Don't 'turn the palm up' on forehands
(but please read enough to understand exactly what I mean by that)
A reader wrote in with some excellent feedback to my post last week on forehands. Here's one thing they had to say:
I think I (and I think some of the other articles you referenced) would disagree with your description of how the wrist moves (based on my understanding). The way it seems you're describing it, you'd have your palm facing forward during the throw and during the release/follow through...there's definitely a "palm up" aspect to the forehand.
I think you want your palm facing the sky, and roughly keep that palm up during the follow through as well.
I agree that, in slo-mo videos of people throwing forehands, their palm will be pointing, at least partly, towards the sky. And that might be confusing in regards to the diagrams in my previous post. I plan to write more about that later, but a quick comment for now: yes, the palm will often appear up, but I don't think this should necessarily be something that we focus on or teach. I think it's the natural result of a good grip and good throwing motion (things that I do think we should teach!).
I want to argue against a slightly different variant of this advice that I've heard before: that we should turn our palm up at the end of our throwing motion. For example, an Ultiworld article on the forehand says:
From experience, one obvious cue for very new forehand throwers is to keep the palm faced up during the wrist snap. Pronating (turning over) your wrist on release is a common issue and results in the disc curving outside-in and down.
I don't like this advice. Let's look at some images/GIFs that I've taken from Joe Marmerstein's Throwing Form playlist.
Here's someone who Ultiworld has called "possibly the best thrower on the planet". Here she is at the moment of release on a flick huck:
And here's what it looks like a moment later:
That's right, she turns her palm down, quite noticeably. Here's the same images in GIF form:
I was interested in seeing how Manu Cardenas throws her flick hucks, but in the video, she's throwing in Crocs and not moving her feet at all so I don't consider it representative of her actual hucks. (I'm also curious if Valeria's form has changed between 2019 and now—watching her play it seems like she's reached a new level recently.)
Here's someone that Ultiworld called "one of the most accomplished throwers in ultimate history".
Here's a side view:
And from the front (I'm not sure if these are from the same throw or not):
I included more of the follow through in this GIF because I think it shows something very interesting. From the moment of release until halfway through the follow through, he's turning his palm down (it goes from pointing up to pointing to the side—it never really faces down here like Valeria's does). But then, well after the disc has left his hand, he turns the palm up again.
His arm is moving so fast that we might not be able to see this if it weren't for the slow motion video. We'd likely just see that he ends with his palm up, and as a result we'd probably think that his palm was up the whole time, or that turning the palm up affected the flight of the disc (which it can't have, since it happened after the disc left his hand).
I couldn't find any Ultiworld pull quotes, but Michael Ing is obviously also extremely good at throwing frisbees. In his form we see something similar to what we saw with Jimmy Mickle. Here's a GIF showing the three moments, like in the Jimmy GIF above:
And here's the full follow through, in extreme slow motion:
It's pretty clear to me that the palm is being turned slightly down as the disc is being released, and then he twists his arm a bit, well after the disc is released, to turn the palm back up.
What's going on here?
To me, there's a story here. Players often learn that they're supposed to turn their palm up. But the best players also throw enough hucks that they learn what actually works for their body. This results in what we see Mickle and Ing doing above: throwing in a way that works, and then twisting their palm up after the disc has been released, since that's what they learned they were "supposed" to do. It's innocuous enough that it doesn't stop top throwers from having good flick hucks, but it is superfluous at best, and at worse there are people out there whose throws are suffering because they try to stop their wrist turning over.
I'm sure the 'turn the palm up' advice has been helpful to many people. I agree with the quote from Ultiworld above that many beginners need to learn to make their forehands have less OI. Perhaps 'turn the palm up' works as a mental cue to make their throws flatter, even though actually turning their palm up isn't what's making their throws better. But as these slow motion videos show, stopping the wrist turning over during the release isn't what makes top throwers have effective forehand hucks. Yes, we need to teach people to get more IO on their throws. But we can come up with better cues that actually correspond to the physical reality of what our bodies doing.
Topspin in tennis
If any of you are nerdy sports freaks like me, this story might ring a bell. A similar thing happened a while back in tennis. For a long time, players were often taught to "roll their wrist over the ball" when hitting forehands. (In our context of talking about palms, this is equivalent to saying they should turn their palm down). But tennis culture has since learned that this is bad advice. The story at that link says that this advice is:
the epitome of everything that’s wrong with tennis coaching...and probably the sentence that’s caused more forehand errors and wrist pain than any other ever spoken.
filming [at 250 frames per second] reveals that there is no wrist snap involved in pro forehands, even with players such as Agassi and Haas. Rather than flick the wrist, pro players hit their forehands with the palm of the hand.
To do this, they establish a set hitting arm position as they start the forward swing to the ball. This position remains unchanged until long after the ball is off the strings.
To the naked eye, both players may appear to use considerable wrist, but this perception is due to the limits of human vision. The naked eye cannot register an event that takes place in 4 milliseconds--the length of time it takes for a tennis racket to strike a tennis ball. What the racket, hitting arm, and wrist are doing at the contact are, literally, invisible to the human eye.
Similarly, if we just watched Jimmy's forehand huck in person, we'd see the end result (his palm turned up), but the intermediate steps are invisible to us since they're at such high speed. Him turning his palm up, since it clearly happens after the disc is released, can't be affecting the flight path.
In the tennis example, the myth started because the wrist turning is a natural part of the follow through motion. In ultimate, I think this is not a natural part of the follow through (since their palms are turning down first), but rather it's just bad information passed down through the culture, that was reinforced when we could only watch great throwers throwing hucks at full speed.
Final thoughts
To be quite honest, watching all these slow motion throwing videos has made me less confident that I know what perfect form looks like. So don't take this article as the gospel truth, but rather as an interesting idea that hopefully starts some conversations and pushes back against the conventional wisdom.
I was also surprised watching these videos by the amount that one person's form can change from throw to throw. Different throws from the same video may show the phenomenon I've shown here to a lesser extent. But there's enough of a pattern that I think it's worth sharing what I've found.
To recap:
Having the palm pointing towards the sky before the disc is released: a natural result of our grip and throwing motion, mostly just noticeable in slow motion, and probably not worth thinking about too much.
Trying to turn the palm up at the end of the throwing motion: unnecessary. Most likely superfluous and not actually changing the disc's flight path.
You don't need to try to turn your palm up as you release the disc. You can throw like Valeria Cardenas instead.