Do you ever sit around sometimes and daydream about being a pro disc golfer? Of course you do. We all do. We imagine we possess every disc golf skill we could name. We are the best in the world at all of them. We shred every course out there and new courses are designed specifically to thwart our super human disc golf skills. That would be like winning the “disc golf lottery”.

While that will happen to literally no one, there is a slightly higher chance you could win the real lottery. Do you ever fantasize about what you would do if you won? I don’t mean you if won $5 and a free ticket playing some rinky dink scratch off game. I mean the big boy lottery. I’m talking about the I don’t ever have to work again megagooglepowersuperball play disc golf for the rest of your life lottery?

I guess that’s a dumb question. Of course you’ve thought about that too. Even people who preach that “all money is evil” have secretly dreamt of hitting it big and never having to work again.

As disc golfers, I would imagine that a common fantasy involves a lot of private land and 36 or more custom baskets. A disc golf paradise for you and your closest friends. I can tell you for a fact that I have my own disc golf country club already built in my head. I’m just waiting for those winning numbers to come through.

But I also fantasize about really odd disc golf related uses for lottery winnings. I wouldn’t just build my own course. I have other things in mind. I’m a bit strange in many ways. This is one of them.

One of the things I’d do with my newfound wealth is hire someone. That person’s job would be to follow me around the course and smack me in the head. Not for no reason, that would be a terrible use of my lottery winnings. Their job would be to smack me in the head every time I forgot to do one very specific thing.

[tweetthis]What would YOU do if you won the #discgolf lottery?[/tweetthis]

Not doing this particular thing causes more added throws to my score card than any other disc golf related skill out there. Forgetting this one thing has contributed to lost league matches, missed ace pots, and embarrassing tournament performances. A lack of this skill has resulted in almost every other disc golf scoring issue I’ve had for the entire time I’ve played the sport. I even listed it as the number one piece of disc golf advice I wish I’d taken since the time I started playing this sport!

You would think that I would have mastered this little skill by now. Especially when it’s not all that hard in the first place. On top of that, it’s the single most important disc golf skill you can have.

And I’m not alone. I guarantee that most of you have some degree of the same issue. This one thing not only plagues my disc golf existence on an every day basis, but I am here to tell you that it probably plagues yours too.

With all that said, can you blame me for wanting to hire someone to follow me around and smack me in the head every time I forget to do it? I’m starting to think that after all these years, it’s the only way I’ll ever learn!

The Most Important Disc Golf Skill

Tired of me talking about this skill but not actually telling you what it is? Well, here ya go…

The single most important disc golf skill is… Following through.

Yep, follow through. It’s the bane of our disc golf existences. If we early release a disc into a tree, you know why we did it? No follow through. If we doinked a putt off the front of the basket, why did it happen? No follow through. If we didn’t clear the water and our disc hyzered out of the sky, plummeting into a watery grave? Yeah, you guessed it, no follow through.

As I played a tournament this past weekend, there was a pretty sizable 4 group back up on one of the holes. I had plenty of time to sit and watch other groups play.

Of the 70+ people playing that day, only a small handful were fully following through. Literally every single other disc golfer I saw was stopping their follow through short.

I went to a clinic with JohnE McCray this year. He started the whole presentation by asking, “What’s the single most important skill in disc golf?” The answer? “Following through”. I’d say he’s qualified and knows what he’s talking about, wouldn’t you?

He then pointed out that none of us were following through. Even when we threw for him and only focused on following through, he was still staying it wasn’t enough. Even when I would have sworn that I followed through further than I ever had before, you know what he said to me? “Still not enough”.

Don’t believe that you have this problem too? Go record yourself throwing. Now watch what you do compared to Shusterick, McBeth, Lizotte, Doss, Climo, or any other pro disc golfer out there. Scary, isn’t it?

It’s My Fantasy, So….

So yes. I want to hire a guy. And since it’s my fantasy, I want it to be an Oompa Loompa from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory. Partly because they are kind of annoying. Partly because they are kind of scary. And partly because that’s just the image that keeps popping into my head. Not to mention, they could sing a catchy little tune while they did it…

Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-do
I have a disc golf puzzle for you
Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-dee
No follow through is what we did see

I picture him trailing close behind me out on the course… My putt doinks the cage and the little orange guy runs up and thwacks the back of my head. A drive misses the fairway, he sneaks up and… KAPOW! I throw an approach shot out of bounds… I wake up with him standing over me just raining down slaps to the noggin’.

I’m telling you, it could be a thing.

The sad part is it doesn’t have to be. Following through is so simple. It’s one of those Nike things. If I was to write a blog post about it, it would be three words long:  Just do it. (or it would be this one, which is almost 1500 words long :/) I have no idea why I and so many others have a complete mental block against it.

Maybe it’s because we are afraid of grip lock. Maybe it’s because we don’t trust our throws. Maybe it’s because we are trying to finesse everything instead of just throwing the stupid disc. Maybe it’s a little bit of all those.

No matter the reason, the fix is easy. It doesn’t require winning the lottery. It doesn’t require hiring a guy. And it doesn’t require an Oompa Loompa (although you have to admit that’s a super cool idea!).

How about you? Do you follow through? Do you really? Can you prove it on video? If so, I want to hear how you acquired this skill. Please let us know in the comments below. If you did hire an Oompa Loompa, can you email me their contact info? I might want to hire them.

You know what else you could hire an Oompa Loompa to do? Keep up with this blog and then read you every post so you don’t miss anything. Of course there is an easier and less expensive way to do that. Just subscribe by entering your email below and we’ll send you a slick disc golf newsletter every Sunday. We’ll also send you links to all of the posts for that week too. That way you stay up to date on the blog and don’t have to deal with a creepy orange guy at the same time!

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The post The Simplest and Most Important Disc Golf Skill appeared first on Mind Body Disc - Disc Golf Blog.

You are standing on the tee. Today you are playing one of the better courses in your area. This hole is a great example of why. The basket is not reachable off the tee. It’s 650 feet away. Good thing you watched that YouTube video last night on disc golf driving tips!

You’ve been working on your distance for occasions just like this one. You are primed and ready to let the disc rip. You can’t wait to impress your friends. You grab your favorite Destroyer. You step up. You crush it like you’ve never crushed it before. You might have even heard the disc squeak, “ouch!” as it leaves your hand!

The rest of the group watches the disc as it sails out past 400 feet. It’s a thing of beauty that skips and flares at the end of its flight leaving you just off the left edge of the fairway. You walk off the tee pad head held high, chest out, and proud of what you just did.

After your display, you kind of scratch your head as you see that one of your friends is holding a Buzzz. Doesn’t she know this is a 600 foot hole? What is she thinking? Well, if she wants to make it easy on you, you’re certainly not going to stop her, right?

You watch as she throws a shot up the right hand side of the fairway. It settles down about 300 feet out and fades gently to the middle of the fairway. Ha! You’ve got her by at least 100 feet!

D’oh!

Now for the interesting part. As you walk up the fairway, your confidence starts to fade. As the disc gets closer, you start to see what kind of second shot you’ve left yourself. The nearer you get, the uglier things look.

When you get up to your disc, you see that you’ve landed in some tall grass that will make a run up impossible on your second shot. The basket is guarded on both sides. With the angle you’ve left yourself there is nothing but trees and bushes blocking any workable line in.

All the good angles are gone from this spot. The harder you look, the worse it gets. It’s going to take a miracle shot to get anywhere near the basket. Looking around, you see that the only spot that has a decent line to the basket is the one your opponent is standing on. She smiles at you and waves.

She is in a perfect position to get up and down. She marks her disc, takes the same Buzzz she threw off the tee, and throws a beautiful straight shot right up to the basket. At most she has a 15 foot putt for a 3.

With your terrible footing, shaken confidence, and lack of a good options for your second shot, you end up in the bushes to the right of the basket. By the time you get out of the bushes and into the chains, you take a 4.

A lot of good that video on disc golf driving tips did you now, right?

Distance shouldn’t be your first concern.

Your first concern, every single time you play, should be getting the disc into the basket in the fewest amount of throws possible. It’s not how far you are going to throw.

[tweetthis]The only thing recorded on a #discgolf score card is your score.[/tweetthis]

That means that when you step up on the tee, there are a lot more things to think about than how far you are going to throw the disc.

In two previous posts, we talked about managing your upshots to leave yourself a putt you had a good chance to make. We talked about reading the green and also reading the wind. The idea was to leave yourself the easiest possible putt.

When thinking about disc golf course management, there is a natural progression of those concepts. Place your drives so that your approach shot is the easiest possible too. At the very least, don’t leave yourself a difficult shot.

If your upshot is limited, you take away your ability to think about what kind of putt to leave yourself. Instead you can only worry about getting near the basket in the first place.

What does the 4x World Champion think?

Paul McBeth recently wrote a Facebook post about people who ask him to play casual rounds to better learn the game. I loved his response. He said instead of playing a casual round with him, they should watch him play a practice round. What do they watch for? Among other things, where he chooses to land his disc and where he throws his approaches from.

The distance your disc travels is only one minor part of where you choose to land your disc. That’s why this week I want to share a quick list of 9 things you should consider when standing on the tee pad. These are the things to think about when picking a landing spot for your drives.

***As an aside… To do this, your field work needs to start focusing as much or more on accuracy and disc control as it does on the actual distance you are throwing.

9 uncommon disc golf driving tips.

• Accuracy. Ask yourself how far you can throw accurately. Sure, you might be able to hit the local football field and bomb discs out past 400 feet. The real question is how far can you throw them and have them land where you intend them to?
• Placement. Where do you have the best approach shot from? Does throwing a shorter drive leave you in a better position? Where are the good lines to the basket? You will need to have checked the hole before playing it to know.
• Footing. Where is the best footing to be had? Can you see a wide area that would leave a good approach shot? Where in that area would put you on flat ground with the opportunity for a clean run up?
• Disc Angle. What angle will the disc need to land at for it to get to the spot you pick? Will it need to skip to this spot? Do you need the disc to settle down flat on your chosen location? This will help you pick both the disc as well as the line you want to throw off the tee.
• Ground condition. Will your drive skip when landing? Will it stick? Can it roll away? Is the ground hard or soft? You can do the best job in the world of picking the right spot to throw your second shot from but if you can’t get your drive to stay there, it doesn’t matter.
• Obstructions. What obstructions will be in your way on your approach? If you choose to throw a straight second shot but then realize there isn’t a high enough ceiling to do that, you will be in a tough spot. Ask yourself if you will have a clear and unobstructed second shot.
• Your preference. Many holes will present you with a multitude of possible second shots. Which type of shot do you prefer to throw? If you can leave yourself both a hyzer and an anhyzer approach, which are you better at? Look for the shot that leaves you the best chance for success.
• Distance. Not of your drive, but of your second shot. What distance are you most comfortable throwing? A good example is leaving yourself a longer second shot so that you can throw that shot at full power. Full power shots are more accurate than ones you try to take something off of.
• Ego? Are you making your decision on the tee pad with your ego or your head? It takes a big person to throw a mid off the tee on a 600 foot hole. Make sure you are playing smart and making good decisions. Letting your ego play for you rarely works out well in the long run. Check out this post for more on this topic.

Do your homework.

To do any of this, you have to be familiar with the course. I’m not just talking about having played it before. I mean really knowing the course. Without this type of intimate knowledge, you’ll never be making the best possible decision.

A great way to do this is to walk or play the course backward. Look at each hole starting at the basket. Take a hard look at the lines in to the basket. Then walk out to those spots and look to the tee. You’ll be surprised at how much more clearly you see the hole when doing this. This drill also gets you out of “play mode” and into “observation mode”.

If you can, take notes. Jot them down. Even if you never look at them, the simple act of writing them down or recording them in your phone will help them stick in your memory. You won’t have long during a round to make these decisions. They need to be made before you even start playing.

Execute.

Think before you throw. Instead of getting up to your second shot and then dealing with an unknown, try to make your second shot one you wanted and planned on. If you have your plan of attack down before you start, all you have to worry about at that point is execution.

Most people, when they search the web or YouTube for disc golf driving tips, they are looking for more distance. I totally get that. Who doesn’t want more distance? But what good does that distance do if it doesn’t help you score lower?

Anyone can try and throw far. There’s a million tips out there on how to do that. Not everyone can score well. For that it requires a different set of tips. I really believe that if you go out and execute the 9 points above, you will get lower scores.

Often the most important shot on harder and longer courses is your second shot. Make it work for you, not against you! Don’t believe this works? Take a minute and watch Paul McBeth or any other top pro play. There isn’t a drive they are throwing where they aren’t thinking about what their second shot is going to look like.

Do you like these tips? Do they help your game? If so, make sure and subscribe to the blog. We’ll make sure you never miss a post. You never know when one tip ends up changing your game for the better forever!

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The only way you can throw a disc is straight.

Weird statement when referring to something that usually flies every way except straight.  I’m not talking about how the disc flies, though.  I’m talking about how the disc is thrown.  So maybe I need to change that statement slightly.

The only way you can throw a disc is straight….  At a target you pick in the distance.

What happens after the disc leaves your hand is totally out of your control.  It’s going to change direction.  It’s not going to go straight.  It’s not supposed to.  The purely straight shot is one of the hardest shots in disc golf to master.  Most of the time, we are playing a curved flight.  Sometimes curved in multiple directions.

In our heads, we all know this.  In our bodies, though, we often don’t.  Let me illustrate with an example….

You step up on the tee pad.  This particular hole is around a corner, 275 feet, on your right.  You are a RHBH player.  You grab a disc that you know will turn right.  Either because it will turn over for you, or because you can throw it with an anhyzer angle and it will hold that angle around the corner to the target.

In order to nail this shot, you have to throw the disc at a target straight out in front of you.  When you do that, the disc will “do the work” of turning around the corner.  The problem is that many of us don’t throw the disc at that target straight out in front of us.

We try to throw it around the corner when we should just throw it and let it go around the corner on its own. It doesn’t need our help and it doesn’t have a steering wheel.

We think that by having some kind of crazy follow through or body position, we can help it get around the corner.  We try to steer the disc in any number of ways. The result?  We grip lock the disc into the woods on the right.  We throw it too high or too low.  We do everything except throw the disc at the target straight out in front of us.

Think about throwing that same disc in an open field. If you wanted it to turn right, you would simply throw it hard, flat, and straight ahead. Then, as it is supposed to, the disc would turn right. If you weren’t out in an open field and you were back in the woods again, it would navigate that corner with no problems.

It’s only when that corner gets in our heads and makes us think we need to somehow throw this shot differently that we run into problems. So, next time you are faced with a time when you need your disc to turn around a corner remember this lesson. Pick a spot to throw the disc at. Commit to throwing it at that spot. Don’t try to steer the disc.

It doesn’t have a steering wheel.

Something you should steer, though, is this blog into your email in box once a week. You never know when we’ll send you the tip that takes your game to the next level.

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My Dad is an airplane freak.  He’s like that dog in Pixar’s “Up” except instead of darting away and saying “squirrel!”, he says “airplane!”.  He’s flown model planes my whole life.  He even flew the real thing for a while.  For me, though, airplanes are more of a puzzle than an obsession.

I remember staring at them as a kid and wondering how they flew.  What wizardry and magic made them leave the ground?  I even did an 8th grade science project on aerodynamics because I really wanted to know what was going on there.

The short answer to how planes fly is they have wings.  Wings lift the plane off the ground and without them, the big aluminum cigar tube would just kind of sit there.  Wings are aerodynamically constructed to do this job.  That and I still think there’s some voodoo involved.

When I started playing disc golf, I found myself asking a similar question about discs.  How do discs fly?  It turns out that it’s not so much that they have wings, but that they are a wing.  Airplanes and discs stay in the air in pretty much the same way.  It’s called lift.

There are actually two different explanations of lift.  I won’t go into either of them here, but if you want a quick 2 minute explanation, check this video out:

What’s important to realize is that regardless of the explanation (I still say it’s witchcraft), the wing’s shape is what causes it to stay in the air.  You know what isn’t a factor in it staying in the air?  How high you throw it.

You don’t have to throw a disc high up in the air to make it fly.  It’s a wing.  It will fly on its own.  You just have to throw it straight and fast.  Yet time after time when we try to throw a disc far, one of the things we do is throw it too high in the air.  Our brains forget that the disc will stay in the air because that’s what it was designed to do.  It doesn’t need us throwing it straight up to help.

With folks who are new to the sport, their brain isn’t thinking lift.  Their brain is thinking it wants the disc to go far, so therefore it needs to be thrown high.  And thus we have courses full of new players chucking their disc way up in the air and watching with a very sad face as it crashes to the ground a disappointingly short distance away.

Of course this is a severe oversimplification.  There are a lot of things that impact why and how a disc flies.  But in the end, most throws don’t need to be more than 10-20 feet off the ground.   Again, that’s an oversimplification, but for most people it’s a great guideline.  Especially if they are new to the game.

So take a look at your throws.  Are they going way up in the air?  If so, you are robbing yourself of distance.  The energy that is propelling the disc up could instead be propelling it forward.  Making it go forward will allow the disc (which is a wing) to make its own lift.  This is one of the first things that I try to teach new players…

Just throw the disc straight and level.  The disc will take care of the rest.  Science!!!

You know what else is meant to fly?  This blog, directly into your email in box!  Just enter your email below and I’ll make sure you never miss a flight.

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“I know why your drives keep going into the woods on the right on this hole.”

“Because this hole hates me?”

“No, turn around.  You’ll see why right away.”

As we walked up the fairway, him to his disc out in the open, me to mine depressingly kicked off into the woods, we both turned around.  At first I didn’t see anything unusual.  But after looking for a few moments more I saw it.  How is it that in over a year of playing this course, I never noticed it?  The tee pad was pointed in the wrong direction!

This hole had usually given me fits.  My drives always seemed to end up heading directly into the trees on the right of the fairway.  I could never figure out why.  As I arrived at my disc, deep in the woods, I peered back at the pad.  Sure enough.  Not only was it pointing the wrong direction, it was pointing directly at me.  No wonder I was always throwing it here, I was just going right down the middle of the pad and never realized that the direction of my run up was making me throw the disc in the wrong direction!

I’ve only played one course with circular tee pads before.  One of the things that I liked about them (the course they were on was mediocre at best) was that they allowed you to line up and tee off in whatever direction you wanted.  With rectangular or keystone shaped pads, the pads subtly direct you in a particular direction.  That’s fine if they point the right way.  But what if they don’t.

Also, what if you want to take a different line?  One that doesn’t go in the direction the tee pad points.  One smart thing to do is first pick your target in the distance.  Then draw a straight line back from it across the tee pad.  This is now the line you want to take your run up on.  It won’t always go in the same direction of the tee pad.

Sometimes it will go from corner to corner.  Sometimes it will go down one side or the other.  Sometimes, it may even start off the side of the tee pad and end up with only your plant foot on the pad.  It turns out this is what I needed to do on the hole that has the pad pointed in the wrong direction.  Once I started doing that, I started keeping it in the fairway.

The moral of the story is that you dictate the direction and location of your run up.  The pad should not be doing that for you.

Another thing that will help you keep your drives in the fairway is to keep up with this blog.  Make sure you are subscribed by entering your email below so you never miss a tip or a trick!

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I don’t know about where you live, but it’s definitely spring here in Illinois.  One day it’s cold, the next it’s hot.  One day it’s calm, the next it windy.  This is the time of year when every day off is a crap shoot weather wise.  The forecast could change several times by the time I’m actually off work and headed to the course.

I’ll play in just about any conditions.  Wind is no exception.  And it’s been windy lately.  A lot of people have trouble playing in the wind.  Especially when they have to throw directly into the teeth of it.  Throwing directly into the wind was something I always kind of dreaded until I was given a very simple tip…  Don’t throw harder just because it’s windy.

There are some long holes on my home course.  At least one of them is always facing directly into the wind.  When you step up on the tee, wind howling in your face, it’s natural to want to throw the disc harder.  Don’t.  In fact, sometimes you may even want to back off a bit.  There are two key reasons as to why.

First, the wind amplifies any mistakes you make.  We’ve all seen the repercussions of trying to kill the disc.  We stand up on it, we roll our wrist, we grip lock, we early release, the list goes on.  Good form is almost always sacrificed when you swing for the fences.  Nothing good usually comes from throwing harder than normal.  Now add wind to all of those possible bad outcomes and you have a recipe for disaster.  When the wind is in your face it’s increasingly important to be clean and smooth in your throw.

Second, you’d be surprised at how much distance you can get when throwing into the wind without having to throw really hard. Distance is created when a disc gets to flat or turns over a bit.  The longer it stays flat or turned, the more time it spends in the air.  Once a disc starts to fade, thats when it’s heading towards the ground and the end of its flight.  The great thing about a head wind is that it will keep your disc flat or turned for longer than if there was no wind at all.

By throwing a moderately over stable disc into the wind at your normal tempo (usually a disc that you can almost but not quite get to turn when there is no wind), you will see that the disc holds its turn, flies quite a ways, and then still fades back.  This is the key to getting good distance into the wind.  You are actually using the wind to help your disc stay in the air longer.

Now this does take some practice, touch, and a solid knowledge of your discs.  But so does everything else in disc golf, right?  The great part is that it really does work.  The next time you look outside and see those trees a blowing, grab your bag, head out on the course, and give this a try.  You may just find that the headwind you used to hate has now become your friend.

You know what else works great when thrown at normal speed, smooth and clean?  This blog when thrown into your inbox every week.  Just enter your email below and we’ll send you a groovy weekly newsletter along with a link to all of that week’s posts.  That way you never miss a minute of the hot, disc golf action.

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“In every round of disc golf, you will have to straddle putt at least once.” -JohnE McCray

And he’s right.  Almost every round, you will end up needing to straddle putt.  Out from behind a tree or a bush.  To give yourself a line to the basket.  Because there is something behind you preventing you from taking your normal stance.  Whatever the reason, it happens.  And it happens a lot.

Why, then, is it that so many disc golfer have such a hard time with the straddle putt?  An even better question is why do so few disc golfers practice the straddle putt when they know it’s going to be an issue?  It’s one thing to not practice some crazy overhead thumber roller that you need once every five years.  It’s another to knowingly ignore a skill you know you will need the very next time you play.

Here’s the bonus.  The straddle putt not only allows you to putt when your normal stance just doesn’t work, but it also allows you to gain an advantage on some putts as well.  By straddling, you have now given yourself a lot of room to set up on either side of your marker.  You can manipulate both wind direction and ground elevation by being able to putt from behind (your standard stance) or on either side (straddle).  Putting in the wind and putting with an uphill or downhill stance become much easier when you are adept at the straddle.

It’s also nice when you are trying to get good footing.  I played a tournament last weekend where a standard stance would have had me standing in ankle deep mud.  By straddling, I was able to avoid that.  You can also pick the flatter, more friendly piece of ground to set up on.

In January of this year I moved from an athletic stance putt to a straddle as my primary putting style.  It’s been one of the best things I’ve done for my game.  Even if you don’t make it your primary style, I would highly recommend learning, practicing, and becoming proficient at it.  That’s one of the first things that JohnE McCray went over in his putting clinic and I would say the man knows what he’s talking about!

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If you are a racing fan, you are familiar with the phrase, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”.  Variants of that phrase are used in many sports.  I’ve heard it in bowling, ball golf, and baseball to name a few.  It might seem counterintuitive, but it’s true every time.  It’s not until a race car driver learns to slow down, especially in the corners, that they start to significantly improve their lap times.

The same goes for disc golf.  The next time you are at your local course, watch some of the players.  Many of their run ups look like they are trying to win the 10 yard dash.  Arms and legs are flailing everywhere.  Many start several yards behind the tee pad just to have enough room.  After they release the disc, their momentum sends them flying off the end of the tee pad like a drunken sailor racing off of a pier and into the ocean below.

Now, pull up You Tube and check out the best players in our sport.  Watch Shusterick, McBeth, Climo, Schultz, Doss, and really almost any other top pro.  It’s almost like they are casually walking up to the end of the tee pad.  If you stopped the video before they actually released the disc, many might wonder how the disc was going to go 50 yards let alone 500 or more.

But that’s exactly what happens.  Will Shusterick, said by many to have perfect disc golf form, steps lightly across the tee pad, coils smoothly, and then throws the disc further than you and I put together could.

I don’t claim to know why this is the case, it just is.  One thing I do know is that slowing down helps you better feel the timing of a proper throw.  There are quite a few threads on both Disc Golf Review and Disc Golf Course Review where people describe their “aha!” moment as coming after they slowed things way down.

I’m sure many of you could probably give the technical explanation of how this works.  For me, I’ll just file it under the “it just works” category and not try to figure it out.  So the next time you are out on the course and trying to improve your distance, timing, form, accuracy, or any number of other aspects of your throw, try slowing down.  Try slowing way down.  You might be surprised as to what happens.

One thing that just doesn’t slow down is this blog!  We just keep on cranking out content week after week.  Make sure and subscribe so that you don’t miss any of it!

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Several years ago, I blew out 4 discs in my back.  It was a very dark time in my life filled with pain, a loss of hope, and the inability to play disc golf.  It was horrible and I don’t wish an experience like that on anyone.  If you have ever had any disc issues in your back, you can relate.  It is not a fun experience.

Like everything else in life, finding the silver lining is key.  The bright side here was that the injury and subsequent recovery forced me to learn a standstill shot.  It was the only way to start playing again.  It was slow going at first, but it was better than being face down on the living room floor and stupid on pain meds.

If you are looking for a single activity that can impact every aspect of your game positively, learning to throw from a stand still is a great candidate.  By removing most of the moving parts of the throw (and they are the moving parts that contribute to distance and accuracy the least), you can really pay attention to the things that matter most.  You can further increase the effectiveness of this skill by learning it with a putter first.

It might take a while, but throwing a putter 250’+ is a completely learnable skill by almost everyone.  If you were to dedicate a good amount of time to this, and then pick up a driver or mid, you will be shocked at how much better your throw is.  Throwing from a stand still will teach you a lot:

1. Weight shift.
2. Involving your whole body.
3. Keeping the disc close to you.
4. Pulling on a straight line.
5. Timing.
6. Imparting snap and spin on the disc
7. Keeping the nose down.
8. Throwing smoothly with no flutter.
9. Hitting your intended lines.

Want to learn to throw from a standstill?  I talk a little about it, and my back injury, in a post I wrote about controlling your upshot distance.   But if you really want the master class, here it is from Will Shusterick:

Now, shut off whatever device you are reading this on and go do that.  Follow his advice and do it until your arm falls off!  Once learned, you will cherish the stand still shot as one of your most valuable disc golf weapons!

Another valuable disc golf weapon is a subscription to this blog!  You don’t have to do anything until your arm falls off for that, just enter your email below!

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Foot faults.  They don’t get called a lot in casual rounds, but they still bug the snot out of me.  It’s pretty straight forward, you have 30cm behind the center line of your mini to plant your foot when you throw.

I kind of understand how this happens when people are using a run up.  I still don’t think it’s something that people should do, but I understand.  The one I don’t understand is when people foot fault when they putt.  You are standing still for crying out loud!  Your body isn’t moving!

I’m going to assume that the foot faults I’ve seen when people are putting are just an accident.  No one would ever try to get closer to the basket illegally, right?  I’m not talking about putts outside the circle.  That’s a whole other political issue right now.  I’m talking about foot faults on putts within the circle.  It doesn’t happen a lot, but almost every time it happens in the same way.

The person lines up for their putt.  They put their forward foot as close as humanly possible to the mini/disc/marker.  They are trying to suck every last bit of distance off of the putt.  They shift their weight back as part of the putt.  Their front foot comes up slightly.  They shift forward when putting and put their foot down right on top of the marker.

That, my friends, is a foot fault.  You can’t step on the mini.  Not even a teency weency bit.  Not when you are throwing from the fairway, not when you are putting.  The good news is that this is super easy to avoid.

Instead of cramming your toe as close to the mini as possible, back off a tad.  Give yourself a few inches between your toe and the mini.  Give yourself some margin for error.  Most people that I’ve seen do this do it on almost every putt.  Of course no one is going to call that in a casual round and most likely no one will call that in league play (although they should, league play is competition with money on the line!).

So now we have a player that has been putting like this for years.  When do they get called on it?  At the worst possible moment.  When it really, really counts.  It will invariably be on the 18th hole of their final tournament round when they are putting for the win.  How do I know this?  I’ve seen it happen.  Nothing will rattle you quite so much as to be called for a foot fault in an already high pressure situation.

So, to prevent that from happening, and to just play by the rules in the first place, start giving that mini some breathing room.  That extra inch or two won’t make a difference (everyone together now…  that’s what she said!) in whether or not you make your putt.  But it could prevent embarrassment and disaster down the road!

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