Fuck This Shit, I'm Lifting

I'm not sure I mentioned this in the previous 3 posts (by the way, sorry for not updating this piece of shit for over a year), but I have never, in my history as a thrower, been a lifter. Sure, I took Individual Fitness my last year of high school, but even then it was simple lifts like chest and leg press (I may have also been guilty of doing bicep curls). I also didn't understand the importance of protein, stretching, hydration, or even the difference between strength and power. On top of all that, I think the lifting only lasted a couple months, then I was done for the season because I wanted to compete at 100%. Fall of 2008 and 2009 had me lifting for 2-3 weeks, maybe less, so not much came from those stints. Aside from that, lifting really hasn't been a thing in my life.

Well now, I'm changing that. My good friend and now training partner Keeley and I are taking our lifts seriously and trying to get in 5 days a week, even though our work schedules don't always line up. She is an experienced lifter and I a novice. But I have been at a throwing plateau for long enough (3 years!), and I know only lifting can ever change this. So we're lifting hard.

Squats, deadlifts, bench press, incline bench, power cleans, shrugs, shoulder press, and rows are on the list, but we are also getting into cardio shape and doing core and kettle bell work twice a week. I have been trying my best not to be a pussy as I have been in the past, pushing myself to my limits every day and trying to bring the same mentality to the gym consistently, as difficult as that is. I'm not sure I've ever been so serious about anything... I guess I really just want to live up to my potential, especially because I had 8 years to do so and never bothered. I'm 24, but it isn't too late... No, actually this is just the beginning.

Not lifting was a mistake, but at least I know that now. I wish I could tell everyone who is doing the same thing I did to wise up and get with the program. You'll never know what you're capable of if you're always afraid. Push the envelope. Throw far godddammit!

Humility

An important subject in throwing, often neglected by YouTubers and other members of the throwing community when communicating electronically, is humility. It's a funny subject, however; there are times for gloating as well, and sometimes it's hard to know which occasion we find ourselves in. I, for one, have worked on being humble through the years. I was never cocky or anything, but I liked to spam my distanced on people, and find ways to do so without seeming arrogant. But what I've realized over my eight years of throwing is that to be truly humble, you must not say anything unless asked. That is it.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. For example, should you post a YouTube video of yourself throwing, you might as well flaunt your distance, unless you really don't care. There are acceptable times to gloat, but most of the time we need to keep our mouths shut.

Technique and Feel

For the past few weeks I have been approaching the throw a little bit differently. Teammate Bryan Kolacz (2009 DIII NCAA Champion in the hammer) referred me awhile back to a few articles about throwing the hammer, one of which explaining, in general terms, how we actually go about pushing the ball (by Martin Bingisser; if you don't know the blog, it is one of the best out there in my opinion, and many elite throwers comment regularly: http://www.mbingisser.com; article here: http://www.mbingisser.com/2010/07/ask-martin-vol-4). Bingisser's article describes the hammer throw as a "dance," and explains that the hammer - not you - is the leading partner. This got me thinking, and very quickly I began attacking my practices differently.

One week after reading the articles sent to me, I posted this on Facebook and tagged my teammates:

Today, for the first time in recent memory, as I stepped into the throwing circle I decided not to think about my legs, hands, head, or any other body part; essentially, nothing at all. No effort, no inner monologue – this was a throw for feeling. As I drew the hammer over my head, the beginning and end of any conscious effort could be found in my slow, relaxed winds, but as I entered my first turn through the circle, anything and everything else in the world was lost. The only two things in existence were myself and the 16-pound ball, which was already beginning to feel weightless. I felt the rhythm and the weight of the ball through my four turns, and with nonexistent effort I produced a pretty damn good throw. Thing stayed up there a minute or two before it came down. But how? Why was this my best throw of the day, when I wasn't even focusing on the plethora of technical problems I have?

There is an aspect of everything that can be difficult to maintain, and it is the act of executing without thought. I find it recurring in my life with everything I do, though in many scenarios there isn't much challenge at all. But rest assured, the problem can present itself anywhere, and chances are quite good that at some point it will.

Take, for example, the act of watching TV. Not a complicated task you might think, and you are right; little in life takes less effort than watching the boob tube. But sometimes, and I am sure this affects everyone (not just ADD lepers like myself), after forgetting that we are watching something to begin with, we come briefly back to reality and inadvertently think. It could be something in real life that interrupts the flow of TV watching – perhaps dinner is ready or your dog won't stop barking – or, and this is a less common cause considering the simplicity of the leisure, we might realize that we are, in fact, watching TV, and this in itself causes a distraction (if only for a brief, brief period). It is a stupid example, really, but illustrates the fact that disruption by “conscious thinking” can occur in even the most mindless tasks.

Of course, we never had to learn how to watch TV, else we might lose track of the feeling more often. Throwing, in this context, is better compared with the playing of an instrument. Obviously our initial couple years with an instrument can and probably will make us look like fools. But you have to start somewhere. And no matter the motivation to pick it up, sooner or later, given ample effort, you will probably reach a comfortable level and find yourself “getting lost” in your music, and playing for no one else but yourself, for no other purpose than to enjoy yourself, and with only the movements that have become instinctual to your body and hands. You'll find yourself staring at an oven or a hole in the wall, without realizing it because your mind is so far dug into the feeling of playing that other perceptions become utterly auxiliary. Your mind becomes the music, and there is nothing else in the world.

But we can always be taken out of this state, and sometimes all it takes is the mere recognition that we are doing something at all. Maybe you've been jamming on your guitar nonstop for the last half hour, and maybe it's great stuff, but as soon as your mind wanders over to your hand on the fretboard, it all falls apart. The simple act of thinking about what we are doing can destroy everything, and in the worst cases, we never get the feeling back.

Such is throwing. Throwing the hammer in practice is a lot like going to guitar practice; you've got to work hard and focus on what you are doing, but you need to be able to lose yourself in the act every once in a while if you ever expect to find a natural groove. Competing and performing are much different. You've practiced for years, you know the motions, and now it's time to put on a show. Don't think about your technique. Feel every moment and every ounce of weight in your hands, but allow them to become weightless. Never let your mind in; the best always comes with an empty head.

Lose yourself in the throw.

The gist is that throwing is an art just like playing music, and sometimes we need to just lose ourselves in the act without thought. But one week after posting this, I began a quick decline in practice, and today I could not even get to the fourth turn on about a quarter of my throws; I was so unbalanced that I had to let go after the third. Basically, I let the articles and my own writing dictate how I was throwing, and instead of working on technique I was simply trying to feel the hammer - which I could not do because I was not in the right positions.

This is not good for business.

Today's main conclusion is this: there needs to be a balance between technique and feel. (Duh!) For example, if you only try to feel yourself pushing the ball, things might seem a little smoother through the push, but you might not be getting your weight over properly, which will end in tears (as it did today). We need a balance between "hard technique" and "feel technique," as we will call it, if we want to apply our technique properly and efficiently. In other words, you can tell someone not to drag the ball, but they need to think it and feel it in different terms for it to actually happen. For me today, the demise of ball drag came the instant I started pushing with my right hand and not just with my legs (note I thought about my right hand and not my right arm; in terms of "feel" and application, this makes a world of difference. The way you think about it and the way your coach words it can fix or break depending on whether they are right for your mind). I sometimes run into a problem where my right hip is unable to push on entry because there is too much weight on it. Only today did I realize the correlation between that (previously called the "weird leg thing" by me) and ball drag. But I couldn't fix the weird leg thing by thinking about my legs. The weight of the hammer puts my body in that position, and unless the ball is in front of me (done by pushing the right hand), it will continue to grow worse through each turn until I fall over or release early.

This does come full circle, I promise. When I thought about my dragging hammer or my hunching torso or my weird leg thing, I couldn't fix the problem. My coach and I had analyzed my positions and located the problem, but thinking about it like this is the definition of "hard technique" training. Positive results only came when we applied a "feel technique" change.

This will not always be the solution; sometimes recognizing a problem can be enough to fix it (as with posture - but not always). But if you are a thrower looking to improve your technique or a coach looking to improve your thrower's technique, the solution is rarely simple. More often than not, the way you think about executing an altercation will determine whether or not it actually happens. Feel is important and technique is too, but "feel technique" is the best solution to a problem in the realm of throwing.

The Thrower's Obsession

The world record for the men's discus throw is 243 feet. This may not seem far – most major league baseball fields extend past the 400 mark – but I can assure you of one thing: it is. For one thing, a baseball weighs about thirteen times less than a discus, but also remember that players whack it with a baseball bat in order to achieve such distances. So even though a world record toss with a 2 kilogram discus will probably result in a shallow fly ball out with a baseball, there is something to be said about such a distance.

When Jurgen Schult threw this record in 1988 for what was then East Germany, the next person down the list had just barely thrown within 7 feet of him. In a sport where distance is the primary objective, 7 feet is inexplicably massive. World championships and olympic finals have been decided by fractions of an inch, so throwing 7 feet further than anyone else in history, as he did, is practically unthinkable. And while Schult's record was scared twice last decade, within mere inches the first of those times, it still stands. Twenty-one years and counting.

You'd think that with an objective so simple as distance, a record would be easier to approach. Well, my friends, it isn't. Lifting day and night is not enough to breach the kind of territory that Schult once so briefly tread upon; while strength never hurts, you have to remember that the 2 kilogram platter he threw probably could have kept up with a car on the highway, and that despite all the force he put into the throw, he still managed to stay safely inside the 8-foot concrete circle. In other words, speed and balance are ultimately the determining factors. Hence, a good thrower also performs speed training on a regular basis, and does balance exercises as well.

But even these things are not enough to make a discus fly well. Physics dictates everything, and for that reason, technique is by far the most important facet of throwing. At first glance, a full-turn discus throw - by far the most common approach - may seem simple enough to get right on the first try. This is, of course, not the case. Throwers spend their whole lives honing technique, attempting to tweak the slightest movements and positions, and to correct every ounce of misplaced body mass, all in order to maximize the conversion from potential to kinetic energy in the implement. More simply put, a thrower's greatest objective is to make sure that whatever strength they have is translated into the throw upon the implement's release. A thrower who neglects to use their legs properly (the most crucial source of energy) will end up wasting a large portion of the energy they put into the implement, and instead of that energy propelling the discus forward with greater velocity, it will be absorbed by the thrower's body and they will experience the implement pushing them back slightly as a consequence. The loss may not seem like much at first, but without incorporating the push from the legs, a 100-foot throw can be reduced to sub-50 (possibly more, depending on how bad the person's form is). This distance gap can easily be closed if the thrower simply learns the basics of incorporating leg power.

By now I trust you know that the name of the game is efficient translation from potential to kinetic energy, so it should not be hard to understand how one small error in the course of a full throw can result in a significant decrease in implement's distance. When greatness is determined by one sole factor, even the subtlest flaws carry huge consequences. I apologize for the lengthy lesson in physics, but it is, to me, a requisite in understanding the place whence each throwing event's complexity derives. The point of it all is that it will take more than brute strength to better Schult's massive throw. Technique must also be refined to the utmost, and the thrower must have strong nerves when entering competition. And, well, a lucky headwind never hurts (I believe this is the only reason Mr. Schult's discus flew as far as it did – a good headwind can add upwards of 10 feet to a throw). There are transfinite other aspects of throwing that also hold importance, but you get the idea.

Anyway, to put Schult's throw into perspective, my furthest toss in a competition is 139 feet, only modestly more than half the world record, and in Division III track and field, that ain't too shabby. Provisionally qualifying for the DIII national championship requires 15 feet more than this, a feat I hope to accomplish this spring, but even that mark (154 feet) is still a cool 89 feet below the world record. So why bother?

If throwing were about distance, as it technically is, no one would do it. Preparation for the sport requires endless hours of training, repeating similar if not the same routines as the day before at ad nauseum. In a given year, a thrower of my age and experience works for an increase of somewhere around 10 feet, and hopes for 20. Sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming, training six or seven months a year hoping to extend my reach by such a simple figure. Naturally there has to be something more to discus throwing than how far you can make it go.

I was recently told by a fellow thrower that, despite its nature, throwing is one of the most difficult sports to get right. I don't often think about it, but when I do I usually get some variety of headache – something so simple as hurling a 4.5 pound frisbee down a field requires an attempt at perfection. Throwing is physics, and distance is only the shallowest of our enemies. Simple concepts like angle and velocity quickly grow into words like torque, push, position, block, and, of course, our greatest fiend of all, balance. If any one of these is varied the slightest amount, the throw suffers. And that isn't including even simpler concepts like how the discus comes out of your hand, which I've gathered to be the greatest challenge of all maturing discus throwers (I, on the other hand, am pretty good with it). It is in this way that the simplicity of a thrower's objective translates to the immense difficulty of the sport.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. To truly experience these ideas you'd have to try it out for yourself, and there is no way to describe the motions of a simple discus throw unless you have seen it up close. The least you can do is YouTube “discus throw.” Go ahead, do it now, I'll be waiting here when you come back.

The point of all this is that so much pain, frustration, and chaos comes out of throwing for a simple number, and yet we do it anyway. This is the last time I will speak in-depth about the technique of a discus thrower, as I intend to approach the greater question: why? Because I often lie awake in bed at night thinking about it and wondering why I waste so much of my time just to make a heavy plate fly. If I ever figure that out, you can be sure I'll get back to you. But for now, maybe you can help me along the way.