What's the intent?

[Taylor]

I know we have a lot of Shawn Clement fans on here so I'll use him as the example -

He commonly states that "hitting the ball" in golf is the wrong intent. If we try to hit the ball, the body would pick up the club like an axe and chop down onto the ball. But rather our intent needs to be to "chop the dandelion stem" or "throw the club" should actually be what we are telling our body to do with the club.

What is the intent with disc golf? Is it as easy as throw the disc? Throw the disc and pretend it weighs 3 pounds? Or is there something else better for our brains to focus on to sling this thing out there further?

 

[Brychanus]

Throw the disc.

Like other athletic moves but it can require a lot of brain retraining.

I may have responded especially well to them because of my martial arts & bag hammering, but I still find nothing wrong with Sidewinder's "slash thru" concepts or the nose of the disc coming around like a hammer head (though mention frequently I had to actually hit a bag to get the concept to transfer to throwing. Weird.).






I also like "throw the arm/disc unit or bat."

None of them work for me unless they're connected to the weight shift mechanics. Sandler has a passable weight shift here:

I still wonder how much of the success I've found with those is by allowing so much of my move to be trained by sidewinder to be centrifugal/due to CoG/CoM shifting. I may never really know.

In the video below, Gibson has a lot of good little moves to study & practice. He also seems to have a pretty clear grasp on how his own move works. I just rewatched this again and perceive his movement completely differently than I did a year ago. His move functions like a slash thru. You can still understand the "pull" by learning from the way the rest of his body moves into the slash thru. Needed to watch and emulate his whole body move to understand how it works.

Intent when throwing for the fences
Gibson also has a point I think people underappreciate once they're moving safely enough. There's a noticeable difference between my 80%+ shots and less than that now. They both feel fairly effortless, but when I'm doing a field session 80%+ now I'm definitely coming in with "smash" intent in the same way that I hit or throw with a sledge. Even at my way more modest speeds, the intent is that anything in the way will get obliterated (with control). I just am learning to generate it out of momentum before muscle.

When I boxed, there was a big difference between a setup punch and a knockout punch. Setup punches are upshots. Drives are knockout punches.

Gibson at 11:57:

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[itlnstln]

Ah, yes! The question that has eluded me for many (many!) years. I get the foot work, balance, arm motions, etc.; but I've never locked into what exactly happens in the last, say 6-12" of the throw. Does the disc pivot on its own? Is it pulling the nose around? Is it a fling? Is it a sling? The answer is "yes..." and "no;" and "some of it," and "all of it."

The closest we came to a drill was Blake T.'s "hammer pound" drill, but even Blake mentioned this drill was incomplete. Then there's working from the hit back, but what is the hit?