Gatekeeper Resolutions Day 18: How to get Maximum Distance
Day 18! Today we’re going to hit an open field and throw some distance shots. Grab 5 overstable, 5 medium, and 5 understable distance drivers–ideally, all the same disc so that you can school up on what you’re doing on subsequent shots. I said on day 2 that a lot of players will sell out for distance with suboptimal mechanics. Today, let’s work from the flight backwards to maximize distance while still keeping good form. Consider maximum distance shots as a balance of stability (flight time) vs. nose angle (height).
Generally speaking, a disc will begin fading when it gets too far below its designed flight speed. For distance shots, what we really want to prevent is stalling, where there simply isn’t enough speed at a particular angle to generate enough lift–for our purposes, that looks like “hyzering out”.
So in order to squeeze as much distance out of the shot, we’d like the end of the flight to be pretty close to flat, with maybe a little bit of finish on it. As such, that suggests that the majority of the flight should be turned over.
Depending on the stability of each disc, you’ll therefore want to release on anhyzer, or a slight hyzer so that it gets over and stays over for a long time. Notice that many of the big distance throwers go with a fast, slightly flippy disc when they’re really trying to get on a shot. For example, Paige Pierce will go with a Zeus or Nuke, Garrett Gurthie throws Katanas.
This implies that the disc will be moving left to right for most of the shot. So our runup will be from back right to front left on a teepad (or in a field to your mark). It’s also essential to give each shot some height, so that it has time to fly. On an anhyzer release, it’s crucial to continue pulling straight through, and adjusting your wrist and torso to get the anhyzer, rather than rounding on the shot. Nose angle is very critical to avoid stalling out–my experience is that this is best-handled by keeping your forearm and wrist in the same swing plane–we’re throwing upward, but the trajectory the disc follows while pulling through needs to be linear.
Other than that, approach distance shots like any other–don’t try to run up too fast, or even throw harder. We want to be loose, give clean spin, and hit the right angle, so that’s how you “win” the game of this field work session. There are a lot of other good resources for distance shots, so listening to spinny me shouldn’t be taken as authoritative.
Written By Andrew Fish, PDGA 58320
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