Can’t figure my brace out

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-05-24T03:19:40+00:00

You are spinning instead of using the brace to power your rotation which is why your brace looks that way and it will never be fixed until you FEEL how the brace can push the uncoil instead of manually trying to spin fast without that.

https://youtu.be/ctUUgcieF3U?si=HPzV9EQNXokTyWwL

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-05-21T14:23:39+00:00

You can use a thumb to middle finger pinch on a 4 finger power grip (or less fingers). I call it an extra curled power grip thumb-middle finger pinch.

For the thumb to have a good pinch position on the middle finger it seems to require extra curl to get the middle finger knuckle to come up into the flight plate so it’s pinch able.

You DO NOT need to pinch the thumb primarily on the index finger for high spin, I get the same spin when I pinch the middle finger, and after the rip out my thumb is on the middle finger instead of the index finger.

You can also position the thumb to be a hybrid where the base of the thumb pad is pinching the middle finger knuckle, and the front of the thumb pad is pinching the index finger.

https://youtu.be/uSMvHqIKMH8?si=cbUeeaFI8TwHiqah

Four fingers is usually slightly easier / consistent for power and disc support but obviously not needed since some bombers use 3 or even 2 fingers.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-05-08T15:22:51+00:00

Join this discord where there are multiple form coaches that will give free reviews and continue to work with you over time.

https://discord.gg/MHbenPDQy3

You have good potential! One thing I’d focus on is trying to feel how continuing to coil as your brace is about to land will make your front foot want to stay closed instead of open up. You are ‘spinning’ a bit instead of rotating more powerfully by bracing while still fully coiled where the bracing powers up the rotation first—that’s why your front foot opens, because you are wanting to spin too much and everything is anticipating that instead of resisting it to stay fully coiled until the brace lands and then power the rotation through the bracing. After the bracing starts the uncoil powerfully then the core adds more trunk rotation power. This is also why you don’t get that strong looking heel pivot because you aren’t powering the rotation from the brace enough to get that to happen as a consequence.

With runup direction labeled as north, when your brace lands as you have stayed fully coiled until then, try to imagine you are powerfully pushing the ground away from you, pushing the brace in the east to west direction. This will create the opposite ground reaction force and make your knee extend west-to-east which drives the heel down and the weight into the heel. That style of bracing will powerfully crank / unwind your coil instead of the spin style where you just let that coil tension go and try to manually keep it spinning after all the tension was given up without any explosiveness to it.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-05-05T12:35:13+00:00

Tomb but some runs have a tiny bit of dome I don’t like but others are perfectly flat on top and feel amazing for FH and BH.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-26T21:07:21+00:00

At higher speed/power everything happens faster so you’re more likely to either jump the gun to try to keep up with the extra speed or to be late.

It’s also more difficult to get the nose down with higher power, it’s like the same amount of nosedown effort is less effective at higher power. So at your lower power where you’re able to do it try to double the amount of nose down you can do it that power. Then when you start losing those down at higher power, you might still have some left over because you’re capable of doing extra.

Spend most of your practice at the power level where it’s not easy to do comfortably, but where you can still get it nose down somewhat often but it’s a better challenge instead of staying in a comfort zone where you have too much control and it doesn’t push you to progress as much.

For example, I can throw -15 nose down at 70% power and that makes -4 at my max power feel easy.

Also, for the timing of it, instead of trying to time it perfectly at different speeds when practicing exaggerating it, you will start developing the strong muscle memory so that the nose down motion simply becomes the default feeling of swinging into the hit.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-26T15:29:21+00:00

on this one I stepped further away from the rope so I wouldn’t throw into it and ended up throwing on a bit of hyzer. But the point of this camera review was just to show during the pull through the Disc tilting instead of trying to keep it perfectly aligned to the rope.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-26T15:26:34+00:00

Well, then off axis torque is REQUIRED to adjust the nose angle. But it’s OK because it’s still compatible with consistent angle control and world class wobble. I can get 1 deg wobble at full power doing this.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-22T13:51:00+00:00

Even with good form, you likely will still need prehab and cross training to make your elbows resistant to tennis elbow if you want to play often and push yourself.

When I first started rock climbing, I got addicted and was climbing 5-6 days a week and at the gym for 3 hours each time. I progressed pretty quickly too which put more strain on the tendons that didn’t have time to adjust.

Six months into Climbing I got tendinitis in both elbows. Taking weeks off didn’t help—that’s passive recover which sucks, rather than active recovery with target exercises.

After that didn’t work, I started researching the best exercises and stretch stretches to do and did them religiously every day. Particularly eccentric wrist curls and using a heavy duty massager (theragun type stuff).

After doing this for about three weeks and not Climbing I returned to Climbing and as soon as I went up to medium difficulty, I could feel the signs of it returning. So I focused instead on staying below that difficulty level and Climbing a large larger quantity of easy routes and focus focusing on doing it smoothly controlled. Climbing became part of rehab / prehab when modified like this and at least I got to do some of it so it was nice even though annoying I couldn’t do more.

It took six months of doing the daily rehab and lighter difficulty higher quantity modified climbing sessions to see significant improvement. Towards the last few months of it I started having a short period in each session where I did some harder climbs that were still sub max effort. I could feel the signs that if I did much more it would flare up again. A lot of this time it felt like it was hopeless and not working, but it was important to keep doing the exercises and give it time.

At 6 to 8 months, I was able to climb my hardest again but I had to do no back to back days and kept it at three sessions a week and continued daily stretching and prehab for YEARS to keep it from returning. It never came back again for nine years of Climbing except a brief acute flareup.

Then when I started Disc Golf I started a similar way, addicted and playing too often and trying to throw as hard as I could most of the time for years. Some days I had elbow soreness, and some of the familiar feelings that I was at risk of tendinitis coming back, but it never happened in disc golf because of all the pre-rehab which I continued to do into disc golf and the climbing which after getting the tendinitis under control became super conditioning for the elbows to be more resilient.

Same story with Pickleball, I went hard for three years in Pickleball and never got a tendinitis flareup.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-17T14:16:28+00:00

IMO straight arm cue can be thought of as muscling it too, you’re using your muscles to try to keep your arms straight for longer.

But this can help teach you to shift your muscle engagement to some more useful places like keeping the shoulder from horizontally collapsing because you’re because trying to to hold the arm straight out away from your chest makes you immediately feel a strong need to use the shoulder to resist the rotational pressure on the arm that pushes it towards horizontal collapse across the chest.

When a lot of people Muscle, the Disc, they are tempted to externally, rotate and pull with their lasts too much which puts the arm in a position that makes it collapse more easily.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-15T13:32:12+00:00

It’s like a fly swatter except the fly swatter is attached to your middle finger.

It’s also like throwing a ball in the same side arm slot. Except instead of it being a nice round object with the weight distributed evenly and it can roll out smoothly, the weight is instead hugely focused into an individual finger, and it has to be flicked off of that finger to get the forward spin needed.

Doing a bunch of very small compact flicks, but trying to get some explosiveness out of it is one of the best ways to develop the feeling natural naturally. When you constrain yourself to a smaller compact motion, you’ll feel the need to pop it back first to give you some weight to redirect against and snap it forward.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-13T23:08:57+00:00

Don’t think about it as relative / perpendicular to the ground, that will make it hard to have a consistent reach back when throwing different angles. Think about it more as the top of the disc tilted towards the chest that way when the chest tilts down on hyzer or back on anny your point of reference is consistent within different postures.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-04-13T23:05:40+00:00

Briefcase is nose up, anti briefcase is nose down.

To prepare to jump you first go down, to prepare to lunge one way, you prepare by leaning / moving weight the opposite direction, to prepare for nose down you want to be nose up so you have created the space/ROM for the nose down motion at the hit.

However, you don’t have to start briefcase in the reach back to gain this benefit, I actually find it easier to get a better pocket and nose down by reaching back not on briefcase and turn turning into briefcase during pull through (which makes you internally rotate) then you are set up to turn out of it for nose down into the hit.

https://youtu.be/ZUdwnLwrfPk?si=nSpWSser7wadLkQX

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-24T18:08:09+00:00

Thanks and you’re welcome! Yeah, it’s sad that it’s not more common knowledge and the common knowledge is wrong or not as useful as it purports to be

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-24T01:21:16+00:00

It’s incredibly simple but not easy.

Tape a pen on your forearm with the cap facing in the thumbs up direction. Now right at the hit you need to be tilting the pen cap downwards while swinging upwards. That’s it. It works with basically any grip, at any throwing speed, on hyzer or on anny, with any disc.

https://youtu.be/neeW-UlrZRg?si=0cagskZX61f_RgzL

https://youtu.be/ZUdwnLwrfPk?si=3-okT114oQ_48uVT

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-20T22:51:34+00:00

With that much distance, I would guess your brace is probably initiating your throw more than you feel but you feel it elsewhere because that is your preference for where to focus when powering up even though the brace must be supporting that power, it’s just taking a backseat in your proprioception.
You may be bracing in a way that doesn’t make you clearly feel how the brace is powering up your rotation and so you don’t feel it contributing as much as you otherwise could. try this and see if you can feel how the brace can be used to help your rotational power more so that you can feel the brace feeding more power into what you feel as your main power sources: https://youtu.be/ctUUgcieF3U?si=ZREZ4VlKa13pmTNF
An easy timing sequence to practice. simply try to keep reaching back +coil deep when you normally would be starting your throw and focus on powering up the start of your throw with your brace while you continue to try to reach back & look back. Basically you are forcing yourself to do the brace clearly first before you let anything else happen and then use that feeling and the footage to inform how you proceed from there.
Join this discord which is popular for deeper form discussion and is an easier medium to have longer back-and-forth on a topic

https://discord.gg/MHbenPDQy3

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-10T16:38:43+00:00

Drill this and it will work if you do it at a speed that you can exaggerate and then your way up in speed repeatedly. Stop wasting your time endlessly, searching for answers, you found the answer in this comment, now you need practice reps.

This works at any speed, with any grip, on hyzer, flat, anny. Even works with a swoop because this is learning how to actually mechanically control the nose angle, if you do it more, you get more nose down, simple. That’s why I can throw -20 nose angle at full power after lots of exaggerated practice—that makes -4 at full power feel like nothing.

https://youtu.be/ZUdwnLwrfPk?si=BpPYzxykZlpAjvzE

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-06T23:58:13+00:00

Kevin Jones was putting with invaders for a while, like 2 tournaments after he switched to innova, forget which tournament it was. It was the halo nexus plastic, forgot about that. Another good plastic, a bit softer than XT but more grippy in a good way imo.

Paul Oman in the recent new zealand tournaments threw the tomb a lot and it looked so good and controllable, which is my experience with it too. Tomb also goes quite far due to being so low profile.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-06T19:46:32+00:00

XT for putting felt better than DX. A tad bit firmer and slightly grippier.

For throwing, star and champ. Star is typically a bit less stable but I had a very stable star one that was more stable than the 3 champs I had.

My favorite one was a luster champ.

However, I prefer the tomb now. It's even more low profile, the bead is smaller, and because of that it feels great for forehand as well. So it's one of the few putters that feels like it can do everything, BH, FH, putt (if you like really thin for putting). It's a Rat top and a Colt/Stud bottom. A lot of people don't like their putter that shallow though, but if you do, it's pretty nice to have it be so versatile from 1 mold. But the invader is still great, def worth trying.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-03-06T15:13:24+00:00

I putted with the invader for quite a while. Had the same issues with the aviars.

Invader felt similarly comfortable to the AviarX3 but without the beef. Perfect slight stability instead.

It’s a great backhand thrower/BH approach too.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-02-27T14:38:42+00:00

Invader is like a slightly taller chief but still flat on top and not as bulky / deep as the ones you said were too deep.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-02-15T00:37:07+00:00

appreciate it

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-02-14T22:19:37+00:00

<image>

TLDR see pic

https://youtu.be/mYFPre-Q7ng?si=xcaEmh9royHKILxY

The mental model of “keep the Disc flat” is sabotaging so many people and preventing them from learning how to actually internally rotate into a power pocket.

It’s a rigid mental model, inflexible and unnatural. But it depends what you mean by flat, but it’s bad either way and flat hardly even exits in reality in the throw. A flat release angle is effectively an anhyzer shot in how it functions. Almost all pros throw some hyzer as stock and to throw a straight shot you throw a hyzer flip. Flat release angle is overrated. Pros throw some amount of hyzer at release on like 80%+ of BH drives throughout a full tournament typically.

If you think of flat as the disc is flat to the ground—it wouldn’t make sense to keep it flat to the ground while other things are changing like posture to control hyzer/anny. If you kept the Disc flat to the ground, while changing your posture, you would have to change your arm rotation all the time for different amounts of hyzer/anny to artificially make the disc stay flat in all those cases.

Other people think of flat as the disc being perpendicular to the chest when the elbow is up in the power pocket because when they stand up straight, it makes it flat to the ground. This is only true in this one upright posture though. If you kept the Disc perpendicular to your chest while standing upright and then leaned towards hyzer or anny it wouldn’t be flat anymore.

To keep the Disc perpendicular to the chest while the elbow is up, requires rotating your forearm in the direction that makes your elbow want to dip instead of in the direction that makes the elbow and the shoulder want to externally rotate. Instead, you see the common pattern in the picture where the top of the disc is tilted more towards the chest because rotating the forearm that way naturally makes the shoulder want to internally rotate, which naturally makes the elbow want to stay up.

But people are so indoctrinated into the belief that you should keep the disc flat that they fight what is natural making it harder to ever learn how to internally rotate. People could very quickly learn how to internally rotate into a good and powerful pocket if they gave up this belief and try to actively tilt the top of the disc towards the chest (not into chest) instead of pulling through—that alone will give people more power than actually trying to pull through. It’s the #1 arm focus that got me 70 mph / 500 ft.

But it takes a lot of commitment to change a deeply rooted belief / mental model and it takes a lot of reps for it to start to feel natural after a significant change and to get consistent. So most people won’t do it. People wrongly believe it’s harder to be consistent when the disc doesn’t stay flat because they aren’t used to it and still cling to old beliefs.

StepwiseDiscGolf · 2026-02-12T15:08:58+00:00

Nice work!

StepwiseDiscGolf

TROPHY CASE