TheBeardedFatGuy
Birdie Member
At least a few of the improvements to my drive have come from just thinking about what actually happens physically at a given moment. Take grip. I use a fairly standard nose-down power grip, with the fingers angled back under the rim slightly. I've struggled with trying to reproduce those amazing times when the snap is just right and the disc holds its angle longer and flies farther. Yes everything leading up to those shots is crucial, and I've read the arguments that grip is relatively unimportant, but I decided to explore it a bit more. Here's what I found that has noticeably increased my drive distance by maybe 10%.
At the moment of 'snap', the bulk of kinetic energy is being transferred to the forward momentum of the disc, with some going toward adding rotation to the disc. It's been said before that disc rotation is added primarily from the wrist action, but the last point of contact is in the fingers/thumb, so I wondered if there wasn't something I could do with my grip to improve my release. By 'improve' I mean two things - give the disc both a final boost to momentum, and give it more torque to improve spin. Turns out you can. I think most people count their middle finger as the longest digit, but the 2nd longest varies from person to person. For me, my ring finger is far longer than my index finger. I started to think about how the point of release must involve those fingers (and the thumb on top of the flight plate) pulling the disc forward and providing a pivot point to impart a final boost to forward momentum and rotation. But how clean was that pivot when my two longest fingers were angled back and probably gripping the disc tighter than my shorter index finger?
So, what I did is laughably simple. I focused on pinching the disc tighter between my thumb and index finger, allowing the other fingers to grip and stabilize the disc. And it worked. With the index finger being a more insistent pivot point, I moved that pivot point somewhere around 1/2 inch farther forward on the rim than my longer middle finger, which had probably been acting as primary pivot point due to it's greater length. There was that feeling of snap I'd been missing and it clearly was giving the disc both more release speed and torque. I know the importance of spin is hotly debated here, but my take is that more is almost always better because it strengthens the gyroscopic stability that allows a disc to hold a line longer, and it allows that stability to last longer.
Pinching harder with your index finger/thumb probably won't help everybody, but there may be some with the same issues I've had. I hope this helps somebody, even if it's just one person.
At the moment of 'snap', the bulk of kinetic energy is being transferred to the forward momentum of the disc, with some going toward adding rotation to the disc. It's been said before that disc rotation is added primarily from the wrist action, but the last point of contact is in the fingers/thumb, so I wondered if there wasn't something I could do with my grip to improve my release. By 'improve' I mean two things - give the disc both a final boost to momentum, and give it more torque to improve spin. Turns out you can. I think most people count their middle finger as the longest digit, but the 2nd longest varies from person to person. For me, my ring finger is far longer than my index finger. I started to think about how the point of release must involve those fingers (and the thumb on top of the flight plate) pulling the disc forward and providing a pivot point to impart a final boost to forward momentum and rotation. But how clean was that pivot when my two longest fingers were angled back and probably gripping the disc tighter than my shorter index finger?
So, what I did is laughably simple. I focused on pinching the disc tighter between my thumb and index finger, allowing the other fingers to grip and stabilize the disc. And it worked. With the index finger being a more insistent pivot point, I moved that pivot point somewhere around 1/2 inch farther forward on the rim than my longer middle finger, which had probably been acting as primary pivot point due to it's greater length. There was that feeling of snap I'd been missing and it clearly was giving the disc both more release speed and torque. I know the importance of spin is hotly debated here, but my take is that more is almost always better because it strengthens the gyroscopic stability that allows a disc to hold a line longer, and it allows that stability to last longer.
Pinching harder with your index finger/thumb probably won't help everybody, but there may be some with the same issues I've had. I hope this helps somebody, even if it's just one person.
