Drew Gibson Reviews His Form

[bryantlikes]

Thought this was interesting and worth discussing in the form review.



Echoes a lot of SW22 things: no straight line, balanced, stacked, braced, etc.

One thing I noticed that I thought was interesting was where he is holding the disc at the apex of his reachback.

His hand is almost in front of the disc. When I tried that out I noticed it caused elbow to be in a better position (I think) where it is more out rather than down.

 

[sidewinder22]

 

[Brychanus]

I was really glad he explicitly rebutted the "straight and flat" idea.

I also appreciated his discussion of backswing height and swinging through the core (center of gravity) - it made me think of one of the main takeaways of door frame drill and Loading the Bow:

Anecdotally cleaning this up with Door Frame drills keeps giving me more access to power even through increasingly smaller ranges of motion. I wanted to connect that to a couple things Drew talks about.

This is one of my favorite posts from my own form critique, showing how you can use bigger shifts in the door frame drill to find how your body can generate leverage and find better front heel-rear toe alignment. Drew mentions his head/body getting lower due to his stride, which is the same as setting up his Buttwipe/Hogan Power Move and CoG drop in transition. I never could really learn how to do the two together without the door frame drill:

Low man wins leverage. You are barely moving.

Lower grip.

Lower butt.

Chin on shoulder.

Front foot toes inline to frame. Rear toes inline to front heel.

You can see how the better East-West separation SW22 shows from the rear of the tee creates space to swing and sets up the torque force from the ground. Once he showed me this it opened a new learning arc and helped me start to break through. Of course, Drew and the big guns are all doing their version of this:

Here are a few more images of pros relating the door frame drill exaggeration to Drew and other pros view from the rear of tee. I drew the solid white line just to show that there are some relative differences in where the plant depth lands East-West, but everyone generates some E-W separation in a neutral stance. You can also drop a heel-to-toe line (dashed) between the feet to visualize their alignment when striding more diagonally down the tee (most stride from somewhat Southeast to Northwest of tee). I think the stride vector helps contribute to lag and loading the torque component up in the backswing.

On Drew, I'm copying my speculative post about his form development here since I'm still curious what others think. I'm not sure the way he learned to generate the torque component is ideal for the body, though obviously his modern form is very effective.

 

[Brychanus]

 

[Brychanus]

I wanted to emphasize another point.

First, I find it interesting that when a lot of pros talk about their own form, they don't really talk often about rocking the hips or the way the spine and pelvis function together. You could say "who cares?" but I think a lot of players see the image like the 2nd panel from the right in my last post and think (or just end up with) "oh, I stack my spine vertically between my feet and twist/torque around." I get the impression that a lot of the big guns never really thought or learned it this way, and maybe learning while young and their athleticism and trial and error got them there without emphasizing it.

It wasn't until I came to DGCR that I appreciated how much the rock is part of the fundamental motion. All those Can Can, Double Dragon, Riding the Bull, and related things are so important but can be hard to learn for many of us.

Drew could have mentioned and shown it, but he didn't (interesting!). So I visualized it here from Drew's backswing through his release:

Also a reminder about the great The Hips thread.

Thought this was interesting and worth discussing in the form review.

I like the idea of centralized pro form threads. Selfishly it makes me less scatter-brained and it could be fun if people weigh in. I also always learn a lot from deep dives on individual player mechanics and sometimes I don't learn stuff until weeks later since it was miles away in a thread I never saw before.

So I'm grabbing some cool content on Drew here to help us out, can add more when I see/remember it.

His form evolution:



Of course the nice Overthrow montage:



SW22 observations & pics:

Drew throwing on 20-20, 20 degree diagonal and 20 degree hyzer to throw "straight and flat".

Drew whip effect.

Drew Gibson arm angles without parallax. It's not 90 degrees or left pec.

Drew is considerably more staggered closed and turned back than KJ Nybo.

Don't forget that the dude's quite an athlete even though he's giving himself grief for gaining some weight in the vid OP linked at the top: