More "Forehand Mechanics That Aren't Taught"
A few tips for those looking to refine their flick
Johnny Bansfield's Forehand Mechanics That Aren't Taught is a classic frisbee essay for those of us who like to theorize about throwing form.
I want to add to the discussion with my own version. Here are a few cue I've found helpful. As far as I can tell these ideas are rarely mentioned, or at least not fully appreciated, in discussions of forehand form.
Many of the points I'll make here build on a previous essay, Forehand: wrist, grip, and wobble. Consider reading it first if you haven't already. The main claim of that article is:
Wobble happens when the forces applied to the disc cause it to rotate around an axis that's not identical to the disc’s axis of symmetry
Two things determine the way we apply forces to the disc: the way we grip the disc, and the way we rotate our wrist
For optimal control and power, there is—probably—a best way to rotate your wrist: through a natural front-to-back motion (flexion and extension). Don't "serve the pizza".
Given that there's an optimal way to rotate our wrists, we should reduce wobble by adjusting the other factor: the way we grip the disc.
In short...grip is pretty important. In the sections below, I'll share a few cues I found useful in optimizing my grip.
As always when it comes to throwing and form changes, let's start with a few caveats:
Changing your form is a frustrating process and can take weeks-to-months. You'll often get worse at throwing before you get better. (I say that from experience.)
There's no "one correct form". I believe there are general principles—based in physics/biomechanics—that guide what efficient form is. But everyone's form won't be completely identical. If your throws are already what you want them to be, feel free to ignore my advice. This article is meant for people looking for solutions. Some people might need none of these tips, some people might benefit from one or two, and a few people might benefit from all of them.
These tips are mostly based on personal experience. I believe in these tips because they helped me, but I don't have years of success helping people fix their throws with these tips. Maybe I just had uniquely bad instincts and *I* needed to find and apply these fixes but other people won't need to.
Let's go:
As Johnny says, bend those fingers
Two of Johnny's main points have become relatively well known in the 10+ years his article has been online:
Getting the thumb way up on top of the disc: "As you can see, with the thumb sitting well into the flight rings–if not past them–there is a visible difference in the amount of disc control."
Aligning the disc with your forearm (which I also discuss in my article, linked above): "the angle between the disc and the forearm should also be around 160 degrees." The modern consensus, from what I can tell, is that a perfectly-parallel 180 degrees is optimal, but Johnny was certainly on the right track.
But I think his last main point is still under-appreciated: the way our index and middle fingers are bent, inside the disc.
In his forehand how-to on Ultiworld, Kyle Weisbrod called Johnny's description "so detailed it makes my head spin a bit." In a previous post, I also called Johnny's article "half-deranged, half-brilliant". I never really understood why Johnny didn't just include a diagram. He has a few photos but they're quite zoomed out if your goal is to highlight a slight bend in the fingers. I'm going to rectify that by making a diagram myself (below).
Pretty much, he's saying that:
the bigger joint on your finger is a bit bent—i.e. your fingers are ever-so-slightly curled up into a fist, and
the small joint at the end of your finger is slightly bent in the other direction. (Personally, I've found this counter-curl of the small joint comes naturally when you squeeze the disc.)
Here's a diagram I made showing what my index/middle fingers are doing under the disc:
Below is a picture of my own fingers under the disc. I had to twist my arm around to take a picture of my own hand under the disc, and I moved my pinky and ring fingers out of the way to highlight what my index and middle fingers are doing. As a result of the awkward positioning, I think my fingers ended up slightly more bent than they usually are—and more bent than Johnny suggests.
Johnny says this finger bend helps generate power, and I agree with him. (Roughly: you're putting your body in a better position to generate power in the pushing direction. Metaphorically, If you needed to push a car down the street, you'd put your body right behind it, you wouldn't stand off to the side and push with your arm outstretched. Curling your fingers a bit similarly puts them behind the spot you’re pushing instead of off to the side.) But I think there's another reason, too.
In his how-to video on the forehand, Rowan McDonnell also suggest bending these fingers slightly, but he doesn't have a great explanation of why we should bend them. He just says we do it "so it's comfortable":
Here's why I think that bend is important, and should be stressed more in teaching: a bent index finger allows you to support the underside of the disc further from the edge. Many new players go to the "split finger" grip because they feel they can't adequately support the disc from underneath otherwise.
If your only choices are "split finger grip" or "fingers straight on the edge of the disc", then it's not surprising so many newbies have trouble supporting the disc underneath. But elite throwers who have their fingers bent are actually getting the best of both worlds—the tip of the index finger is near the edge of the disc, but the curl of the finger allows the disc to be supported from underneath at a bit of distance from the edge.
Mechanically, we can think of the disc as a lever—a see-saw—with a variety of forces acting on it. If the index finger is supporting the underside of the disc right next to the edge, it's very hard to use counter forces to align the disc in your hand. Getting the index finger further out makes it easier to use pressure on the top side to align the disc into the correct spot. Here are a few more diagrams (imagine there’s a forearm aligned horizontally, coming from the left edge of the page):
Note on the diagrams: for the diagrams above (and coming up below), imagine I'm showing a cut-through view of the disc, cut along the purple line in the picture below:
Because my index finger is roughly pointing along the rim of the disc (towards the left side of this picture), it shows up in the cross section as a cylinder. My thumb, however, is roughly pointing towards the center of the disc, so it shows up (in the images in the next section) still looking more-or-less like a thumb. I hope that's clear enough!
In summary, while “bend your index/middle fingers” is a common suggestion, I think it remains underrated as a teaching tool because people don’t fully understand what makes it an effective technique—i.e. the way it makes it easier to ‘lever’ the disc into the right position in your hand (along with how it helps generate power).
Squeeze with the whole length of the thumb
My next tip follows along the same line of thinking. Everyone says you should squeeze the disc tightly (source: every Reddit thread asking for throwing tips, ever). I don't disagree with them, exactly. But I imagine some people hear "squeeze" and think that means pushing down with the tip of your thumb—your thumbprint—as if you're squeezing two fingers together. But I've found it useful to squeeze with my entire thumb. As a diagram:
It turns out that this wasn't as unknown as I thought—Rowan makes a somewhat similar point. He says you want to push with the joint just below your thumbprint:
I'm of a slightly different opinion—I think you can push with the whole thumb. The explanation for this is pretty much the same point I made in my previous discussion of the index finger: the closer to the edge of the disc that the thumb is pushing, the more leverage you're generating to push the outside edge of the disc 'up'. The topside forces that are further from the balance of the lever (i.e. your index finger underneath) are contributing more to pushing the disc. (In physics terms: moment = force * distance. Apply the force at a larger distance from the fulcrum of the lever—your index finger—and you get more out of it.)
(But this raises a question: if thumb pressure near the edge is good, then why is everyone convinced that the thumb should be way up on the top of the disc? I'm not sure I have a great answer, so I'm just going to mumble something about how "it's better for your control overall". If your thumb is further up, you can choose from a variety of pressure distributions, while if you barely get your thumb over the edge of the disc, there's only one spot you can push on. It’ll also help you support the disc from underneath when you turn it upside-down for a hammer/scoober.)
One final detail here: as you've seen in the diagram above, the full-thumb pressure isn't just pushing the top of the disc, the base of the thumb is pushing on the side of the disc, too.
This side push is useful too. First, it just makes the disc more snug overall. Second, this counterbalancing force on the outside of the rim lets you load up more pressure onto your middle finger pushing on the inside of the rim, which I think may help generate a bit more power.
A tighter grip shouldn't always mean "more pressure everywhere"
One final point about how pressure applied to the disc aligns it in our hands. As mentioned, everyone will always tell you to grip the disc tighter. But if your wobble is caused by the disc being mis-aligned, more squeeze might not help too much.
Consider adding more squeeze in specific locations. Some people (I've been one of them) might benefit from pushing more with the index finger on the underside, without adding thumb pressure. Others might need more thumb pressure, or a different distribution of thumb pressure. It's even possible to push more with the ring finger where it supports the bottom edge of the disc.
All of these small pressure adjustments are rotating the disc slightly in your hand, so they'll affect how much the disc wobbles.
Hopefully this section is clear enough without any photos or diagrams. "More pressure" shouldn't always be applied willy-nilly. Sometimes you need to figure out where the disc needs more support to bring it into an optimal alignment.
Don't distort your hand & wrist: bring disc to hand, not hand to disc
As others have pointed out, there's a paradox in gripping the disc: we want a certain amount of pressure, but we also want to be relaxed and fluid so we can whip the wrist and transfer forces efficiently.
At one point in the development of my form, I realized that in order to grip the disc, I was distorting my wrist and my hand. They started in a neutral position—not bent in any direction—but after grabbing the disc my wrist would be tilted at a weird angle.
I adjusted my grip to make sure my wrist and hand were still neutral after grabbing the disc.
I don't have a fancy camera setup to make it easy to take identical photos, but hopefully the GIF below gets the point across. When I grab the disc, it just looks like I'm closing my hand. I'm not twisting my wrist up or down or around, and I'm not twisting my hand itself. I'm letting the disc fit into my hand.
(Note on the images above: If it seems the disc has an odd alignment with my forearm, that's mostly an effect of the camera angle, as I've pointed out previously.)
I believe this is one of the factors that lets me have a good combination of snug grip and fluid motion. I'm not activating any more muscles/ligaments than strictly necessary to hold the disc.
(Similarly, you also don’t want your grip to cause the disc to warp in your hand. It’ll wobble as it un-warps upon release. Your hand should fit around the disc, and the disc should fit in your hand.)
Perhaps this is just a "me problem", and most people instinctively grasp the disc in this 'neutral' way. But it took me some practice to learn to let the disc fit in my hand. (To try to put into words what helped me: I sort of used my off-hand to rotate the entire disc relative to my throwing hand. Eventually it came to an alignment where I could just close my fist instead of needing to 'reach out' towards the disc.)
Final thoughts
These ideas may not be helpful to everyone. But I hope they can make their way to the people who will be helped by them. Please treat them as interesting theories and not gospel truth.
In The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey points out that we want to perform athletic actions (like throwing a disc!) without thinking. We should be able to trust our bodies and our "muscle memory". I agree with this 100%.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the way I throw. But then, once I've started to imprint a new pattern into my body's memory through being intentional with my focus while throwing, I make sure to switch back to fluidity. I intentionally practice clearing my mind, relaxing, trusting my body, and throwing based on instinct. More than once that's been the last little cue I needed to put it all back together again—and so that's my last cue for you today, too. (Specific suggestion: try throwing with your eyes closed sometimes. I bet you’ll be surprised how good you are at it.)