Thoughts.

My Situation

I’m presently doing rotations in San Francisco for a couple months (working at California-Pacific Medical Center‘s Pacific Campus); as such, I am a long ways away from Dartmouth’s free-for-student gym access and the resources it offers. Unfortunately, my current finances and location are such that I have no close, cheap gym options to get my iron fix on. At this point, it’s a bona fide jonesing to lift heavy; there is something deeply satisfying to me about a heavy pull or nailing that last squat in a set  that is hard to recreate elsewhere, but necessity is the mother of invention, and here I am needing to gear up for another season without my old, comfortable training allies.

So, what’s the alternative? There are a range of options for the aspiring trainee without a power rack:

• Acquiring a decently-weighted kettlebell enables a lot of strength and power work without a lot of expense or equipment
• Likewise, a TRX setup allows for several motions (I’m thinking of inverted rows and other pulling movements, but also unstable pushups, ab “rollouts” and bulgarian squats with an unstable rear foot) that broaden the palate of strength training options.
• Finally, the best implement to master is the one that you carry with you every day – your own bodyweight. Many challenging movements exist that push not only your strength, but your balance and aid in the development of athleticism.

In the interest of not paying excessive baggage fees, I opted against bringing my kettlebells out here – I have put together a homemade TRX setup for under $30 that I highly recommend (though they just came out with some elastically-rigged “Rip Trainer” that I’m dying to emulate as well). I’ve been using it mostly for inverted rows but there are many, many options to incorporate this into one’s training.

General Concepts in Strength Training

But enough about that – the meat of this post is about bodyweight strength training. A general review of the notions of how to improve strength includes a few options:

1. Moving a heavy load. This engages the nervous and (depending on how heavy and how long) muscular system to both improve the capability to express the strength you have, as well as stimulate muscle growth with enough volume.
2. Moving a less-heavy load, at high speed. This method focuses more on engaging the nervous system – with an intent to move at full speed, you recruit more muscle units and therefore train more of your muscle mass on a movement. This is generally the case when doing olympic lifts or dynamic effort work on the basic lifts.
3. Moving a less-heavy or light load to the point of fatigue or failure. This method, often used by bodybuilders, is intended both to maximize time under tension for a given muscle group (believed to be a prime variable for stimulating muscle growth); additionally it’s thought that the last few reps of each set occur at a point where the smaller, weaker muscle units are so fatigued that you cannot help but recruit the larger, more powerful units, allowing you to stimulate a large percentage of the muscle to adapt, grow and improve overall strength capacity.

My personal bias has always been more for methods 1 and 2 – with method 3 you lose some of the nervous system training component (typically one ends up “training slow” doing bodybuilding work and not developing athletic qualities such as speed and explosiveness; there’s also the notion that this encourages adding less-functional muscle mass.  If you’re training for speed, every pound of excess weight, be it fat or muscle, that isn’t making you faster is slowing you down; I’m also not fond of training to failure on a regular basis, as it tends to promote more lasting fatigue and injury risk). With bodyweight work one ends up necessarily trending more toward the low-load, high-rep end of the spectrum, but there are ways to keep efforts challenging enough to develop real strength.

Increasing the Degree of Difficulty

This is something I plan to focus on – if our sweet spot is somewhere less than 15 reps/set to maintain at least some strength development, it’s important to progress in the type of movement being done to keep it challenging. Examples of this are progressing from a split squat to a Bulgarian (rear foot-elevated) split squat, or adding range to reverse lunges by doing them off of a step, or elevating one’s feet while doing pushups. One does not need weight to make such progressions.

Another way to go about this is to regularly change the exercises done. If after a few weeks pushups are feeling too easy or taking too long to get the effect you want, experiment with handstand pushups against a wall. Return to pushups again later, try a different progression, and see if allowing your body to “forget” the movement doesn’t allow it to become useful again.

High-speed Work

An additional way to go about this is to add a high-velocity component to the exercise. Again, time under tension and doing slower movements can be good for stimulating growth, but it fails to develop explosive athleticism; rather than (or ideally, in addition to) doing slow, controlled reps of your split squats, try an explosive variant like split squat jumps or scissor kicks (or work the absorptive rather than generative side of explosivity with some jumps to lunge position landings). One could even combine methods and start with an explosive variant and transition to a more controlled version once fatigue makes the explosive version too hard to sustain.

Diminishing Rest Intervals

Finally, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Crossfit it’s the magic of incorporating a time element. Sure, you might be able to do 50 pushups at one go, but how long does it take? What if every 10 pushups you alternate with some lunges or air squats? What if these pushups are at the bottom position of a burpee? If you’ll pardon this coming from a scientist, there’s something magical about what happens when you take routine exercises and integrate them into a larger circuit, when you track time and incentivize doing more work with less rest – this probably also relates to the time under tension concept, where it’s not only the overall volume, but the density, that stimulates the hormonal responses that encourage growth.

More to Come

Those are the general considerations. I’ve decided to follow more of a set program for my bodyweight training rather than wing it entirely (based off of the Vertical Jump Development Bible‘s bodyweight strength program – incidentally, the whole thing is a great read for some grounding in basic concepts of athletic training), but I’m hoping to actually lay it out more specifically along with the rest of my training plan in a future post.

’tis a great season for reading, as students are about to go/are already on break…here’s what’s been on my tap of late.  Would love to hear your good stuff in the comments.

The Definitive Book of Body Language. Really easy to get in to, broken up into perusable chunks makes it a great bathroom/bedroom read. From the perspective of a neuroscience major, I find it fascinating, and from the perspective of a future physician, I find it a useful tool for reading my patients and evaluating their needs (and how they’re responding to my suggestions).  You never know, it could help make you a more persuasive call-arguer.
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This is a fairly old article, but one that bears continual revisiting.

Researchers looked at perception and elite performance and found all sorts of clues that the elite see things more clearly and decisively (and can therefore respond earlier) than novices (I’d suggest Blink if you’re looking for a more in-depth treatment of the matter). They also found that things like field sense are absolutely not innate, and suggest that free, unstructured play is key to getting the experience and developing a broad, flexible sense as opposed to a narrow-minded one. Check out this blog post for a bit on the difference between explicit and implicit learning–remove coaching and especially structure from the equation, and you tend towards the implicit–given that something like “field sense” is rarely taught explicitly (if I asked you to explain “field sense” to me–what to look for, when, what leads you to make one decision over another–would you be able to do it? In a way I could understand and apply?), you need to go the other way.

As frustrating as low-level, amoeba play (or loosely organized summer league, etc.) can be, or as much as you might think your disc-using non-ultimate games (I’m thinking of boot in particular, but schtick counts too in its own way) are not going to help you improve, recognize the opportunity inherent in these games. Try throws and strategies you wouldn’t normally. Experiment with new positioning and decision-making processes. Expand your repertoire and your mind.

What sorts of games do you play to grow?

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.

In Outliers Gladwell brings up some points considering how arbitrary factors can influence success in a given endeavor (like birthday cutoffs for youth play–an 11-month difference between just before or just after a cutoff is huge in developmental terms), but perhaps more importantly, he delves into, for lack of a better way to put it, cultural programming–how your upbringing and environment (“nurture” in the nature v. nurture debate) have a profound effect on all sorts of aspects of your character, from communication style to how long you are willing to persevere at a given task.

The implications of this alone are significant, but he goes a step farther and talks about changing said programming–with Korean Air, they changed the culture of communication in the cockpit by enforcing English use, as the Korean they had defaulted previously (which, much like Japanese, has in-built status considerations for speech) was encouraging imbalanced power dynamics where the younger copilot would not question the elder, even if he knew the other was in the wrong (which led to a spat of preventable plane crashes back in the ’90s and before).

How do you change an ultimate team’s culture? Specifically, how do you create a culture of work (and, eventually, success), from a team culture that is more laid back? Certainly a large part of it is eliminating the vestiges of the anti-work culture, and this is perhaps the most difficult feat to accomplish. Generally, when you’re talking about getting rid of the slacker (or taking the slacker out of the player) you’re talking about potentially butting heads with your peers, your friends, your teammates. For this reason, I’m inclined to think this change is not one that is easily done overnight–instead, it’s a process that can take many years to achieve fully.

Plant the seed of hard work and perseverance in the young, impressionable minds. Get a batch of bright-eyed freshmen to buy into the culture of work, and while you might not see immediate payoff, perhaps when they’re seniors they’ll have worked hard enough to take a team to nationals. (Perhaps not). Making an impression takes a strong example–as tough as it may be to get, you need strong, hard-working leadership. It may not be possible to get everyone, but if you have an established core of hard-working veterans, that can and will resonate with young players who may be searching for just this outlet. Of particular importance is a team’s senior leadership–outside of a team’s captains, it’s these guys, the vets of the vets, that set the tone, and make the biggest impression on your freshmen.

The goal is to reach a tipping point with your hard workers where so many people are working so hard, the guys on the fringe will have no choice but to fall in line (or fall by the wayside).

It’s not easy. In particular, players need to see payoff for their hard work–obviously winning more games is a plus, but a big win like a strong showing at regionals (or perhaps just making regionals–your goal should be specific to your team’s situation) will go a long way towards creating a culture of success. Once players see that hard work leads to more success, it will become easier and easier to ask that of your teammates going forwards.

At least, this is what I think (and have seen). I think the biggest legacy any group of seniors can leave is the impression they make on their underclassmen. You can’t do it all yourself–you have to create a culture, a team system, that continually breeds success. Anyone can contend for a year–it’s making a Program that really takes work.

Feel free to chip in with your own thoughts and experiences.

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.

This is far too deep to be covered in a single post.

(Part 2 | Part 3)

But perhaps you’re interested in training and have been looking through some materials. There’s an absolute shitton of resources out there. Some of it’s crap, some of it’s useful–you can learn by doing and you can also cull wisdom from that which is repeated throughout many sources (usually–sometimes bad advice gets repeated. Use your discretion).

The big question, however, is how exactly do you go about structuring your training? I’ve already touched upon the essentials of this when I wrote about goal setting. If you haven’t set your goals, stop reading right now and figure them out. Honestly, if you don’t know what you’re working towards you’re just going to waste your time more often than not, unless you have somebody like a coach or a team to make goals for you. However, even those are not guaranteed to be in line with what you want, however, so take some time and think about it for yourself, too.

Structuring your training is like building a house. Your goals are the foundation upon which your progress will eventually be built. You can try building with a shitty foundation, but it’s likely to look pretty shitty when it’s done and be nothing close to what you expected, and will fall apart as easily. Get ‘em right–you can always refine later, but do it as well as you can from the get-go. Don’t be afraid to set ambitious goals; know that they can serve to motivate you more than setting no goals will.

Once you have your goals, you’re ready to plan. Where do you start from here?

Look at your goals. Let’s take a look at mine from two summers ago and use that as a framework:

.1. Eliminate Ankle/Knee woes
If you have pressing injury concerns, this should be at the forefront of your planning. For me, my ankle and knee issues were enough to limit how hard I could train in more general terms, limiting my range on squats for instance. I added a lot of single-leg work geared toward strengthening both, and TOOK CARE OF MY BODY. Get enough rest. Ice when it swells. Take ibuprofen if necessary. Braces are a question that depends on your needs–if you really need it or really need to perform now, go for it. Otherwise, aim to wean yourself off of it–even if you still feel compared to wear a brace, say, when playing, if you can get comfortable training without it you’re that much less likely to have the brace fail you as a sole support.

Injury prevention work means doing (pre)habilitation work before every workout. Even 5 or 10 minutes will help keep you from overdoing it and setting yourself back. It also means flexibility work. More on that later.

2. Get into “Better Shape.

Improve my Vertical.

Improve my Strength.

Train for General Physical Preparedness (GPP).

These are covered in more detail in the actual blog, but whatever your general fitness goals are will determine what direction your training should go in. Of course, a balanced program is best–one that doesn’t focus on strength to the point of sacrificing conditioning, etc. But keep in mind what your current needs are as well–sometimes a bit of sacrifice to shore up your weaknesses (or further augment your strengths) will ultimately lead to better results.

If your goals tend towards the explosive (ie, improving your vertical), you should focus on plyos. HOWEVER, focusing on the plyos alone won’t do it unless you’re out of shape–your absolute potential for being explosive is limited by your strength, so you should also include strength work. If you can’t squat your bodyweight, you shouldn’t be doing plyos. If you can’t squat at least 1.5 times your bodyweight, you shouldn’t be doing exclusively plyos. If you can’t squat 2x your bodyweight, you should not be doing too much of the really high-impact plyos (one-legged depth jumps and the like). Just trust me on this one, unless you want to shell out $40 for the VJDB to get the same info.

If your goals are more grounded in strength (this is often in addition to other goals), hit the weights. It’s a little beyond the scope of this entry to go into that in too much detail–but if you’ve never lifted before (and I mean on a regular basis–if you’re trying to structure your own program without knowing how and are reading this, you probably haven’t lifted in the way I mean), start with a focus on the basics–squat. Deadlift. Bench (if you’re inclined–and balance it out with some rows). Work in one-legged versions of the first two and a one-armed version of the last one. Train your core. I touch upon a bit more detail here as far as rep schemes go…if you’re in doubt, try 5×5. If you’re still learning the motions, go lighter and try for 3×8 or 3×10. Shoot for a total of between 20-30 reps (not counting warm-ups if you start light) on a given exercise in a given workout.

If you’re going for GPP (known by most as “conditioning,”) you have a lot of options. Crossfit is a great source of workouts (and workout resources–check out their exercises page!). You know what a conditioning workout is like–work hard, rest little, get better. The key is to make sure you can either time your workout or do it with a time limit for number of reps/distance covered/etc–in this way you can track your progress.

So, your goals are the foundation. The exercises are your tools. When you know generally what kind of exercises/workouts you want to do (finding them is where the research comes in–check out the exercises page of Crossfit, and give T-nation a scouring (search for squat, deadlift, bench press, and dig a little) if you need help with coaching–or better yet, find somebody who knows what’s what and learn from them. I’m talking somebody you pay, or somebody who shows the results of their own work–your roomate probably thinks he knows how to squat, but just dips his butt a few inches), how you combine your exercises into workouts and place them throughout the weeks and months provides the framework for your improvement. This is perhaps the trickiest part to master.

Anybody can go in to the gym and dick around for an hour or two every now and then. The reason why you set goals in the first place is because it is from this foundation that you can draw your motivation, and motivation is absolutely essential if you’re going to consistently work on the house that is your body and your athletic potential and make progress.

Next Saturday I’ll finish by talking more about specifics to how each component of training should be incorporated into a larger structure.

In the meantime, allow me to insert a plug for Ross Enamait. Quite frankly, my experience with program design is driven in large part by information I’ve gotten from his Infinite Intensity program. I recently purchased Never Gymless to guide my training here in Japan, and it has been equally helpful. Ross gives very broad guidelines and a number of specific exercises for you to pick and choose from (and a sample 50-day program if you’re a sheep and don’t want to bother to think for yourself–I’m not judging you, I swear), all of which are likely to do far more to enhance your training than my ramblings. The dude doesn’t pay me to give him shoutouts (Hah! Like I get enough traffic to warrant such a thing), this is just me speaking from my own experience.

See the frisbee clearly when you catch it.

This comes inspired by the Inner Game of Tennis, which I just read recently (if you fancy yourself an athlete, this is mandatory reading. If you hope to learn anything from athletics you can apply to the rest of your life, this is mandatory reading). Galwey, after an initial explanation of some fundamentals of tennis play (which is all tied in to performance and performance mindset), suggests simply to focus on the spin of the ball as a means to concentration, getting your mind out of your body’s way.

Have you ever dropped a disc because you were thinking about your next throw or how you were going to spike it or some other facet of the moment not directly related to the catching of the disc? I should amend that to “have you ever dropped a disc because you were thinking,” because all thoughts are a distraction.

It’s a bit tougher to constantly focus on one thing in ultimate–unlike in tennis, in which the ball is a constant object of focus, in ultimate the frisbee is really only your primary concern when it is in the air. With each facet of ultimate, you have to focus on the cues specific to that facet–the hips (interspersed with awareness of the frisbee’s location and the play developing around you) for defense, space and the thrower when cutting–and when you’re receiving and the disc is in the air, you should have little else on your mind beside the spin of the disc.

I don’t mean contemplate the spin of the disc, thinking about the disc’s spin. I mean, simply, noticing how it is spinning and moving in space. Let your body find and attack the frisbee (these are skills you develop with focused practice–perhaps more on that in a later post), and keep your mind out of it by devoting your attention to the disc’s spin.

Give it a try sometime when you’re tossing. Don’t judge based on initial results–you have to learn to trust your body, and your body has to learn that you’re trusting it, which can take a little while–but let it go for 10, 15 minutes and see if you don’t notice a difference, an extra ease to your motion. And then see if you can’t carry that same ease and relaxation into your in-game performance, too.