Welcome to this episode of the Disc Golf Answer Man Show. I am Bobby, Cool Daddy, Slick breeze, and I have with me a special guest, Mr. Clint Easterly and he has blitz disc golfer blitz DG on YouTube. OK, so let me tell you a little back story. So I watch body Cam videos, I watch police videos, I watch true crime stories a little bit of I don't know if he ever heard it delivered, but he does like live car shows. And of course I watched my fair
share of disc golf videos. Well, I was thumbing through YouTube and I saw this video saying something about throwing 400 feet and I thought I would love to be able to throw 400 feet. I want to hear what this guy to say. And of course, popped up Clint, nice casual. Just I think you're, you're in your yard, right? Your front yard or backyard. And yeah, it was just you were just talking about some maybe myths or misconceptions of about throwing far.
And I watched the whole video and I was like, I really like this guy's approach to things and I want to get him on the show. So I reached out to you and you said yes. So thank you so much for getting on the show. But real quick, just in case anybody hadn't heard of you, tell me a little bit. Tell me your kind of your elevator pitch as far as your disc golf story. Oh, elevator pitch. OK, well, I started playing disc golf not that that long ago,
about 3 years ago. I was a powerlifting coach before. I've done a lot of powerlifting basically, you know, just fitness stuff. And about 3 years ago one of my buddies from my military service actually came and visited me and was like there's you got this disc golf course by your house, let's go out there and just Chuck some discs. So we rented, you know, some like super like in of ADX Sidewinder type discs.
We went out there and chucked a few, never played before really and never like had terrible form whatever. And I don't know, I just kind of got addicted to it. So I spent about a year trying to get better, learn to throw and watch everything I could possibly watch. I'm a really, I have like a really addictive personality. So if I get into something, I'm just like laser focused, like I'll watch 10 hours a day of like form videos and this stuff.
And I had kind of a good background for form in general. And I was pretty athletic already because I've been
working out for a long time. So I got to throw in pretty quick, pretty far, pretty quick, I guess I should say and I started out X step and one day I just tried standstilling like I always knew my standstill was pretty fast, but I got a tech disc and I was like, all right, well let's see what the difference is and I could perform better more of the time with a standstill than a next step. So I was like, OK, well let's see how far I can take this.
Did that for a while, broke 70, broke 500 feet, you know, six months into disc golf or something like that. And then, you know, as I've watched all this coaching and disc golf form stuff, I kind of realized that like none of it was really hitting on like what I found that made me able to throw far and like how I taught other people to throw far and it was more about like be exactly like this. Otherwise you can't throw far. And I, I don't think it's like
that. I think it's so much more like a fluid movement and creating power the way that your body is good at creating power instead of just being like really dogmatic, like you need to look exactly like this. You need to be balanced on this leg with this leg in the air. Just never really, I never really had to do any of that. Like once I got to, you know, 70 miles an hour, I could do it from like all different positions. So yeah, I made my first video two years ago.
I think it is. And it just took off. Like I, you know, I thought I was just making a video just to ramble on my back porch, you know, And it just took off. Like people really liked it. And they really kind of, I guess it, it reached out to them and they learned, you know, something they didn't know. And then it just kind of
snowballed from there. I started teaching more and more people and getting really good results and having like a really good ratio of like people who came to me and increase their speeds, you know, 5-10 miles an hour pretty quickly. So I don't know, I kind of stumbled into being a content creator. It's so funny, 'cause like, you know, I have a daughter and she's, it's just so weird that I'm, I'm a content. Creator.
Yeah. Yeah, 'cause I'm like, you know, previous military, like not very like sociable. And I'm the guy who's on YouTube, like with a bunch of subscribers. So it's really strange. I love it, I love it. That's just way as I've talked to different people about content creation, it seems like that's just how it starts is that I just want to make a couple videos. I thought maybe people would like it, and then it just it clicks, which is really cool.
So what branch of the military were you in? I was in the army, I did six years. Very cool. Did you got to see get to see a lot of the country or? Yeah, I was at a few different duty stations, Oklahoma, Georgia, so did a deployment, that kind of stuff, so. Yeah. So, and you mentioned powerlifting, so is that something that you did you just start lifting weights a little bit then looked into powerlifting or how'd you get into that? Yeah, I actually was not super
athletic as a kid either. Like I played almost no sports in high school. I wrestled for like a year and I was always really big into like wrestling and stuff like that with my dad. He was a drill Sergeant, taught hand to hand combat, blah, blah, blah. So we were arm wrestling and wrestling were like our ways of showing affection, which was probably not very mentally healthy, emotionally healthy, but yeah.
Very cool. OK, So the first thing when you said powerlifting and you know, you, you look like you, you know, you obviously you look like you work out. Tell me because that's as my years in in in disc golf and talking to people on the podcast, it does seem like a misconception that to get distance you have to have a lot of power in the sense of somebody with muscles. It would make sense that they could RIP the disc and make it go far. Tell me your stance on that.
So I mean, there's some truth to it for sure, 100%. Like I think that your ceiling is going to go up the more power you can produce, like muscularly for sure, OK. But generally, like the most important thing in my opinion is like coordination. So you can be athletic and not be super strong. So there's tons of, I mean, all kinds of like track athletes. They're not super big, bulky, strong, but they're extremely coordinated.
And like you see this, you know, in all of the really good disc golf players, the pro Tor players, they're not huge bulky, but they're really well coordinated, like probably way more than people think. And it's because they started doing this when they were kids. So I mean, when you're that young, like your neuroplasticity, right, is just so like anything you do, your body is just like super computing all these micro movements to make it efficient.
So their coordination when it comes to throwing disc is just like top, top tier. And I think there is carryover though from like, like lifting weights. It's not really the strength that's going to make you throw crazy far, but it is being able to use your muscles and coordination, right? So even if you're not that big, if you do sports, if you're athletic in general, you're going to be able to learn the movement better because you're just able to coordinate your body parts better.
That's just part of being an athlete. Yeah, I, I noticed that a lot of times we at first when we started disc golf answer me, it was a lot more of people sending in a lot of questions, right? And the biggest question that came across was always, how do I get more distance? How do I get more distant? What would you say is a basic? What is a misunderstanding that most people have when it comes
to achieving distance? OK, I think the most blatant one that I probably talked about the most is like the misconception that you need to throw with your hips. Like I think that I think there was a lot of coaching done. I don't know when like I'm not super like ingrained in the history of this sport. But throwing with your hips, like the idea that you like rotate your hips forward and then your body follows or the disc follows is just like you can see in the data in the mocap stuff we have.
It's not true. Like you were not initiating your hips and then ripping your torso through and ripping your arm through. That's not how you achieve like the highest speeds in disc golf. So like, I think a lot of people get caught in the throwing with their hips mindset where they're really just trying to like wrench their hips through first thing. And that's all it does is like collapses the geometry of like their upper body. So they're not getting as efficient of like a release.
And that's the most important thing. Like, I like to describe it like you can make, let's just say like 100 lbs of power, 100 kilowatts of power, right? However, what percent you use of that, like that's actually going to the disk is the most important thing, right, 'cause if you're not being efficient with how much of that force is actually getting to the disk, you can add more and more and more leg power and it's just, it doesn't really matter, right?
And there's like there's a point where you're adding so much light power you're you're taking away from the efficiency. So it's like you're adding a bunch of like effort, but you're actually getting less distance. And that's kind of one of the things that I focus on on my channel is like efficiency in your swing path and your upper body mechanics to actually get as much of the energy as possible to the disc is the most
important thing. And then you add more light power once you already have that efficiency, and you only add what you can keep that efficiency with. Interesting, very interesting. There's something you did mention in that one video, I believe it was that particular video. Is that how some people don't understand or don't think about it, that there's so many variables happening? There's so many things happening in your body when you have a good throw, right?
There's so many things, timing and, you know, movement. So if you don't mind, I'd like to start like from the bottom and kind of work our way up the body of like what are the best practices or things to keep in mind? So let's start with the feet, the stance, or even the walk or X step or whatever step you're you would suggest. Walk us through the mindset of what you need for that. OK, so I think for one, most people in my opinion just
started a standstill. It is much less to manage when you don't need to be like dynamically affecting your balance into the throw. Like it's it's extremely hard to get an efficient X step and it takes like years even for a top tier athlete to get a really good X step into brace where they're using the momentum effectively to add power to the disc. Most people are just X stepping and messing their mechanics up. So they would throw farther if they just made it less complicated and got the
mechanics right, I would say. But starting from the bottom, it's kind of hard to go through every single thing in detail. I've actually thought about doing a video like this before. There's just so much going on. It's really hard to like hit everything. But generally what I like to see is the first thing is your lower body needs to be sturdy and stable. That's kind of like, and there are other coaches that talk about this now too.
It's kind of a recent thing where it used to be everyone was just like rotate as fast as you can. And now people are understanding it's not really rotate as fast, as fast as you can. It's like you want to be sturdy and stable in your lower body so that you're actually able to use your torso and configure your upper body correctly. And only when you can do that do you add some momentum. So I kind of preach simplify your lower body like a wide leg. Standstill is the best place to start.
You're going to have a ton of angle on your brace leg, so you're not going to be able to kind of go past it. It's going to be really easy to stay in balance and allow you to figure out kind of your torso power and the geometry kind of of your upper body, which matters a lot for efficiency. The majority of power is coming from your arm.
We have study, we have data like Chris Taylor, Eunice Merlis, they're doing kind of studies on mocap stuff and muscle activation and the majority of your powers coming from your arm. So like the idea that you're throwing with your hips and rotating in your arm as a noodle, It's, it's just not true. Like you're the muscles activating in your arm are, I mean, they just are activating and they are the majority of
power. And we've done a bunch of testing to like, how far do you throw a standstill to X step on your knees? Like we, we do these tests to see what percentage of power you can throw from each position, right? So on your knees, you're just unable, you're much less able to use your hips as a power source. And we're still seeing people throw like 80% of their Max, you know, from their knees. So it's like your hips are adding much less than people originally thought, I think.
Yeah, That that, that surprised me that you said that because that's always what I, I would think is that the, the rotation, the power, the whip or whatever comes from the from the hip. But it's a cultural thing too. Like everybody thought that, right? Like everybody has thought that. And it's only recently that people are starting to realize like it's not as much rotation equals power.
And like we see that in we have like angular velocity metrics on throws, right, where hip rotation does not equal more mile per hour out of your hands. So it is not spin faster to throw harder, right? It's a lot more about coordinate everything, be efficient and you just need kind of not that much hip rotation. So that's the first thing I would say be stable, be sturdy, get it wider base where you kind of can't mess up. Learn to use your torso for a
good majority of the rotation. Your torso is is a huge contributor to rotation, probably much more than your hips. And learn to use your arm effectively because you have to use your arm like it is. It's not debatable when you look at the data that you're just, you have to be pulling forward, you have to be using your arm and you have to be rotating a lot with your torso and your hips are kind of like along for the ride, adding a little bit.
It's not the opposite like I think was originally thought, I don't know how many years ago where you're just cranking your hips and everything else is kind of just following. That's just we don't see that in the data. And you know, shout out to the other coaches out there who are looking at the data and like changing their views too, because there are some coaches who started out very rotational based and just recently have switched like, OK, you're not
rotating as much as we thought. Use your arm more. You need to pull. We've recently saw in the last couple years kind of people pivoting to this is what we see in the data. So this is what we should start teaching. Interesting. I'm looking at your YouTube channel and I see one called It's Leg day for Disc golfers. So talk to me about what? What is something we have to keep in mind when it comes to our legs during the throw? Yeah.
So I would say the biggest thing to focus on when it comes to your legs is you need to be stopping is the biggest thing. I would say it's not about rotation, it's about just stopping. So like if you're running up or you're walking up, you want to be basically hitting a wall kind of right where you're not continuing forward so that you can give yourself that stable base and convert at least some of that momentum into the disk going farther. I think that's what you're going to see in a lot.
And I should not say say it the way that I said it. You should be slowing down. Decelerating is kind of the the key because when you see people throw three 60s, they don't stop, right? They they slow down when the brace hits as much as they can and then they spill over with everything that's left. So it's not about like a complete stop. And there are coaches who teach that as well. Like you want to stop the hips, you want to end like basically stonewalled behind your brace.
And I think that's also kind of the wrong direction. It's about like pushing back as much as you can and then leaving yourself kind of a safe release outlet so that you're not like putting too much stress on your body because like full bracing. If you just Sprint up and try to full brace and stop every bit of momentum behind your brace, like it's hard on your body, your hips are going to hate you. And you know your lower back's
going to hate you. So you need to make sure that you're also like following through. And if you bring in too much momentum, you need to let some of it through. So OK then then moving up to the hips, you you've already mentioned that to the hips aren't at aren't as important as once we thought it was, but what is something to keep in mind when you are rotating the hips? What is something to keep in mind when you are rotating the
hips? I would say one of the biggest things that I kind of brought light to was like using the posterior chain more so anteriors like quad chin, posteriors like glute hamstring and getting kind of posterior chain involvement. So I think like for a long time there was a lot of like you want to be on your toes, right? That's an athletic movement. And what you'll see mostly in really high level throwers is they're not on their toe, especially on their plant foot. Their whole foot gets down,
right? It's it's a lot like a single leg squat. You want all three kind of the tripod on your foot, right? You want all three points down so you can engage both your hamstring, your glute and your quad to all press into the ground. Not, you know, like hit with your toe and brace a lot with just your quad because being on your tippy toe makes it really hard to use your hamstring and glute to help you press down. You could think about like leg pressing.
You would never leg press on your tippy toes, right? So it's the same concept. You really want to get into your posterior chain so you can use your glute and your hamstring to like assist in that downforce. Very interesting. What? What are? OK, so we moved up from the hips. Now what about I guess, my torso? What's going on there for you? What would you suggest? OK. I think torso rotation is like
super underrated. I think you can generate a butt load of power with almost just torso rotation. So a lot of people are trying to overuse their hips and they're not taking advantage of the very strong muscles in their torso. So you can train this by doing lots of different stuff. But Eunice, the Finnish head coach, he likes to do like from the knees throws to really train acceleration and deceleration of
the torso. So you're basically training your abdomen, your ABS, your lower back, your whole core to both spin fast and stop fast. And that power is really useful in the in the backhand, I think. And in the forehand, really, it's much more useful than people get it credit for, I think. And then, OK, so now we'll go up to the arms. How am I holding it to make sure I get the most spin out of the disk?
Spin, OK, spin's a good one. I think there are two main things that you want to do to get spin. One is risk oil, you know, wrist curl. So your goal would be to have and I wouldn't, I shouldn't say like the maximum amount because you can't like overdo it and like touch the disc to your forearm. But you want a good amount of risk oil as late in the throw as possible. You want the wrist to be the
last thing to unravel. So as your arm comes out, you're unraveling your upper arm, then your lower arm and your wrist is curled to the last bit. And it's the last piece of the whip that transfers the last bit of energy to the disk. So you want to go from coiled to flat basically right at release, holding that as late as possible. Super important. And the other one is just deep pocket. Getting deeper with the disk generally makes you have more spin.
And when I say deep, I mean. Farther forward or a greater angle between your bicep and PEC, right? So this is 90°, this is like 130. Getting to here with a curled wrist will give you more spin. And that's why you see like Thomas Gilbert crazy spin, Zach Nash crazy spin. They're really deep, right? Their wrist is super curled all the way to the last second.
And it when I very first started it, I I was under the, I don't know if someone taught me or just the way I just started doing it, but I would have my hand and I would bring the disc tote close to my chest. But I think I need to start putting it outward. Would you agree? Yeah, I think the best way to learn is to give yourself a butt load of space. You only want to start getting closer and closer to yourself kind of as you start really going to the advanced side of things.
I think most beginners are probably like collapsing and coming in too close. Yeah, you could throw really hard being really far from yourself. So I would probably advise learn to throw like with a more space than you need and then trim it down from there once you kind of get to that advanced level, I'd say. Gotcha. OK. And is anything happening with the shoulders? Is that just kind of part of the arm? There's a lot happening with the shoulders.
Hey, let's let's go there's. There's external anterior rotation which does need to be managed some. I like to teach as neutral as possible. One of the most important thing is depressing your shoulder. So there's elevating your shoulder. You'll see this in a lot of amateurs where they shrug as they pull once. It's not very safe for the shoulder. Elevating your shoulder out of the socket puts it in a little bit more of a dangerous
position. Also, it makes your body cut power to it 'cause it doesn't want to hurt you. So keeping it depressed is really good. I like to keep it protracted for a good amount of the throw to give me more space for my chest. And then there is some retraction that happens at the end of the throw for sure. And if we're just going to, if we want to talk about upper body the most, I think managing your angles is extremely important.
So when you reach back, you don't ever want to get this bicep to pack angle inside of 90° ever through the whole throw. If you do that, like let's just say I start at 90 and as soon as I start turning, it collapses some. So now we're at like, you know, 45 or something. The more collapsed I get, the weaker I am in this position. So the more collapse I get, the
weaker my muscles actually are. OK, so once you collapse a little bit, it becomes you can't pull out of it because now you've weakened your position and now you can't recover from
the collapse. So it's much better to stay on the good side of 90, the whole throw where you're strong, than to let yourself collapse a little bit and then try to dig your way out of it. And there are really good pro players who dig themselves out of it after collapsing a little bit, but generally it's not the most efficient and effective way in my opinion. Got you. OK, so finally we're up to our my head. What am I doing with my head? Am I looking at where I'm going
to throw? Am I looking back behind me? Because I've heard all different advice as far as like not looking behind me, not, you know, you know, whatever. So what? What's your advice? I think obviously there's like you want to keep your eye on the target as long as possible. I think that can be overdone. There are some, like a lot of students that I have, it's like they're trying to look at the target all the time when they should be kind of committing to their coil.
And when I say committing to their coil, it's like, yeah, we want to look at the target as we're walking up. But once we start striding into that last step, we need to take our eyes off the target to actually get a good coil. It's very hard to turn yourself back as much as you need to while keeping your eyes forward on the target. So generally eyes on the target till that last stride starts.
And then you want to let your head allow your coil so you can, you can even look backwards if you need to. And then you, the only other real thing to manage is you don't want to be leading the throw with your head. So I like to say if your eyes are on the disk or farther back, right, you're in a good spot. So when I'm reach back, my eyes are on the disc. When I'm in the pocket, my eyes
are generally neutral. And I don't ever want to be in a position where like, let's say I'm in the pocket, I don't want my eyes to be here in front of where the disc is going because generally your body like follows your head. So if you reach back and start the throw by looking forward, you can see I'm going to immediately collapse my arm. This angle that we just talked about, the 90°, as soon as I look forward, that collapses immediately and then once again,
I can't pull out of there. So now my efficiency just plummeted and that's all I did was move my eyes. So it's like it can be such like a butterfly effect doing something so small. But I have a drill called the look back drill where you just focus on like basically loosely gazing slightly behind neutral and you just kind of keep your arm, your eyes there and let the throw finish before you move them. And it really helps people not
collapse. It's pretty incredible, like what the odds can do in powerlifting too. Wow, I mean, I know most people are like no kidding, Bobby, but I mean, it's just like so much is like like I've told, tell people so much is happening and so much has to go right, or at least be closer to going right to achieve the, you know, the maximum a distance. So, and I would assume obviously you probably watch a lot of pros throw. Give me like a hint like maybe two or three examples.
If someone's like tell me who to watch just to kind of observe a great form. As far as throwing, give me a few. I have 3/3 what you got I have. Three, so the simplest form I think anyone could try to mirror. So if you're at a very beginner level and you're trying to learn to throw correctly, watch Nick Los Angeles. He has by far the simplest mechanics and he does everything he possibly can to make it crazy simple and not able like to mess up.
So he's not using any of the advanced mechanics that a lot of the really, really crazy hard throwers are using. He's just using just the fundamentals, just the basics. He could probably touch 70, but he's extremely accurate, extremely consistent. So if you're looking for a throat of mirror as a beginner, he's exactly what I would point any of my students to next tier up. Very simple, little bit more powerful.
And also someone who probably does the geometric part of like configuring things so 90° or farther and keeping your elbows far away from you as you possibly can, getting your your disk as far away from you at release as you can. So these are like efficiency cues where like we're trying to just increase the length of our levers, right?
Zach Nash, he he basically does everything correctly like to AT and that's why he's able to walk up super slow and throw, you know, 80 miles an hour ish, right, with 1700 RPM or 1800 RPM. And it the he's a fantastic example of like your legs, they're just not adding as much as you think when it comes to like momentum, right?
He's sauntering up the T pad and just throwing absolute bombs with and his power metrics are giant and power metrics consider like speed and spin, right, because they both take power. So his added together are like some of the best in the game and he's doing it with, you know, a one mile an hour walk up. So it's like he, it's much, much more about configuring your parts correctly and letting the energy transfer efficiently than it is about just absolute B lining at the T pad and then
collapsing yourself. And now you're getting 13% of the power of your throw, you know, and you're using every muscle in your body. So third has to be mentioned, Anthony Barilla. I competed at USD GC with him this year and he just murdered the field. It wasn't close. He threw more overstable discs, harder, lower, and just crushed everybody.
It was a very windy, very hard headwind and his ability to throw a really stable disc just ultra hard just decimated the field because we were all trying to throw less stable discs to actually get our S flights, yadda, yadda. And he was just like, Nah, I'll just throw, you know, an overstable nuke, 80 miles an hour, low laser beam, so the wind can't do anything. His form is awesome. He does a lot of really good stuff.
And he's just really like flowy, you know, he's, he's really like clean, not muscling it too much and just good mechanics. Nice. Who's somebody that like, you watch their form and you're like, they should not be throwing that. Well, is there someone out there like that? Oh, someone out there who? Oh, that's you want me to call somebody out for having bad? For well, but I mean it someone who's like they're, they're doing well and they're and they're throwing far and it's
like, man, there's you. You should not be throwing that far based on the mechanics of it all, I mean. Probably me, honestly, I think, I think, I think most people would probably say me, I think. Like I like, I don't, I don't observe it obviously as as much as you do as much as a lot of people. But like someone like James Conrad with that super long throw and he's just very like
flowy and everything. It's like, I would think as like if looking at the mechanics, and maybe again, it could be just my ignorant eye watching, but the mechanics would seem like it kind of goes against a little bit of what people think it takes to throw far. I I do agree, I think that if you actually slow MO his mechanics, they're not that bad. Yeah, he is doing a lot of like bringing in too much momentum, bracing just a small amount of it and then letting the rest
just flow over. But we see like AB do that on three 60s as well. Like AB just flies straight past his brace on three 60s. So it's like, it's not bad, right? It's maybe he could get away with just walking up slower and it wouldn't have any ill effects on him, that's for sure. But generally.
Unconventional. Maybe a little unconventional is a better way to put it. Yeah, yeah, I think Chris Dickerson, he he definitely like, he throws so good and it doesn't look like he's going to throw so good when he when he runs up the T pad, but then he's just like a monster. So I would say like unconventional Chris Dickerson, you could probably learn a lot about, you know what you can get away with by watching like a Chris Dickerson?
He he does just enough of the right things where it's like his throw is still amazing and you don't need to look beautiful. You know, Silas Schultz famously said like form is for Instagram, right? And it's it's kind of true. You can you can get away with a lot if you have just a few pieces going correctly and the main pieces are like the upper body timing and like geometry. If you can get those right. I mean, you watch AB impersonate people's forms.
He can impersonate half the freaking pro tour like to AT and still throw 70 miles an hour while doing it. It's like he's not used to that, but once you get the correct upper body mechanics it's like it doesn't really matter that much. You can throw 70 from like most positions. Yeah, another one I can think of is who who's hasn't played in a while, at least I haven't seen him, is Eric Oakley, good buddy of mine. Yeah, I did an episode with him actually on my YouTube I have.
A oh nice. Yeah, his little hop step, whatever. A lot of people used to really get on to him for his little hop step, but he still could throw the disc pretty far. Yeah, I definitely, I think I think there's a lot of stuff that you can, you know, have your own style with as long as you're getting these little tiny key pieces right, it's like it doesn't really matter that much. That's why I made that video where it's like all these things that people say you can't do with your feet.
It's like generally if you have good timing and good upper body mechanics, they don't matter that much. And like you'll see, you see people patent pending crazy shots, Nicholas, Angela stanstilling crazy shots. Like if you have the correct mechanics you can kind of get away with having your own unique style in other places I think. Yeah. And of course the other, another part of the equation is getting the right disk right.
You got a lot of beginners that they see all these big guns throwing these high speed drivers and they try to grab these high speed drivers. It's just not working. And then then you're kind of working against yourself because in, at least in my observation, then they're then their mechanics are all wrong because you're trying to make that high speed disk work for them when they need that they need to be for working on the form and then letting the disk do the work
with them. Yeah, I think that's actually one thing I get questions on a lot. It's like, what disks should I be throwing for distance? And I generally think it sucks because I know it feels like gatekeeping when people say you shouldn't throw 12 speed, you shouldn't throw 13 speeds till you have a certain speed. But I think like in a perfect world, you're in a field and you're throwing Max distance, your farthest disk is going to be the highest speed you can possibly get.
It is for everyone. Even if you throw 50 miles an hour, if you get the flippiest strike in existence and throw it perfectly, it's going to be your farthest flying disk.
But the amount of times you're going to have to throw that to get that exact right, everything, you know, one out of 20 shots is going to go 400 where if you threw even just a 12 speed or an 11 speed a race, you know 5 out of 20 shots are going to go 390. So it's like you're you're losing 10 feet on the very, very top end, but your consistency
just shoots up so much. And it's like, I think that's why we see a lot of pros using 12 speeds because it's that good middle ground where it's like it's not too squirrely, but it still goes far enough. And I think the higher speed you go, just like physics wise, your nose angle matters more, the height of your shot matters more because they just respond worse to messing up any small secondary metric of your throw.
Excellent. All right, so I asked you before we went online if you would take the time to watch my throw, you'll give me some advice and OK, so we're going to move. So this is the first time I've done this where I've added a video while I was talking to someone. So please bear with me. So also remember I'm a big guy. I'm I'm, I'm in my mid 50s, just turned 54, but I'm still active.
I still get out there that is kind of an I'm, I'm actually working on a video called my January Reset where it's like, I'm ever since getting this job back at Dynamic Discs, it's been stressful, but it's, it's been good. But I put on some weight and I'm, I'm getting going to go get back to my healthy activities, my healthy eating and stuff like that. So anyway, I'm just let you know
that's what's happening. But I'm going to, what I did was I threw I think 3 times from the side and then a couple times filmed it from the back. And so we'll kind of go through that. OK, hold on. Let me get this going, see if I can make this work. Here we go. OK. And I can pause it anytime you need me to. Yeah, give me a, Give me a Just scroll through these frames kind of slowly. If it'll let me do that.
All right, let's see. Yeah, I think the lag time won't let me scroll or scrub through it, Yeah. OK, I see one thing already. Show me it one more time or two more times and I'll try to pick something out each time. OK, one more. OK, I got you, I got you. OK, so the big things I would focus on for your Form 1, uncoiling your hips into the plant. So this is a super common problem. We're like we're coiling up, right?
So we're trying to basically face our hips, our front hip backwards as we stride forward, right? That's kind of like to simplify, that's what we're doing. We want to be leading the throat with our heel, right? So when we plant, we're either like perpendicular or slightly closed. The reason we want to do that is it gives us a really good like stopping point for basically our hips so we can aim better off of it when we have like a sturdy
stop. The more open we plant, the more we're having to aim like manually, right? We're having to use like quad power to stop ourselves and actually release the disc online. So the first thing I would say is you uncoil slightly into the plant. So you coil up OK, but then as you start to place your front foot down, you let it wind open. So you basically give yourself coil and then give it away
before you throw. What I would recommend is there's I have a drill called the Reaper drill where basically you're focused on coiling up, shifting forward while coiled and then throwing. So and you'll see this in in most pros right there at their Max coil when that foot gets down. The Reaper drill is just kind of a simple, easy way to do that. Second thing. I think your pull through is a little low generally. I think mechanically, right? You want your elbow as far from
your spine as possible. That's going to make your upper arm the longest lever it can possibly be, right? So if you pull through low, you're giving away some of that distance of your elbow being away from your spine just by virtue of it being lower, right? Because this is just less room. So if you pull through kind of belly button level, generally you're giving away some of that mechanical efficiency.
So I recommend kind of around the nipple to upper rib area is a good spot where you can keep your shoulder depressed. So it's not kind of too high up because if you try to go like throat level, right, you start to get the shoulder shrugging and things get all whacked. Not good for you, not safe. I wouldn't recommend that high. But you know, nipple level is just that perfect point where your shoulders depressed, but your elbow is basically as far mechanically as it can be from
your spine. That's probably thing #2 you would be surprised at how much just a smidge of mechanical efficiency makes a huge difference because it's just multiplying your power by more. It's like you have like this rotation and then you have multiple levers, right? You have your upper armor is a lever, your lower armor is a lever, your wrist to hand is a lever. So the more you can add to this upper arm lever, the more this guy gets and then the more this guy gets.
So it's like it's exponential growth kind of it feels like you can add a little bit here and by the time it gets to the disk, it's multiplied by even more. So just making the upper arm lever longer generally, like you just get pretty effortless distance, right? And then the last thing is your braces. Your braces a bit a bit weak and like soggy, I would say you kind of bend it and spin on it to where like you're not really pushing back against your
momentum as much as you could. I would say I have a drill called the Donk drill that's really good for this. It's basically learning how to use the vertical push of your front leg to add power to your throw. Basically you kind of there's a drill called the piston drill where you think about your legs as Pistons.
When you walk up your, your rear piston is on and you're coiling so your front Pistons off and it's kind of like folding down and in. And then as soon as that front foot hips, you reverse the Pistons. This front leg becomes the piston going vertically up and this rear leg falls down and in. And that's why you see that internal rotation of the of the rear hip. So there's kind of the three things.
Yeah, nice. OK, so I'm going to, I'm glad I recorded this because I'm going to going to go back and watch all of it. So but yeah, part of my goal, the video that I'm working on, it's kind of a health reset and then a disc golf reset in the sense that I am not trying to win any records, you know, distance records.
I'm not trying to GoPro. I'm just, I, I talk about in the video, it's like when people go out and they go and it's just their buddies having fun, the cows around and then you're doing poorly and someone says. Oh well, most fun wins And I'm like, I'm not having fun getting bogeys and double bogeys. I at least want to get pars. I'd obviously love would get to get birdies, but I want to get more pars, more birdies.
And so I know adding a little bit more distance and of course accuracy is going to help me achieve that. So that's kind of my goal through this year is to up my, my distance and I set a baseline. I, I go out to a field, I throw it three times. Got a speed 10 disc, I throw it three times and I set whatever is the farthest that's my baseline distance. And then from there I'm going to, I'm going to kind of grow
from there. So I'm going to use your advice and put it, if you don't mind, I'm going to put that in that video and actually work through some of the advice that you give me and see, see what I can do now. I'd give you 1. More tip. Yeah, one more tip. So one thing you'll see really good players do a lot is this sideways disc free throw, right where they're holding the disc sideways like this in their hand, right? And the reason for this is it's much easier to keep your elbow up.
Like whenever you have your hand like this, right, when you put your palm down, right, you're going to find it's easier to keep your elbow up. It's like a natural thing. When I try to spin my palm down, my elbow moves upward. And when I try to spin my palm the other way, my elbow moves downward, right? It's just natural. So when you do your pre throw, do this sideways disc right where you're basically only focused on this space right here, distance from elbow to spine.
And you literally just do this. Boom, this is where I want you, where you're as far away as you can in your pre throw. OK, so just like that, here's my hand. It's directly sideways, so you don't need to hold it like a disc golf grip. Yep. And you just go bang. OK, OK, I'll try that. It helps a lot with just getting the feeling right before the throw. It's kind of like a reminder to your body, like this is what we want to be doing, you know?
Yeah. Nice. OK, so another question that popped my mind is that so let's say I go out here or even with your students that you've done stuff with how like how quickly I'm assuming obvious depends on how much work you put into. But like, I guess I'm thinking like if I go out there and do this a few times, if I'm not really getting better distance. How long do you think it takes for your body to kind of unlearn the bad habits and relearn the
new habit? OK, so it's it's definitely dependent on a whole bunch of factors. And the first one is how long have you been doing the bad habit? So if you've been playing for 20 years and you've been low pull through the whole 20 years, it's like it's going to take your body a long a while at least to figure out how to like on the course, keep that elbow up.
So that's why I have things like that sideways disc drill because you're on the T pad, your brain seeing the hole, it's seeing the line and you're reminding at the same time, keep that elbow up. That's just a little trick that you can do to kind of meld those two things together. So your body like moves toward
it more quickly, right. And I would say the the how much like you gain from a change has a lot to do with like how badly it's kind of messing you up. So for you like your upper body, change is probably going to make the biggest difference. Like you, you could see, no joke, you know, 40 feet in like less than a month. If you got that elbow up and you actually like practiced it, you did your pre throw, sideways disc throw and you just increase that mechanical efficiency.
Like you can see really fast gains with something like that. When it comes to the legs, it's going to probably take a little bit longer because like learning to brace is freaking hard. Like really hard. And it gets harder the older you are, right? When you're a kid, it's easy because you don't really have a normal and you can adapt super fast. But when you're an adult, it's like you've been in balance for 50 years now.
You're trying to teach your body how to throw while you're like dynamically, diagonally balanced on this brace. It's like your body hates that, right? Anytime your head and shout out to Chris Taylor for this specific quote. Anytime your head is not like balanced over your body, your body freaks out if you're not used to it, right? So when you're bracing, you're basically like diagonal leg. And then your head is here, right, completely on like a different plane.
And you're in this dynamic balance where the only thing keeping you balanced is your momentum moving forward. So learning to be OK with that and not like freak out a little bit to try to regain your balance is learning how to brace. So I wouldn't expect to see like quick brace gains for basically anybody. And that's why I say like fix your upper body first, because you can throw 400 feet with pretty crappy brace and just a really good upper body. And it's not the opposite.
You can't throw 400 feet with just a really good brace and a crappy upper body. So the best course of action is fix your upper body first, get all the gains you can reap out of there. You're going to have fun. You're going to throw 400 feet, you're going to be freaking having a blast. And then if you really want to push for that 500, five, 5600, wherever you want to go, that's when you can do the six month, one year, 2 year grind of just
slowly getting a better brace. And the benefit is every time you make a breakthrough on your brace, it will go straight through because you're already being super efficient. So whenever you add power, it just goes straight through. Like out of 95% ratio, right? Like, I recently broke 80 and it took me like a couple sessions of figuring out something in my brace because my upper body was already basically perfect. So as soon as I added that leg power, it just went straight
into the disk. I saw a five mile per hour jump in my speed and it was, you know, easy. But it's not the same the other way around, right? The upper body is bad. It's like you're not going to see gains quickly. You're going to see like a half a mile per hour. If you increase your brace, it's because yeah, you're getting 40% efficiency from it. Wow, OK, I'll keep that in mind for sure. Well, I appreciate all this, man. This That's that's good advice and stuff.
I'm going to actually put in the practice for sure. I appreciate that. Yeah. So you do, other than just the YouTube videos and things like that, you, it sounds like you do some sort of one-on-one coaching. Yeah, I coached through for Marrow. I have a lot of students. I have a lot of reviews so if anyone wants to check down on there you can go read all the reviews if you want.
It's like a hundreds at this point, so you can see what kind of what my clients think about me and stuff like that. It's just kind of just AI mean. I know the buzzword is side hustle, but is this is this kind of a side hustle for you or is this something you want to see grow into whatever it can become? Yeah, you know, it, it didn't start as anything that I really planned on being.
I still have a full time job, so I definitely like, you know, my time is stretched, especially with the amount of clients I've gotten. So it's kind of like after work knock out as many reviews as I can, try to keep up with the demand and I don't know what it'll morph into eventually, but it's been fun. I've been enjoying it so far. So I'm going to keep doing it for for, you know, at least a while longer. I've just resigned with infinite. So that was super cool.
They have been awesome sponsor to me, so shout out to them. And yeah, I'm going to keep keep going while the getting's good, right? Absolutely I I think it's awesome all right, so I know people can go find you on YouTube blitz DG on YouTube and then I think it's the same name on Instagram correct Blitz under score disc golf to find you on Instagram and guys, I highly recommend that you follow him, especially on YouTube. He's got all kinds of elbow the disc. Let's see why why lower back
extension is ruining your throw. Fix your plant, plant foot workout program for disc golf. So he's got a lot of information for you guys if you want to improve your game. If you're somebody wanting to GoPro, I think that'd be fantastic. But if you're just a casual player and you're sick of hearing most fun wins and you want to really have at least a more little more fun by playing a little bit better, then I definitely suggest you check it
out. Well, again, I appreciate you coming on the show and maybe in about six or seven months maybe we can check back with you and and I can tell you how I'm doing with my distance. Be sure I I'm interested to know so don't don't forget to reach out. All right, man, I appreciate it. Thank you so much again for coming on. Thanks, Bobby.