Thoughts.

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.

Be careful of focusing too much on developing a single skill, or in a single area.

It’s very easy to fall into this trap–after spending most of my freshman year developing into a solid defensive player, playing my sophomore year as a D-line starter, I shifted my attention to becoming better offensively during my junior year.

I became a much better offensive player–that year I was one of the primary cutters on our O-line–but I also lost my fire on defense, the Kill Mode. I don’t know that I’ve ever quite gotten it back, frankly.

A friend of mine had a similar experience, only instead of general D and general O, it was setting a lethal mark and shifting focus to becoming a great handler that took him from superlative to something still good, but less.

Do strive to be a great all-around player, but in doing so, don’t neglect those skills that got you to where you are now. Don’t shift focus…expand it. Don’t replace, augment.

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers* over winter break (more specifically, over the course of a handful of flights between Albany-Philly-St.Louis-Buffalo-Boston as I did my Medical School Power Tour**), and got a few good ideas from it that I’d like to extend to ultimate.

In this instance: becoming an expert. I’ve heard it said (yet another short snippet I want to attribute to Zip, but can’t verify) that you need to perform a throw 10,000 times in order to master it (e.g., 10,000 forehands), which is perhaps an ultimate paraphrasing of the 10,000 hours rule–for the uninitiated, this states simply that in order to reach an expert level of proficiency at something–ANYTHING–you need to invest about 10,000 hours into experience/practice/whatever you want to call it.

Gladwell hammers this point home with a few examples, perhaps most notably with Bill Gates (his high school had access to computers for programming work before most COLLEGES had anything, allowing him to be one of few with a huge head start on the programming skills progression), and the Beatles (who apparently played a ludicrous number of live, all-night performances in Hamburg, Germany, before they ever hit it big). In both instances, he refers to the times when they were able to gain an exceptional amount of experience in a relatively compressed period of time–for Gates, his high school years; for the Beatles, Hamburg–as crucibles for them reaching the magic 10,000 hour mark.

The connection with ultimate is easy to see here. How do you get your 10,000 hours? There’s a reason growth at the college level was (and is) so explosive–perhaps the best crucible for any aspiring ultimate player out there is to be part of a team in college.

When else can you simply call a friend and be throwing within 10 minutes? When else are you FREE enough to spend all your daylight hours out on the green, tossing back and forth lazily? When else do you have such easy frequency of practice, tournament, game experience? (you might counter with “high school” here, and that’s fair).

I’m not saying you can get to 10,000 hours in 4 years. But compared to, say, club ultimate, where practices are pretty infrequent and players generally have full-time jobs and no throwing buddies a stone’s throw away, college is a time you absolutely MUST seize if you want to go from a player to a baller on the ultimate field.

Obviously the idea extends beyond simply preparing for ultimate (academics have a similar crucible in college and grad school if you’re willing to embrace your subject matter, for instance), but this is, after all, an ultimate blog.

If you’re still in college, or better yet, yet to arrive at one, make sure you make the most of your time there. You never know when you might spend your following year working full-time in a country where the majority of people who do know frisbee (and there aren’t that many in the Japanese countryside) think, “with a dog?” and opportunity to learn is less. Don’t take your chances for granted.

*I definitely recommend the book. If you’ve read his other works, he takes more of the wide-lens, population-based approach that typified The Tipping Point, but still has his usual style of fleshing out larger stories with specific incidents. Especially if you’re still young and wondering about what you might want to do with yourself in the future, this book might give you a better idea of what you’ve got and how you might identify opportunities when you meet them. As an ultimate player with an interest in psychology, I’d also recommend his book Blink, which explores decision-making, specifically the unconscious variety (real-time decision making on the field, anyone?).

**For those who are wondering, I’ve already gotten in (phew!) to SUNY Buffalo, am still waiting to hear from Drexel & Wash U in St. Louis, and really want to go to (but have yet to hear from) dear ol’ Dartmouth.

OK, so I’ve said you should be mobile on the mark. I’ve said you should work to stay balanced. Great.

How?

Hint #1. Guess what lift the mark shares body positioning with? You got it, the squat.(Hint 1a. You lift on your heels. What do you mark on?)

Hint #2. The squat is a stationary lift. Is marking stationary? Which direction are you moving primarily when you mark? Hey, horizontal (in the frontal plane)!

Hint #3. Core strength enables what is a “reach” for some to be easy for others. Athletes are Athletes for a reason.

Hint #4. How do you teach players to use their legs instead of relying on their reach on the mark? Courtesy of one Peter “Socks” Bonanno, ’08, #88, I’d like to date, he’s really great…we call it the black knight drill. (Yes, I know–Miranda Roth in The Huddle beat me to it already. But I’ve had this written out for a while, and redundancy only reinforces the utility of the thing).

Really simple. Take your regular marker drill…and start channeling Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (“Just a flesh wound.“). Mark as normal, but put your hands behind your back.

You’re not exactly going to stop a lot of throws here. Try and resist the urge to footblock (too much), and focus instead on moving your body such that you force the thrower to move (fake, pivot, or otherwise) once or twice. Your thrower should start off with fairly basic pivoting and faking just to allow the marker to get used to the notion of moving to follow before making a serious attempt to throw past. Keep the drill relatively honest, no over-the-tops and try to avoid the temptation to take the shot through the big hole left by no arms (make the mark work laterally rather than frustrating her with a quick break past the body at stall one).

Of course, you can scale this any number of ways. Early last year we would start a marker drill with some 5 seconds of Black Knight (with no throw) before allowing the mark to use his hands and the thrower to make his pass, which seems like a nice compromise between learning and practice (the dichotomy coming from the eternal dilemma in which things that might help the team learn more quickly [i.e., dedicated, focused, deliberate drilling, with no consequences] are not as appealing to players as jumping in headfirst and “practicing” or scrimmaging, which is essentially just performance with lower stakes than a real game or tourney).

I think it might have been one of Zip’s Tips (though I can’t find it now) to always push beyond your comfort zone in marker drill; if you’re not getting point blocked or turfing every so often, you’re not expanding your repertoire enough. This applies just as much if not more so for the guy on the mark as the guy with the disc. Figure out your thrower. Experiment with baiting. Choose what throw you’re going to make your quarry take, and deny everything else with extra gusto. Learn.

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

So, focus. I’ve harped on visualization a bit here…you might be aware that focus, properly applied, can increase ability even without physically practicing. But did you know that focus can be trained, too? (There’s a whole school of Buddhism devoted entirely to the pursuit of better focus, in fact. Perhaps you’ve heard of zen?)

A former captain of mine was once mocked for telling the team to “focus on focus.” While it sounds silly at a glance, there is something to be said for being aware of one’s ability to focus, and there’s something more to be said for deliberately working on improving this skill.

How? That’s the trick, isn’t it. As Dr. Goldberg has put it, it is not the ability to sustain focus, but the ability to refocus, that separates the high performers from the rest. It’s not that Michael Jordan didn’t get distracted; it’s that he was able to put these distractions aside and return to living in the moment that allowed him to thrive in the big moments (granted, a lot of other things went into that success, too).

Any practice on focus and re-focusing is going to resemble meditation in some form or another. You know that whole “flow” thing? Flow is essentially an active meditation. If there was nothing to it, you wouldn’t see so many practitioners still at it today.

So, in short: meditate.

In long: take the time to simply live and breathe. If you need something to focus on, pick up a frisbee and place it in front of you. You only think I’m kidding, Daniel-san. Pick something simple to say and easy to remember (Goldberg suggests “one”).

Look at the frisbee. Breathe. Focus on every detail of that hunk of plastic. Notice the ridges on top, the imperfections from use…hey, that Vegas graphic is pretty cool. I wonder how this whole Conference 1 thing will shake out?–
“One.” Refocus on the disc. Use the phrase (or simply a thought) to cue yourself to refocus. Work your way from a frisbee on the table to a frisbee on top of a TV playing highlights from the club championships, and you’ll have developed a pretty potent system for getting your mind in the right place.

More conventional means: Sit. Close your eyes, or don’t. Breathe. Count your breaths. Count to 100. Count to 200. Count to 300. Start over when you lose track for your thoughts. When you feel good at that, start over when you simply wind up distracted from your breathing and your counting, instead of when you can’t remember the number. But start simply.

Other means: You can practice focus in a wide variety of situations. Read The Inner Game of Tennis, read The Art of Learning, embrace the ability of your body to execute without your mind’s chaperoning it all the time. Focus on relaxing your mind…focus on letting go. When you’re out for a drive, forget the thoughts racing through your mind, and simply let your body drive the car for a while. (driving is one of the most complicated tasks a human performs on a day-to-day basis, and is a great candidate for flow experience)

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.

I know what just leapt to mind.

“The lefty backhand, huh? I’ve never thought it was very useful./What a useful throw!”

I’m not going to write on the merits of such a throw (haven’t had much chance to test it myself–though it is ready, should the appropriate situation for its use ever emerge…).

This is simply a suggestion. If you’ve ever hurt your throwing arm or dislocated a finger on your throwing hand and hurriedly rushed to learn how to throw off-handed because NE ’07 Regionals was only a week away (before finally resolving to grit it out with the right, because you could make due with the pinky in a splint), then you might appreciate what I’m getting at here.

Teaching yourself how to throw off-handed is like teaching a rookie how to throw, but with the slight leg-up of your extra experience with the other limb. Through the lens of what you’ve already learned, can you apply your knowledge and discern what the real keys in throwing are?

It’s hard to teach any skill, especially if you’re far enough along in your learning that you’ve forgotten how you learned in the first place…with throwing, however, you have the luxury of another novice–your off hand. If you can teach your off-hand, you can teach a rookie.

Perhaps more importantly, if you can teach your off-hand, you can learn how to improve the consistency of your dominant hand. How is it, exactly, that you’re able to determine where your forehand goes when you let it go? Is there something in the grip that lets you keep your backhand flat?

It’s also a good way to keep casual throwing interesting. In addition to throwing some game-time visualization into these situations, you can take a step back and re-examine the fundamentals through use of your off-hand. If you’re looking for a slightly more practical carryover, you can do a lot worse than having an off-handed backhand in your arsenal (particularly the high release, which is to date the most consistent advantage for the lefty backhand vs. the righty flick I’ve seen).

Try it. Re-learn how to learn.

(And then teach)

UPDATE: Check the comments for some more thoughts about in-game applications of off-hand throwing.

Watch good ultimate.

One of the best things about ultimate, as it’s currently constructed, is that the UPA series has no arbitrary cutoff for playing. Everyone, from the repeating champ to the pickup squad of you and your buddies, can play. And anyone can show up to a regional (this is admittedly easier in the Northeast than in other regions) and watch.

Since I started playing at Dartmouth 4 years ago, one of the things I’ve enjoyed most is being able to go to Northeast club regionals–first in div. 2 with an 08 frosh squad, than later in div. 1 with Chuck Wagon and Dartmouth–and play against and watch some of the best players in the country compete. From watching DoG my freshman year, wide-eyed and amazed (after all, DoG’s run of dominance in the ’90s was all I had heard about of ‘pro’ ultimate as a high schooler), I’ve found as I become more and more experienced in this sport that, rather than simply being astounded at the level and a simple observer, I’ve come to appreciate a lot more nuance of how play goes.

Watching two good club teams play each other is a really special treat. If you haven’t broken in to that level and had the opportunity to train in a system that creates those kinds players, the nearest substitute you can get is attentively watching. Something as simple as watching the players throw as they warm up can yield some wisdom–players throw hard, but confidently, to their target.

You can observe a lot at the team strategy level, too–zone sets in particular, how teams communicate and what they do to adjust, etc.–but I think the biggest or quickest gains to your own game can be had from simple imitation. I watched some DoG players going through their warmups and noticed how they stepped and threw, quickly and effectively, to their target, and shortly thereafter was working on my own throws attempting to do the same thing.

We all imitate at some level, whether we realize it or not. Mirror Neurons will activate when you observe an action, and the simple act of watching can lead to learning if you’re sufficiently trained. The better you get at ultimate, the easier it is to get better at ultimate–a rookie watching a high-level player might simply observe, “Wow, they’re fast,” while a more experienced player might noticed a subtle shift in the primary cutter’s hip motion that sets up their exploding into their next cut so effectively and seemingly quickly (and then be able to incorporate that same technique into their own game with a little practice).

Watch ultimate. Watch GOOD ultimate. Learn from the best. Ultivillage is a godsend, though you’ll pick up a lot more from the real thing in person. If you don’t have the chance to watch the really good players, find good players who are really good at at certain things (for example, that guy at pickup with the huge forehand). Figure out how they do those things so well. Amalgamate the best in others and you’ll make yourself into a hell of an ultimate player. (And then do the same for people you meet and life skills and become a great person, too).

So there’s some discussion about trends in strategy in ultimate.

Interesting stuff, for sure. I especially liked one of the comments about ‘resistance’ as a means to gauging progress.

When I was co-captaining the B-team last year, we always started practice the same way–at least 10-15 minutes of marker drill, and a bit longer than that doing dump drill. Simple, yet effective drills, and I definitely think they paid off–by the time we got playing in sectionals, we were regularly using dump-swing-continue O as opposed to the force-it-up-the-line mentality with decent success. We certainly were able to beat a fair number of low/mid-level A-teams and were not often outclassed, save against the upper-level teams in the region.

We did a lot of other drill-type stuff, and I think the proof is in the pudding so to speak, in that a lot of the guys on the team were able to improve a lot fundamentally and became much better players as a result.

I definitely feel like there’s a lot of benefit to be had from devoting a significant portion of practice time to skills development rather than straight-up scrimmaging. It provides a great opportunity to really hammer down a specific part of one’s game, and on the B-team in particular it was a good opportunity for players of varying skill levels to work at their own pace–the hardworking guys can work together and push each other, while in a scrimmage it’s not always the case that all 7 guys are fully invested in their play, or are as capable as one would like. That said, scrimmaging is very necessary–there’s plenty of strategy and chemistry to develop, and it’s a lot more fun and keeps people coming back out to play, important to the B-team in particular.

With regards to Dartmouth ultimate, keeping a focus on the essentials of good team play (the mark and dump-swing) is always a good idea, for both levels. The B-team should perhaps spend a bit more time on it, but I think there’s ample evidence from the fall season that says the A-team likewise needs to invest time as a team to working on the mark and the dump. I like a lot of what we did otherwise in terms of drilling though–a lot of what we do, even in scrimmages, revolves around working with a specific set of circumstances–D team starts with the disc on a sideline rather than receiving a pull, some of the man D drills we do.

I wonder if we can’t improve the effectiveness of the drills further though? Idris talks about teaching a sort of improvisationality to the players, which is an interesting contention. We do a lot of drills that are fairly rigid and simple in their setup and execution. I definitely feel like there’s a benefit to be had from these drills, and we don’t necessarily need to change them, but I wonder if there aren’t perhaps variations or new setups we can incorporate to make drills more like real, game-time situation. Drills more like the drill we did a while back to work on our three-cutters dump scheme, where the person with the disc has multiple options to evaluate and decide upon.

I don’t know. Just an interesting topic to keep in mind down the road…