Thoughts.

The mark is to defense as the dump is to offense.

Again, don’t get caught up in the flash. The greatest defense–team defense, that starts with the mark and ends with the last defender downfield (really, with the sideline–but that’s for another post)–never makes the highlight reel, but it’s exactly that which puts a team in a position to make those highlight reels in the first place.

I’ve written about ways to talk to keep your players in a better performance state here already, but allow me to put it more simply:

Live in the positive. And keep playing hard.

…check out Bagel Fodder Ultimate. Read the first post for an explanation of why I think it’s worth reading.

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?

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

Yeah, yeah, throwing and catching. Fundamentals aside, here, let’s talk about one step up–the dump. Absolutely essential as a building block for any offensive strategy (even if you Huck and Hope, you’re going to make some dump-like passes to set that up at some point).

It doesn’t take a team strategist to figure this out. Dumps give you a reset on the count, and, when leveraged correctly, are a WEAPON. Anybody who played against Dartmouth last year (particularly our D line) can attest to the lethality of the dump if you fail to contain it. Conversely, a team that dumps poorly is going to give up its fair share of short turns, and if you can’t dump with competence, then these same dumps will lead to a slower, more predictable (read: easier-to-defend) offense.

You know the whole analogy about how the running game sets up the passing game in football? With ultimate, the dump game similarly sets up the rest of the offense.

There are tiers of dumping. How comfortable are you?

1. The “get a reset” dump. You look dump at high stall, and have to rush a throw. OR the dump cutting is ineffective (you have a “dancer” who doesn’t get open by much, and takes 4 seconds to do it). Either way, the throw winds up more or less shovel passed to the receiver, who gets the disc somewhere within the vicinity of 2-5 yards of the thrower (and likely coming toward the thrower or moving straight back). No advantage gained, merely a new count to look upfield and insist that somebody “CUT!”
2. The early/competent dump. Note that those two terms tend to be synonymous. The decision to dump the disc is established early in the count more often than not (before stall 4 or 5–this will vary depending on your team’s offensive philosophy), and/or the dump cutter has an easy time getting separation from her defender. In this situation, the pass is usually made to a receiver in stride, perhaps going upline with the defender trailing (“power position,” anathema to all defenses–the thrower has a free shot deep, with momentum from the run to put it even farther), or likewise going backwards–in either case, the defender is not in a position to stop the next throw, which sets up a dump-swing style offense or a deep offense (hence the “running game” of the dump sets up the “passing game” going deep or side-to-side). This is the level of dumping which most good teams have; I’ve seen many a team that works the upline dump VERY competently, setting up a very powerful deep offense. Less common these days is the team that really works the width of the field, but your Harvards and Dartmouths will still flash this style with some effectiveness.
3. The skillful dump. Taking the competent dump one step further, this is dumping not just for a reset, and beyond the dump as a building block for your offense. This is the point at which the dump becomes a FEATURE of the offense–the degree of thought and setup that goes into the positioning ensures that (almost) every dump puts the receiver in a position to further the offense. This is the sort of thing that Frank of RSD fame would often go on about with his ambidexterity rants and the like. Being able to run the give-and-go, for instance, not just as a every-so-often technique, but as the basis for your offense (see Minnesota and their often super-quick resets and movement–I don’t know that I’ve ever worked so hard on defense for so little gain), makes it a very potent tool, and can absolutely destroy teams unprepared to deal with it (which is, interestingly, becoming more and more the norm as teams fall into the glamour trap, opting for the big plays and the big players over the big fundamentals).

It’s all about raising the level. I don’t care who you are, you’re not going to go very far without at least competent resents (and you’re not going to thrive unless you can raise it a step beyond that–or you happen to so outclass your competition otherwise that you can make up for it).

If you’re a burgeoning team–high school, club, college–you MUST emphasize the fundamentals. You might key in on the flashiness of it all, the big hucks, the huge plays, but keep in mind that more often than not 90% of the highest-level games are anything but–just good fundamentals, solid cutting, hard defense, and GOOD RESETS. Model yourself after the “boring” parts–the plays that look easy, because they’ve been practiced and polished to seamlessness–and you’ll more often put yourself in a position where the flashy plays actually make a difference, instead of becoming a footnote in your recap of the blowout loss to stud team x.

More on fundamentals next week.

Been a while since I had cause to do a tourney writeup…this is less a writeup proper and more a short impression, since it was so brief (one day).

There’s some stuff from the summer version here. The site and condition were pretty much exactly the same, maybe a little rainier, but you get the idea.

The squat.

This is the simplest (and most complicated) lift you can do. It is the easiest (and hardest) lift you can perform. It is the most beneficial (and most dangerous) lift you can perform.

It is a lift you absolutely need to be doing.

This lift does far more than simply train your legs. It’s not simply a lift you do to get big. This is a movement, and its benefits will carry over to all aspects of your life, if done correctly. It makes you stronger and healthier.

Avoiding the squat invites a host of nagging aches and pains, most notably in the back and knees. The hip strengthening that comes from effective squatting is a panacea to your back and knee woes–when your hips are actually able to carry their load of the work, it saves your knees from taking more force than they have to–and you’ll develop a range of motion and core strength that allows your back to stay in a more natural position, unperturbed by stress and torque from weak/tight muscles.

I’m going to preface the descriptive part of this post with a warning: Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust me as though I’m a certified fitness professional or your doctor (ask me in 10 years when I’ve got my MD and a few trainer certs under my belt). Don’t jump headlong into heavy weight training if you’ve never done it before (or if you haven’t in a long while). The risks of overdoing it far outweigh the benefits, and particularly given the timing of this post–in the fall “off-season” for college and the post-season for club–there should be no major impetus to overdo it to strive for incremental benefit. Just doing the lift properly and consistently will lead to great results without much loading at all.

For information on proper squat technique (in far more depth that I’m going into here), check out T-Nation, and keep an eye out for Dave Tate, Mike Robertson, and Eric Cressey. Crossfit is also hugely keen on the squat (including the overhead squat). They have a wealth of videos that can enhance your understanding.

***This clip*** is THE clip to see if you’re new to squatting, want to teach other people to squat, want to squat, or do squats. It gets at the most basic components of squatting in the quickest way I’ve seen (I wish I had known this last year when I was teaching guys to lift!) Note the stance at the beginning.

Another squat option for the particularly risk-averse is the front squat–note that this will work your hips differently than a back squat, emphasizing the quads more (which astute readers will note in a comment I made last week, is not a muscle group that I believe needs training emphasis in most of the population).

Mark Rippetoe puts bad form more eloquently than I ever could:

The common form problems in the squat upset this balanced lever arm relationship and result in the biomechanical inefficiencies that typify bad form. If the knees cave in toward the middle, the quads are being asked to do the job of the adductors, and, as in our earlier example of the hamstrings in the deadlift, they are strong enough to do it, even though it leaves the adductors untrained and ultimately weakens maximal squat capacity. The femur and the tibia, which normally operate vertically parallel as the knee flexes and extends, deviate inward (toward the midline) at the knee, squishing the lateral meniscus in the knee joint due to the uneven load. The bones move wrong, the muscles move them that way, and the muscles get trained wrong as a result.

Don’t train the muscles wrong. Practice GOOD FORM! Get a spotter to observe you. Use a mirror for cursory checking (but realize that it’s not the end-all be-all, as your view is limited). GET A CAMERA and RECORD YOURSELF lifting. Number one way to see how good or silly you look. Most of you will disregard this advice and just go dick around in the gym (or perhaps worse–not go to the gym at all). At the very least, get somebody to check you out for the first few times you do it until your body gets a good sense of how it works.

Squatting IS a natural movement to some extent, so you can teach yourself–however, most of us lack the range of motion in the hips to truly pull it off. Do the Samson stretch. Practice doing overhead squats with a broomstick or similarly light-weighted item. Make your hips work through a full range of motion (Get Your Butt in Gear). Squat.

You get better at squatting by squatting, but only well-intentioned squatting. When I caution against going too heavy too soon it is for this reason–you need to be able to get a full, comfortable range of motion (and know its limits) before you progress to developing strength through that range of motion. This means, ideally, a fair bit of time devoted to squat technique before you even get under the bar. If you want to get under early, that’s your perogative, but use light weight and still focus on form (if you can’t get your butt down to parallel without arching your back, go as far down as you can without compromising it–and consider box squats). It’s important to progress slowly if you want to avoid injury trouble and weakness-inducing imbalance down the road.

As you get comfortable with your range of motion (and you WILL notice an improvement in your fitness just from this improvement alone without any additional weight), THEN you can start adding resistance (weight) and make yourself into an Athlete.

To be sure, you can get away with just about anything for training in the short term. But long term, you need to plan. Set some goals. This practice will help ensure continued progress (and an idea of what might be stalling your it if you hit a wall).

Female readers should note that this advice applies every bit as much if not more so to you. The lack of strength training in women’s ultimate is rather astounding to me. Getting “huge” is not a consequence of lifting–it’s a consequence of diet and bodybuilding. If you know me, 5’8″, 135lbs on a good day, you’d know that all my training has done very little to jack me up–I’ve maybe seen a net gain of a few pounds at most. It has, however, helped me to lean out, and left me heck of a lot stronger and more athletic than I would have been without stepping inside of a gym.

There is no good reason not to squat. None. Absolutely none at all. Do you have reservations? Email me or leave a comment and I’ll do my best to allay them. Short of being recently (a couple months) off of ACL surgery there’s very little that should keep you from this, the most fundamental of motions.

UPDATE: Deadlifting is the squat’s complement; I’ve written about it here and here.

If you really scour my blog, you can find this info on my UCPC post on Alan Goldberg’s talk.

Rather than subscribe to stress, free yourself with focus. The opportunities to let yourself go and be content to simply live are limitless. You can become a better ultimate player in this way, and a better person, as well.

UPDATE: Micah adds in the comments that Dr. Goldberg has his own site up and running–I haven’t given it an in-depth look to say for or against it yet (it can often be the case that such sites are simply used to hook more customers without offering any of the meat of their ideas), but you might find it helpful.