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In theory you should be able to swing a really heavy load the same way and with the same rhythm. Less sway with the the feet and legs and more pump and pressure shift. Make the pump heavy outwards rather than a big motion.
If you were heaving something heavy here you would get pulled back by it like a rag doll. Your whole upper body/head is overturning and drifting back behind your lower body instead of staying leveraged against the swing. The backswing momentum is what should pull/cause your body to turn back.
Thanks, this is also familiar & explains some of the Hershyzer transfer issues. I will start minding it in the H2 drill this week and see if it helps.
I can feel this tilt difference right away whenever I do a wide stance standstill, but I couldn't feel the difference in the narrow stance at all until I swung a 15 lb dumbbell. My heaviest hammer was still too light.
Heres me swinging the dumbbell in the setup and then a throw. I'm only focused on the pump part here. I'll work on this as long as it takes.
I'll keep saying thanks for your patience. Hope it's not too frustrating when I need to endlessly revisit this stuff.
Actually H/o. I think I can get the proper tilt and then get my weight more stacked over the front leg in the setup so my mass is more forward and I move quicker with better posture in transition.
1. Your pendulum looks forced and static. Like you are pumping it with your hand and just swinging the body with it for balance. In theory you should be able to swing a really heavy load the same way and with the same rhythm. Less sway with the the feet and legs and more pump and pressure shift. Make the pump heavy outwards rather than a big motion.
If you were heaving something heavy here you would get pulled back by it like a rag doll. Your whole upper body/head is overturning and drifting back behind your lower body instead of staying leveraged against the swing. The backswing momentum is what should pull/cause your body to turn back.
Ok, need to rest for a couple days, here's where I am. I focused mostly on fixing the leverage in the setup - (1) the tilt/side bend and (2) starting more leveraged forward on the front foot so everything is attacking the target. I didn't focus too much on the last two steps since the setup and maintaining patience moving into the first step required a lot of focus.
15lb weighted setup drill in narrow stance:
Few throws varying horizontal and vertical force a bit:
Your x-step also looks like you step in the way(west) of the right foot and too far north so your legs are pretzeled. Note how your right knee is leading your stride so your front leg is open while your head is turned back. I'm much more neutral with everything between the feet to head.
1. I'm not sure you should be focusing so much on the pump/swing. It looks out of rhythm in every clip I've watched. It doesn't have to be tool for everyone. That's my take on it. I've never really focused on it myself. In the freeze frames above from SW22 your arm and disc feels dispatched and unbalanced with the body. Not counterbalanced like SW22s comparisons. Why is your pump so high? If you were a swing set and the disc a child swinging, that child would make the famous loop around, right? Are you focusing on the right thing? Maybe you should move on and return to the pump later on?
The pump is a bit like the arm swing when jumping forward. The feeling of building momentum and a balanced ground force to push of from.
Turn it laterally and adjust to the body.
If anything I think you could benefit more from swinging a heavy rope than a dumbbell. There is a big difference from ball golf where you are swinging a long and heavy club two handed. But in theory it's the same with a shorter rope swung one handed. I feel like it's easier to imagine than it would be to drill it for real, just to be clear. Getting the heavy and centered rhythm is the key. Think throwing out a net one handed, or a big cloth/blanket. Everything needs to be in sync.
2. The X-step fix is easy, but I never hear it talked about. Should almost be it's own thread for how easy it is. The pros all share one thing, no matter how big or opened/closed low/high the x-step is. Your back knee should max out in the x-step right above your front foots point of contact with the ground. Easy-peasy.
Also this bit of unspoken information that makes everything from balance to aim so much easier to understand and adjust to everyone's form:
2. The X-step fix is easy, but I never hear it talked about. Should almost be it's own thread for how easy it is. The pros all share one thing, no matter how big or opened/closed low/high the x-step is. Your back knee should max out in the x-step right above your front foots point of contact with the ground. Easy-peasy.
Interesting. I stand by my words on this for now, but I'm open for discussion.
I'm going for a more feel than real approach here. The truth is often far from straight lines when in a dynamic motion.
Your own screengrabs with the knees more towards target happens a few frames later than mine, with both knees 'falling' TOGETHER towards the target and brace. I'd say that the back knee kind of picks the lead knee up to start the 'kick the ball' motion laterally towards target.
Would you say that you are addressing the shot with the back toes, or are they just hanging from the hip/pelvis too? Thinking about the back knee on the same line as the front heel is better advice than the old front-heel to back-toes advice. It makes for better balance and movement, but it isn't a golden rule.
The over-head-view is much better to show my point. I'm not talking straight back from the tee. I'm talking in the travelling direction the knee and heel lines up quite well.
1. I'm not sure you should be focusing so much on the pump/swing. It looks out of rhythm in every clip I've watched. It doesn't have to be tool for everyone. That's my take on it. I've never really focused on it myself. In the freeze frames above from SW22 your arm and disc feels dispatched and unbalanced with the body. Not counterbalanced like SW22s comparisons. Why is your pump so high? If you were a swing set and the disc a child swinging, that child would make the famous loop around, right? Are you focusing on the right thing? Maybe you should move on and return to the pump later on?
The pump is a bit like the arm swing when jumping forward. The feeling of building momentum and a balanced ground force to push of from.
If anything I think you could benefit more from swinging a heavy rope than a dumbbell. There is a big difference from ball golf where you are swinging a long and heavy club two handed. But in theory it's the same with a shorter rope swung one handed. I feel like it's easier to imagine than it would be to drill it for real, just to be clear. Getting the heavy and centered rhythm is the key. Think throwing out a net one handed, or a big cloth/blanket. Everything needs to be in sync.
2. The X-step fix is easy, but I never hear it talked about. Should almost be it's own thread for how easy it is. The pros all share one thing, no matter how big or opened/closed low/high the x-step is. Your back knee should max out in the x-step right above your front foots point of contact with the ground. Easy-peasy.
Your x-step also looks like you step in the way(west) of the right foot and too far north so your legs are pretzeled. Note how your right knee is leading your stride so your front leg is open while your head is turned back. I'm much more neutral with everything between the feet to head.
You've both evoked some new thoughts and I encourage you to keep up the back and forth here
TL;DR: maybe I need to try some karate stuff to trigger the right move.
Trying something totally new re: x-step
I tried some stuff, wrote a post, then looked again and deleted that post and came up with this. Let me see if I can help you help me for once.
Every time I use a pendulum pump or cradle rock, I have had an awkward feeling in the x-step and could never find the feeling/move I get in Buttwipe or Swivel Stairs or get in the Hershyzer-like "preset booty" when my feet are moving. It's especially bad in my pendulum pump and there I get ragdolled one way or another as I slip around in the rear hip socket. I can't seem to micromanage my way out of it, and I keep trying and failing to generalize it from drills and standstills. I was going to write a lot about that w/ a video and then tossed it since it was basically more of the same.
Both of you have advised strategy/perspective changes when you're hitting a wall. So here's my pitch.
I went back to martial arts. I did some boxing drills this morning at the gym then went into my motor memory tool bag from karate. I seem so much more relaxed and faster and fluid and lighter on my feet there despite my size.
In karate there are moves that use a crossover step like the X-step. It wasn't always practical but it was a lot of fun because landing a solid kick usually puts an opponent on their ass and then you land still balanced and ready to go. Most importantly, if done correctly I noticed that it places and loads the X-step and my weight totally differently than my awkward one in my DG BH, and I get from foot to foot much more naturally.
Summary Image followed by what I learned:
Crossover sidekick - good x-step leverage, but incomplete swivel & open front leg.
Here's a karate-style x-step similar to if I were getting ready to do a crossover sidekick, but letting the leg swing into plant. I found that this generates by far more lateral leverage from the x-step toward the target and I feel completely in balance moving forward. I could move much faster if I wanted to. But I noticed that the front knee still opens out, just like my leg likes to in DG. Why? Because if I were to throw a crossover sidekick from the x-step, the leg & knee are in that relative position due to the posture and how you want your foot to make contact with the target - maximum lateral transfer in that posture. The head "balance" point is also more forward because of how high the leg would swing up for a sidekick - the "ground" the plant would land on is actually the target in front of you.
Anyway, my point is that here my x-step seems to get my leveraged forward and moving quickly in balance to the target. I don't think we've ever seen me move like this in my DG x-step.
The DG BH x-step is sorta like a crossover backkick.
So I was staring at that for a bit annoyed by the front leg, then tried and failed at a few more things. I went upstairs, looked at Eagle's spindly legs, had a new thought, did Swivel Stairs on the way to the basement, and came up with this move. This is much more like a crossover back kick. The big difference in DG of course is that the leg is supposed to swing in low (hershyzer/ball kick) so that the hand rather than the leg transfers the force. The trick here is that the leverage is still mostly what we would call laterally from the rear foot toward the target, but since I'm setting more like the back kick, it's starting to look much more "Hershyzer-y" out of the x-step- letting the booty being "preset" by the backswing. The trick is being patient and letting the backswing turn me/the knee away just like a back kick does, which will take specific practice (I used to do most of my kicks moving in the LHBH direction). You can also see that the rear foot is landing pointed a little too far back here while trying to find the move, so my BH leverage point is probably a little closer to the sidekick but with the backkick-style backswing. Basically I want to plant the x-step a lot like that sidekick but swivel more like a back kick.
I noticed that in both of these karate-like motions, my plant foot is landing in a position that won't torque my knee.
As another cue that my overall motion pattern might be better is that you can actually see my feet blurring in real time as I stride, which is more like what happens when we watch Eagle or other pros in real time:
Waltz + spinning backfist + watching Harper's crow hop mechanics at this angle are helping.
Don't worry, I worked hard mostly on my feet in the first two steps. My feet & legs were way ****ed up in ways that were hard for me to see but felt huge to me. I made a few discoveries feeling stuff out. They're all related so if you're bored here's what I learned. I'm pretty confident I'm on the right track with 1-3 here but lmk. I should clean that up as much as possible before moving on.
(1) Psychology and stance: "Karate mentality" in setup is good to get my mAss moving, I'm sticking with it. I needed both feet to be angled so my overall stance feels much more aggressively toward the target in my setup.
(2) Rear foot was a huge deal: It didn't look big to me on camera, but moving my rear foot toe forward to its true neutral position relative to the front foot put me in a position where I could get moving even better rocking off the rear foot. It sets everything up so the toe angle in the x-step lands more aggressive toward the target and I get better stride leverage from it.
(3) First stride vector was a huge deal: My first step needed to be much more directly toward the target/on the stride line. I keep stepping too West first, which ****s up my ability to land the x-step and get the backswing right. That's part of why my rear hip is swiveling around and I'm tending to lean to stay in balance.
(4) Need to "Sit" in backswing before you stride: The other big reason I tend to lean. Once my x-step lands the most inconsistent thing I feel is getting the "sit" correctly on the rear leg before I drive like Hershyzer 2. I know what it feels like. Working on 1-3 and rocking a little back into the rear leg/feel the twerk before I stride into step 1 seemed to help a bit. I'm sure you'll notice something in how I'm moving into the first 2 steps to clean up too.
Dry runs
My fist feels like it weighs a ton here again - I can get it primed with a standstill pendulum swing or thinking of loading up a backfist. I found that "quieting" it into my martial arts stance let me pay more attention to where my feet and body were but I could finally get the arm/fist to feel heavy.
I'm mostly feeling out the above issues 1-3 here. You can see I didn't quite get the best rear side "sit" in this one. At the end I would shuffle around a little trying to figure out where my feet/ body should be landing to get me in a more powerful swing posture (still looking a little flat-footed at the end there, shoulder got a little tense while focused on feet/rock, and stance is still coming out maybe too turned away staggered closed for x-step...). I'm going to limit throws until I'm consistently striding and landing on my plant knee better.
Waltz + spinning backfist + watching Harper's crow hop mechanics at this angle are helping.
Don't worry, I worked hard mostly on my feet in the first two steps. My feet & legs were way ****ed up in ways that were hard for me to see but felt huge to me. I made a few discoveries feeling stuff out. They're all related so if you're bored here's what I learned. I'm pretty confident I'm on the right track with 1-3 here but lmk. I should clean that up as much as possible before moving on.
(1) Psychology and stance: "Karate mentality" in setup is good to get my mAss moving, I'm sticking with it. I needed both feet to be angled so my overall stance feels much more aggressively toward the target in my setup.
(2) Rear foot was a huge deal: It didn't look big to me on camera, but moving my rear foot toe forward to its true neutral position relative to the front foot put me in a position where I could get moving even better rocking off the rear foot. It sets everything up so the toe angle in the x-step lands more aggressive toward the target and I get better stride leverage from it.
(3) First stride vector was a huge deal: My first step needed to be much more directly toward the target/on the stride line. I keep stepping too West first, which ****s up my ability to land the x-step and get the backswing right. That's part of why my rear hip is swiveling around and I'm tending to lean to stay in balance.
(4) Need to "Sit" in backswing before you stride: The other big reason I tend to lean. Once my x-step lands the most inconsistent thing I feel is getting the "sit" correctly on the rear leg before I drive like Hershyzer 2. I know what it feels like. Working on 1-3 and rocking a little back into the rear leg/feel the twerk before I stride into step 1 seemed to help a bit. I'm sure you'll notice something in how I'm moving into the first 2 steps to clean up too.
Dry runs
My fist feels like it weighs a ton here again - I can get it primed with a standstill pendulum swing or thinking of loading up a backfist. I found that "quieting" it into my martial arts stance let me pay more attention to where my feet and body were but I could finally get the arm/fist to feel heavy.
I'm mostly feeling out the above issues 1-3 here. You can see I didn't quite get the best rear side "sit" in this one. At the end I would shuffle around a little trying to figure out where my feet/ body should be landing to get me in a more powerful swing posture (still looking a little flat-footed at the end there, shoulder got a little tense while focused on feet/rock, and stance is still coming out maybe too turned away staggered closed for x-step...). I'm going to limit throws until I'm consistently striding and landing on my plant knee better.
I like this form better. Pump seems heavier, like a battering ram.
Another thing you might try is doing a regular four step, but focusing on the feet (instructions below). It might help with balance and keeping it centered not leaning away or falling through the brace.
1. Back foot step forward at 45 degrees from target. Focus on feeling the ground contact on the inside/instep of the foot. This will accelerate your whole body in sync.
2. Lead foot plant perpendicular to target. Focus on feeling the ground contact on the outside of the foot. This will build on the acceleration.
3. X-step the back foot focusing on feeling the ground contact on the outside of the foot. This will start the deceleration from the ground, which will give you more acceleration in the whip.
4. Brace the front foot focusing on the inside of the foot.
Still looks like your left foot is stepping in the way/west, instead of stepping out of the way behind/east.
At any rate, you end up stuck in too wide stance/horsestance/splits, your rear foot slips and knee extends, instead of making the Swivel Chair/Ride the Bull Move so the knee moves forward under the hip with femur more vertical. The rear knee should bend toward the toes when you plantar flex.
Turn your head forward, so your chin is over your shoulder.
Figured I'd try each thing out over lunch. Getting somewhere on this. I think I picked up something from each one. Despite appearances I know what you're both after.
Another thing you might try is doing a regular four step, but focusing on the feet (instructions below). It might help with balance and keeping it centered not leaning away or falling through the brace.
Navel, here's a 4-step. Fussing with the foot angles a little helped me get me moving a little more easily with a little more control over where my feet can go (see pt 1 below) and a bit more awareness of pressure. I'm landing with better upper body tilt each time. Interestingly my plant stride looks better but I still see the rear leg/horse stance issue coming out of the x-step here SW mentions below:
Still looks like your left foot is stepping in the way/west, instead of stepping out of the way behind/east.
At any rate, you end up stuck in too wide stance/horsestance/splits, your rear foot slips and knee extends, instead of making the Swivel Chair/Ride the Bull Move so the knee moves forward under the hip with femur more vertical. The rear knee should bend toward the toes when you plantar flex.
Turn your head forward, so your chin is over your shoulder.
Scaled it back to 3 steps for this. Couldn't quite isolate the rear leg move with the 4th step yet.
1. Left foot is easier to get a little more East now. Starting stance more perpendicular-ish to the target and just striding more or less laterally helped.
2. Chin over shoulder seems good and triggered some DFD. I don't think my neck is as flexible as MK's there, but I tried. It definitely helped me get off the rear side and when I land I feel like I'm balanced and ready to swing a ton of bricks.
2. I promise I know what the swivel chair/ride the bull move are, but will I ever get it in transition? opcorn: Maybe I got the first half. I decided just to focus on the rear leg since getting both in transition was a step too difficult today. You can see my little crush move at the beginning of this clip, then some 3-steppers trying to step more East into X-step, and get off the foot more like swivel chair/bull. I think it's going to take specific work to make sure I move this way each time off the x-step, but my transition move looks way different already. I am definitely rocking into that plant way different (front leg sucks).
3. Since my plant stride still kinda suck there, gonna need to change something. I think it's a combination of (a) where my x-step lands + (b) the issues you called out most recently in Hershyzer 2 + (c) lack of swivel chair action off the drive foot. So here's Hershyzer 2 again - I'm putting more focus into the tilt, front leg position, and booty preset. But I think I still need to fix the way I move off the rear instep in this drill too.
Summing up: will keep focusing on the above to get flowing onto and off the x-step better.
Back to work but I welcome any new thoughts. I sincerely wish I could do this all day. I hope you guys are having as much fun watching this as I am doing it lol
Do you remember when we couldn't get me on top of that leg at all? I need a sense of humor to survive this lol.
Getting to sloped field is tough right now but I might also be able to rig up a decline ramp.
Maybe cutting the swing short is also backfiring at this point. More like I'm focused on braking rather than swinging. What do you think, want to see me start swinging out of Hershyzer 2?
I'd rather see you doing the smaller motions in the Steve Pratt vids and/or Ride the Bull/Swivel Stairs/Crush Can 2 with elevated rear foot/cinder block/stair.
