Get better at frisbee without leaving your room
The lockdown is over but I'm still a hermit
A friend of mine has a job where they sometimes end up with lots of free time during work hours. They need to be reasonably available—they can't leave and go to the park—but they're otherwise relatively free to spend their time how they want. We were chatting about how they might best use their time to improve at frisbee.
I have some ideas and thought it was worth making into a blog post to share with everyone. I've experimented with everything in this list myself—although I'm not currently doing all of them—and I include each of them in the list because I believe they've helped me.
A quick note on sources
There are no sources. There are no well-designed studies I can cite to prove that the skills you'd build doing the drills below will definitely transfer to on-the-field ultimate frisbee. I believe that skills do generally transfer somewhat across domains, although it's a slow and unpredictable process. Anyways, this is free advice—use what you like and don't use what you don't like!
Level I: Don't even need to leave your chair
Journal your frisbee goals. You'll only need to spend an hour or two on this, but it could have the biggest impact of any suggestion here. Spend some time writing out your thoughts on your skills progression. Which of your throws do you trust the most? Which throws do you still need to develop to reach the level you want to be at? What other skills do you need to strengthen?
Read my blog. Biased, but how could I not list it?
Read other frisbee content. There's lots of great ultimate content out there. There's some bad stuff, too—but even the bad ideas should get you thinking. Some well-known sources include The Huddle, Zip's Tips, Understanding Ultimate, Ultimate Rob (~2015 and earlier is when most of the technique/strategy tips were posted), Joe Mama Ultimate.
Ultiworld has lots of great older articles but I'm not sure how to efficiently find them all (and many of their articles have broken GIFs). As a start, here are the posts tagged: defense, analysis, film room, Tuesday Tips, and video breakdown.
When reading any content, I suggest taking notes—which ideas do you like that you've never heard before? Which ideas do you not agree with? You can go back to your notebook (digital or physical) a few months later to quickly remember all the most useful ideas.
Don't be overly focused on reading (or watching videos) to the exclusion of building other skills. There comes a point where knowing what good frisbee looks like isn't enough and you need to do the hard work of building up the skills to be able to play good frisbee.
Watch film. Watching film does not mean "open up an ultimate game on YouTube and press play". Watch the game and really try to understand what happened. You should be making liberal use of the ability to Pause, Rewind (hot tip: hitting the left arrow on YouTube will take you back five seconds) and go Slo-Mo (hot tip: the < and > buttons change the playback speed).
If someone catches an open pass, do you know how they got open? Rewind and find out—what were they looking at? How did they time their cut? How did they change their positioning before the cut started? Do you know what type of offense (and defense) is being played on the point you're currently watching? Do you notice open players who the thrower didn't see? What do you need to change about your game so you don't miss those opportunities? (And same goes for the defense—what mistakes did they make that let the receiver get open? etc.)
Not every point is "interesting", but when you do finding a sequence worth exploring further, it should take you much longer to "watch film" of it than it took in real time.
Play brain games like Zig Zag and N-Back
Brain training games famously don't work. I try to share only good science on this blog, but this is one case where I'm not sure I agree with the science. If you have free time that would otherwise be "wasted", brain games are worth trying. Here's the short version of why I'm skeptical of the skeptics:
Many studies are too short. I don't trust any study on building skills that only lasts 6-10 weeks. How much have you ever improved at frisbee in 6 weeks? You can hardly notice the difference in such a short time span, but on longer time spans you can make obvious improvements.
But there are longer studies that still show brain games don't work, so here are my other complaints:They prove too much. This study, for example, shows that brain games don't work even when the tests they used to measure cognitive improvement were specifically chosen to be similar to the brain games used for training. They're very nearly proving that nothing transfers at all, which is obviously false. I'd like to see some discussion of this research that explains to me why these skills wouldn't transfer when other skills do.
They don't train the test tasks. My mental model of how brain training would work is "you do some brain training and then you also play lots of ultimate to slowly 'integrate' the skills that training helped build. But that's not what happens in these studies, at least in the few well-known studies I've skimmed like the link above. They train on one game, and then are tested on another game, without training it. There's no integration period.
My mental model of how skill transfer works, based on personal experience and books like David Epstein's Range, is that transfer is slow, is unpredictable, and requires extensive integration time. Being good at basketball didn't immediately make me a great frisbee player, but when I had a few years to integrate my basketball knowledge into frisbee contexts, that previous experience raised my skill ceiling compared to people without my athletic background.
All that being said, I think a game like Zig Zag may help you improve your ability to (a) quickly have an intuitive sense of confusing geometries and (b) get comfortable making decisions uncomfortably fast (something I've written about before, in fact). Don't forget to actually challenge yourself to get better. I don't expect the benefit to be large, but small improvements is all we're chasing after here, anyway. I can semi-consistently get scores of over 1 minute, if you want a goal to shoot for.
N-Back is a famous brain game that trains your short term memory. "Remembering where things were when you can't currently see them" is an important awareness skill for frisbee players and when combined with lots of ultimate I think there's a chance getting stronger at this game will help your ultimate.
Meditate. There's evidence that meditation is good for your stress and emotional health and stuff, right? Besides those general benefits, there's two specific reasons I think meditation is good for athletes:
First, a Zen mindset is useful in high-stress, high-performance situations. Being in the present, having high levels of awareness of your surroundings, not dwelling on the past, not overthinking things—all of these are concepts I learned from meditation and Buddhism. They're also exactly the mindset you want when you're on the universe point line.
Second, it may help develop your awareness. I've already made the connection between meditation and awareness in a previous article. Meditation challenges you to notice your thoughts, which are surprisingly hard to notice. The same challenge exists in becoming a more-aware frisbee player—you need to somehow break out of your usual mental patterns and start noticing things you previously didn't.
Practice breath holding. In general, our bodies are built to send us signals to stop well before we reach our limits. The uncomfortable truth is that being an athlete requires us to learn to resist what those feelings are telling us, to some extent. For more, here's my book review of Endure. Although it's important to stop before going past those limits, it's safe to learn to ignore some of those signals.
In the abstract, dealing with the pain of holding our breath trains us to endure those signals. More specifically, breath holding trains our body to get used to dealing with less oxygen and more CO2 than it wants—which is roughly similar to when we're doing an intense cardio workout. I was a bit worried this suggestion was too deranged, so I was happy to see Healthline.com actually agrees that breath holding is useful for "generally improving breathing and lung function".
Level II: A frisbee in hand, but not throwing it
Practice switching your grip. This is a classic "thing you can do at home". Practice switching between your forehand and backhand grip, uncomfortably fast. Having a quicker release is always useful. Efficiently changing your grip helps with that. Rowan has some great suggestions here, I especially like the way he throws the disc up to himself so he needs to clap catch it and immediately transition into his grip.
Practice getting your elbow back on forehands. Did you see the image of Jimmy Mickle's forehand windup in my article on forehand hucks? 90% of frisbee players don't get their elbow back that far when they throw. It'll take lots of actual throwing practice to change your form, but as a start you can just do some windups in your room. Bring that elbow all the way back—you should be able to feel the stretch in your shoulder & pectorals—and then whip it forward, leading with the elbow and letting your forearm stay loose.
(Similarly, you could practice getting a fuller swing on your backhand hucks. Wind up so far that you can feel the stretch behind your shoulder blade, and then whip your arm around so fast it winds up behind your back.)
Practice huge step outs on your throw. Are you comfortable stepping way out on a backhand? Marks are much easier to ignore when you have no problem just stepping around them and releasing from a spot too low for them to get their hand on.
Again, it will take lots of actual throwing practice to master a new throw, but as a first step you can grab a disc and practice doing huge pivot lunges in your room. Warning: this will turn into a leg workout surprisingly quickly. I'm about six feet tall and can somewhat comfortably touch the disc to the ground six feet from my pivot point. I recommend practicing with a left-handed pivot as well so both legs get a workout.
I never really mastered the low release forehand but you can practice those pivots as well:
Level III: Active, but not using a frisbee
Work out. Frisbee players don't need to be absurdly strong, but there's clear benefits to having a baseline level of strength. Do a set of pushups (20 pushups with good form is a solid goal to aim for). For legs, the pistol squat is a great option for a challenging motion you can do in your room without any weights (aim for a set of 5-6 squats, each leg). I like the L-sit for working the core (hold it and swing your legs side-to-side if it gets easy).
Practice your balance. There's some evidence that having better balance might help prevent injuries. And I assume it's just a good skill for an athlete to have in general—the more time you spend on the field fully in control of your body, the better. Get a balance disc and practice some simple drills. Do them with your eyes closed when you start getting good. Balance boards are a bit more expensive and give you some new options for balance practice.
Practice catching with a catch trainer. Get one of these little guys and practice catching it by yourself. My technique: throw it up in the air, and while it's airborne I decide (a) which color to catch and (b) which hand to catch it with (with three options—left hand, right hand, and clap catch).
Level IV: Throwing stuff
Even if you're alone in a room with free time, it might be hard to throw stuff—people in the rooms around you might get annoyed if you're making too much noise. I do have one noise-control suggestion: if you're at home, some of these drills can be done while standing over your bed. Mis-thrown discs will (mostly) land quietly instead of loudly rolling around the floor. Laying a spare blanket on the floor is another option. Obviously do these drills with clean discs that you don't use outdoors, we aren't cavemen here!
Back when we were all locked down during the pandemic, Rowan put out some suggestions on drills you could do indoors:
Ultimate Frisbee Indoor Throwing Routine — partner throwing drills
Indoor Ultimate Frisbee Training Drills | Part 1 — drills you can do alone
He's got some good ideas, here are a few I'd like to add:
Learn to juggle. Juggling frisbees is one of Rowan's suggestions, but if you don't already know how to juggle, I suggest starting with something simpler like tennis balls instead of frisbees. I'm sure YouTube has some extremely good tutorials—this one has a few million views.
Juggling will build your general hand-eye coordination, and will get you comfortable with catching and throwing uncomfortably fast.
Juggle 2 or 3 discs horizontally. Rowan holds his discs vertically when he juggles (the rim of the disc points at the sky), but if you're a real frisbee sicko like me, you can learn to juggle while holding the discs horizontally, like you're throwing a backhand. This took me a lot of practice, but I think it helped me develop a lightning-quick release.
I suggest both juggling two discs using one hand and juggling three discs using both hands. I actually can't get them totally flat but they're mostly horizontal:
Throw to yourself to practice generating spin. Rowan suggests throwing underhand scoobers—but I'm not sure why he doesn't suggest throwing normal scoobers to yourself. Work on getting them to spin clean and (uncomfortably) fast. I have a huge scoober compared to most people and I think doing this helped a lot. You can also practice getting lots of spin on your hammers — lay down on your back in bed and throw hammers towards the ceiling.
And it goes without saying that you can practice getting lots of spin on your backhand too. Practice your high release, getting the disc as close to the ceiling as possible without actually hitting it. Work on your off-hand as well!
Throw at a target on your bed. (Again, clean discs!) Throw a few hair elastics down on your bed and use them for target practice. The short distance forces you to use touch on your throws. Practice all your throws: forehands, scoobers, high release backhands, etc.
Do these drills with mini discs. Disc Store includes one of these with most orders. Perhaps if you ask nicely they'll throw in an extra one or two. They're quieter if they fall on the floor and overall are a good size for some of these indoor drills, since they don't go as far. Getting good with different sized discs is helpful because varying your practice environment (disc size, in this case) helps your body calibrate itself (as I've written before).
Got any suggestions I haven't included here? Leave a comment!
(Updated 2024-02-19):
When I wrote this I remembered there being an Ultiworld article on a similar topic, but I couldn’t find the link. I eventually did find it so I’ll add it here: Tuesday Tips: 50 Ultimate Things For Fun or Improvement You Can Do When Stuck Home Alone