’re tossing on the green or in the park or wherever you happen to get your tossing in. Keep it in mind when you’re in the gym and doing plyos. Develop your strength, and then learn how to channel that strength as quickly and effectively as possible through your toes. And dominate.

As I alluded to earlier, relative positioning of the disc (to receiver and defender) is a key consideration not just for the thrower, but for the receiver in situations where the defender is close.

This notion should affect a receiver a few ways:

1. When setting up one’s cuts, have a mind for where your defender will be when you finally pick a direction to move in. Some of the most frustratingly effective cuts that have been made on me (and which I in turn started making) are set up very simply by moving until the cutter is between the defender and where the cutter expects to receive the disc. In this way, a quick movement gives the cutter the innate advantage of a well-positioned throw without requiring a ton of effort on the part of the thrower.
2. As soon as the disc goes into the air, a good receiver will not move simply to catch the disc as soon as possible–she will also move, perhaps laterally somewhat in addition to the direction she’s already running in, to position her body behind the the disc’s trajectory. In so doing she will put her body in the way of the disc, making a play more difficult for a defender (picture a football receiver shuffling to catch the ball rather than reaching, allowing them to take a hit while receiving the ball without fumbling).
3. Along with 2, a good receiver will catch the disc such that a defender cannot make a play through his body without fouling him. This means either attacking the disc as soon as possible in front of him, or, if pancaking the disc (this is seen with some frequency at the elite level), will position his arms such that the lower arm is on the side of his body that the defender is likely to bid from–a good layout D comes from a low angle (high, gazelle-style layouts (hi Watson), while impressive looking, contain a lot of wasted motion in the up-down plane and are less likely to get to the disc as quickly), so using your arm as a buffer (catching with your arm under puts your elbow in the way) in addition to your already well-positioned body makes a clean D nearly impossible.

Feel free to comment if you have additional thoughts here. Certainly the case is such that sometimes you need to lay out for the grab, but that falls under “exceptional” rather than “good,” in my opinion.

How small of a margin between receiver and defender are you comfortable throwing to?

One step? Two steps’ gap? What is your primary consideration when you assess whether or not you’ll throw to an in cut?

Don’t think just in terms of gap. Consider your receiver–if you know he’s faster than his man, trust him to accelerate to the disc (and conversely, if the defender has been baiting the throw all game and getting it, perhaps you should reconsider). A very important consideration, and the focus of this post, is the relative positioning of the receiver and his defender, as well as the trajectory of his cut.

Assuming your receiver is making a good cut (vertically/slightly angled, rather than horizontally–more on that in a later thought), you can throw to her with a remarkably small margin and complete the throw successfully. The number one deciding factor in whether a throw is a completion or not (from a thrower’s perspective, and assuming basic competency; obviously there are other considerations) is not the margin between receiver and defender, but where you place the disc relative to the receiver and her defender.

Some visual aid:

This is where you want to place the disc to prevent a D. The receiver is led to space , with the disc coming in to him on the side opposite that of the defender. With the disc placed in such a manner, a defender is forced to go through the receiver for the D. Particularly on cuts that don’t cover a lot of ground (such as handler cuts), it’s nearly impossible for a defender to get around the receiver sufficiently to make a clean D (otherwise, he needs to lay out through the receiver, which is very obviously a foul. In some instances it’s possible to get a D, but with proper catching technique this is nearly impossible. More on that in a later thought, too).

With placement like this–either heading towards the receiver instead of leading him, or placed such that the receiver’s body is NOT between the disc and defender–a defender can move in and get to the disc before the receiver (this also happens commonly with horizontal cuts, which is why those are not the most reliable cut to make, especially at a low level). In the picture above you can clearly see that the disc placement more or less negates whatever advantage the receiver has, essentially placing the two at an equal distance from the play.

Placement is not a universal cure–even with the right intent to your throw, sometimes players will make plays (if there’s a speed disparity, this can negate good placement on longer cuts). However, an awareness of disc placement by both thrower AND receiver (I’ll touch on it more later, but you can cut with this positioning in mind) can make tight defense beatable. It can almost swing to the point of being a disadvantage for the defense to be too close if you place it properly, as overzealous defenders can be baited into failed bids, giving the receiver a few free counts to do whatever she wants with the disc.