Thoughts.

This is a pretty simple concept, but applied properly can make a big difference in your efficiency and effectiveness on an ultimate field. In ultimate, as with many things, knowing your limits allows you to excel while remaining within yourself.

Your absolute pivot range is how far you can get out to throw. Period. How far does your lunge take you? How much farther does your reach and body torque get you on top of that? Can you throw from that far out? Can you throw well from that far out? You have to be able to throw from this distance (or, phrased differently, know what you can throw at this distance), because the only reason you should extend yourself this far is to throw.

Your practical pivot range is how far you can get out while still being able to quickly move back (which is to say, how far you can get WITHOUT overextending, or your effective faking range). This is a range you’ll wind up doing a lot of your motion on an ultimate field in–realistically, a lot of situations won’t require you to get out to your absolute range to throw successfully. Think open-side passes, or even a quick swing (fake) when you catch the dump ahead of your defender.

Generally speaking, it’s good to keep the fact that you can extend further hidden until you have an opportunity to exploit it (for instance, if you have a killer full-extension inside-out pass, there’s no need to show it until you can make that killer IO for a goal or to start some flow, etc.). Even once you’ve shown it, you shouldn’t need to fake all the way out to that range to get a mark to bite, assuming you have convincing, effective fakes.

Pivot/extension range is worth paying attention to in any circumstance–just tossing around, drills, even in scrimmage. Developing a sense of not only what you can do, but what you need to do within that range to suit your goals (get a throw off, or make a mark bite), can and will make you a better player.

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.

If I asked you the question,

“What do you look for in a good handler?”

Your list would probably look something like this:

• good throws
• good hands (catching)
• quick
• good hucks
• breaks
• good decisions (doesn’t turn the disc over)

I’ll offer that, while there is some requisite level of competence required in some of these areas (I’m thinking “good hands”) to be a handler, you can actually do a LOT without anything close to a complete skillset.

The most important thing for any handler (or really any player with the disc in his hands) to know is:

• his/her own limitations

That’s all. Can’t huck it? Maybe learn the fake, but don’t sweat it. Always turfing your IO? Shelf it. Always throwing the disc away? Maybe you need better teammates to catch your visionary throws. (I’m kidding). Not quick enough to shake ‘n bake your man in two steps? Master the fine art of positioning and timing, instead of dancing in the lane.

Right there with knowing what you can’t do is knowing what you CAN. Maybe you don’t have a money flick bomb, endzone-to-endzone, but when you get the disc on an upline cut you can put it to Fred where he’ll rip it down 80% of the time. Maybe your IO sucks, but if your mark is overplaying it you can make a beautiful leading around pass.

Play to your strengths!!! Maybe your team asks you to do more than you’re capable of or comfortable with right now. Instead of simply trying (and failing) to live up to those expectations, think about how the things you WANT to do and CAN do can jive with those same goals. If you’re a handler without game-changing throws, but you can move quickly and get open, instead of trying to make that short IO break pass the coach keeps preaching you can instead focus on dishing the disc to the first open man you see as soon as you get the disc and get back to where you’re the most dangerous–moving. If you’ve got big hucks and little else (including good judgment on when to throw and when to hold), consider talking to your cutters and establishing some preferred receivers you can be comfortable throwing to (and make sure the rest know not to make that cut for you, so you’re maximizing completions).

I’m sure you’ve had experiences where you’ve run up against guys and thought, “I/we are so much better than them, can do so much more,” and then get your ass whooped. You can do a lot with a little if you know how to use it. Before you get caught up in all the stratagems, running a ho-stack or a clam because everyone runs one, try running it from the other side–what can you do well? In what setups, or simply “how,” can you best utilize this skill or ability? (Or instead of the positive definition you can look at the negative definition–given your limitations, how can you most avoid overextending yourself?)

Nobody has it all. You can be a great, well-rounded ultimate player, but there are bound to be areas where you feel less confident. Sometimes you’ll bump up against those limitations–but it doesn’t have to be by design! The best offenses are structured to play to their strengths, to feature their talents. Certainly, progressing in your skills and abilities is something to work towards, but when it counts,

Know yourself.

Consistency.

You hear about it plenty with regards to ultimate, usually something like “if you can consistently complete a forehand/backhand to an open cutter, throwing ability will not keep you from playing elite-level ultimate.”

How do you get it? You know where I’m going because you’ve already read the title.

This is something I’ve mentioned offhandedly before–honing your skills to a point where they become unconscious–but this cannot be restated enough. It’s only when you get to a point where you don’t have to think about what you’re doing that you can really thrive. When throwing a forehand is as natural to you as walking (ok, perhaps nothing is quite THAT natural, but you get the idea*), you’re in a good place. How often do you stumble when you walk?

You really need to develop a mental state for performance. Part of that is avoiding distraction, and “distraction” includes what you do with your body. If you HAVE to think about your throwing technique while you’re doing it, can you really expect it to hold up under game-time pressure? If you need to think about your footwork mid-cut, are you really going as fast as you possibly could?

Levels of Competence

I believe it was in a book about Bruce Lee (if I had anyone who I’d say was a personal role model for me, he’d be the one) that I read the following about skills progression–specifically for martial arts, but the parallels with any physical activity are evident:

• As a beginner, your instincts are bad, unwieldy, inefficient at best.
• As an intermediate, your instincts are still bad, but you know what’s proper and can correct. (There are multiple intermediate stages, with “knowing you’re wrong” and “knowing what’s proper” and “being able to correct” each their own, discrete stage).
• At an advanced level, you again return to your instinct, but the old, inefficient ones have been replaced with the precise and the honed**.

It was due to this belief that Lee’s original school of Jeet Kune Do‘s first and final ranks were both symbolized by an empty circle (your intermediate ranks were a progression of the yin-yang).

Many people reach a high level of intermediate proficiency–able to consciously will themselves to perfection of a sort–and get complacent, missing the pinnacle: true unconscious competence.

That’s where you want to get. Every time you step on the field, you want to operate unconsciously. You don’t want to have to think about your footwork. You don’t want to have to think about your grip. Your thoughts and energies should be focused purely on recognizing your situations and responding appropriately–no logistics of how to get there, merely intended destinations. Many a D set has been thrown that succeeds simply by taking players out of their unconscious selves and forcing them to think. Don’t help out your opponent by doing it to yourself unprompted!

Developing Unconscious Competence

How do you develop this kind of unconscious competence? Well, it ain’t easy, but there is some transferal between tasks (usually you regard it as “talent” or something similar when a player seems “naturally good;” natural is a good word indeed, for these individuals are almost always allowing their body to take over, getting out of their own way–and I can guarantee you they went through the process of learning to let go at some point. Whether they realize it or not). Again, I’ll mention driving (esp. stick) as a nice example of an opportunity to learn to let go. I’m currently learning how to play guitar–instruments are another great analog.

Relevant reading: SciAm Mind’s*** latest on How to Avoid Choking Under Pressure, page 2:

“Let’s say you’re trying to play the piano. If you were relying on your motor memory”—just letting it fly—“your motor command would automatically read out the next note in about 50 milliseconds.” But consciously monitoring your performance brings this superfast sequence of motor commands to a screeching halt, resulting in a choking incident of epic proportions. “The feedback from the first note takes 100 milliseconds just to move from your cochlea up to your brain. So if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, I just finished the C, now I have to go on to the D,’ you’re going to have problems.”

This sums it up perfectly. In order to become a good musician, athlete, public speaker, you have to learn to let go, to let your body simply DO. You have to hone your body’s skills to a point where you can let go with confidence.

If you can develop a regimen or strategy to learning this skill, you can continue to apply it elsewhere, too.

Deliberate Practice

The foundational building block of all unconscious competence is deliberate practice. I don’t mean deliberate, as in, you have the intent to practice, but rather in the sense that you do everything you do with purpose. You should always be working towards a goal, honing a skill, refining, testing, repeating. repeating. You sure as hell can’t expect to make all your passes in a game if you can’t do it when you’re simply out tossing, right?

The deliberateness comes into play when you’re not content to just toss, but instead choose to toss with preconditions–you only throw from a full-extension pivot, you only throw after a fake, etc. And then, being deliberate at those things is another layer on top of that–is your full-extension as far as you can make it? Can you get to that point and also keep your balance, throw convincing, effective fakes, not pull a hamstring? When you throw fakes, are you working mechanically on the fake itself, or are you moving beyond that, visualizing a game situation and a covered defender (poor conditions, an aggresive mark) causing you to make that fake? Seeing the ensuing change in conditions that enable the one you do throw?

Visualization is the bridge between deliberate practice and effortless performance. You work on your throws deliberately, get the hang of throwing a forehand with touch…then, you stop thinking about how you’re throwing and instead start thinking about where you’re throwing. You picture a cutter. Does the throw still go where you want it, how you want it? What if you picture a mark up against you, defender tight your receiver’s hip? Can you place a pass where it won’t be D’d? If yes…can you do it again? And again? And again? Get to that point, and you might be ready for primetime.

Developing the mindset for mental toughness and applying it in-game is another component of being successful, particularly when the going gets tough, but you can go a long ways towards getting there if you can learn to simply


Stop.

Thinking.

It’s a long race when you’re chasing flow****. As they say in Japan, ganbatte.

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*to be completely honest, your best comparisons for throwing a frisbee would be with other activities which involve a high degree of coordinated movement of the arms combined with stabilization through the core and a significant transfer of power from the lower limbs, as well as involving a dynamic component to projecting an implement–which make things like basketball shooting, baseball pitching/throwing, tennis ball hitting, or football throwing your truer comparisons. (Adding in the extra factor of a rotational component trims the list farther). Looking for some cross-disciplinary reading to do for ultimate? Look in that direction. Looking for some off season cross-training? You could do a lot worse than the same (I especially recommend a sport like squash, which incorporates a lot of the same sorts of lunging and one-handed motion that throwing does).

**this is otherwise known as the point in which you become a killing machine. Lee worried about some joker challenging him on the street (or one of the stunt men during a film shoot), because his instincts were honed such that in a real fight he might not be able to stop himself from, at the very least, seriously injuring his opponent.

***as I exclaimed to a friend on first discovery: “it’s like somebody made a magazine just for me!” I eat this stuff up. Highly recommended for anyone who cares to understand humanity better.

****fast forward to the last 5-8 minutes for the good stuff.

Use it before, during, and after you throw. Build an awareness of it.

Torso includes, but is not limited to: your core and your shoulder. Optional: include the hips.

That is all.

(D, Ca, St & etc) (Fitness)

As winter break swiftly approaches for those of us who work at schools, I thought I’d go back over some of my older posts–I have a feeling that with the influx of new readers this blog has seen over the past couple months, it’s likely that some of the stuff I started posting in the summer, when I changed from simply recapping my ultimate experience to (attempting to) share how I’ve learned to play, has been overlooked.

I’m not sure what the best way to work around this and make the blog more archive-accessible is (I’ll likely continue experimenting with format), as my general goal is to make this site a resource as well as a blog (I’d welcome any ideas to that end–blogspot’s whole scrolling-through-pages isn’t terribly efficient, nor is the archive).

So I’ll try and link up some of the posts I think are most useful/relevant, sorted by category. Let me know if you find this helpful. And, feel free to comment with anything you think I’ve overlooked.

Throwing

• Being Quick on the Catch-Throw Turnaround. Not sure, but this might have been the first post about ultimate that wasn’t strictly focused on myself.
• On Balance
• Grip, part 1 (Part 2, the video (much more helpful) here)
• Arm Action (also a video)
• Throw Convincing, Effective Fakes
• Disc Placement (not just throwing to space, but throwing to space with purpose)
• On Hammers and Throwing to Space
• Forehand Hucks (see also Scapular Loading, aka the shoulder jerk)
• The Windup
• A Throwing Checklist for Warmups
• More on Faking (this also reads a little unclearly; I’ll revisit at some point when I can phrase it better)
• Throw Off-Handed; you’ll appreciate your on-handed ones more and have a better perspective to teach from.
• It’s the little things in day-to-day life.
• Throwing with Touch?

Cutting

• Around this time last year I made a post about the notion of “Threat Points” when cutting–this is, more or less, another way to try to phrase what becomes an intuitive sense of how to see and attack space as a cutter. I think the post perhaps comes off a bit esoteric, but maybe it’ll help provide a framework for better explanation.
• In my opinion, one of my most useful posts is the one I wrote this past spring about cutting schematics. As a deprived B-teamer, and later as a budding A-teamer, (and a lazy student) I often spent time in lecture drawing up various situations and playing them out mentally and on paper, from the O and the D perspective.
• Create Space
• The Juke
• It’s Stoppin’(sadly, the UV link I referred to is now broken)
• Making Adjustments (secondary cuts)
• Use Your Opponent’s Acceleration
• More on field sense.
• Being a a primary cutter vs. a fill cutter (keep your man busy)
• Expanding your repetoire
• On endzone cutting

I’ll leave it at that for now; I’ll round it out over the next week with an overview of the rest of the ultimate skills/strategy stuff and the copious postings related to fitness.

A little busy at work (need to prep a class on Christmas) and a little starved for inspiration of late…but check out this RSD thread on throwing with touch I posted in a couple weeks back.

My opinion is already there, but there appears to be some dissention. What’s yours? How did you learn about throwing with touch? How have you taught (or would teach) others?

I usually tell rookie throwers to think about throwing to a point on the field, rather than passing on a line that includes said point (ie, throwing to space), and that at least goes towards taking the laser out. Please chime in with your own experiences.

Having trouble gripping your forehand? Have you ever used chopsticks? Did you know that you can hold them in such a way–with your thumb pinching the bottom stick against your ring and pinkie–as to closely simulate holding a strong forehand?

The school ID you use to swipe for your meals? Ever consider the similarity of an ID card to a frisbee when gripping and throwing backhand fakes while you’re waiting in line? I have. I do it all the time. I do it subconsciously with all manner of object–put something in my hands, stand me up, and make me wait, and within 20 seconds I’ll be throwing fakes. They’ll have more or less exaggeration depending on context–if I’m standing in front of my class of 20+ Japanese students while they work on the latest English paper, I forego the object and disguise the steps in my pivot as pacing around the room and keep my shoulder motions subtle, but with intention and a little bit of visualization.

These motions are as natural to me as anything else I do.

You can go to practice and throw for half an hour before warmups, you can toss on the green every day for an hour…I’ll take that, and add on all those odd idle minutes throughout the day. If I can move, I’ll practice the fakes. If in class, I’ll make cutting schematics when the lecture gets boring.

Walking to class? Going up or down stairs? Throw a little attention towards your footwork when you change direction on your turns. Think about planting and stopping quickly at the bottom if you like to hurry down the stairs. If you’re really into it, carry a disc with you. Get to know your frisbee, become its friend, and it’ll treat you well in turn.

Opportunities are endless. A little creativity and you’ll find them everywhere. Incremental actions in aggregate will make a profound difference in your game.