You want to throw more accurately? Throw softer.

That’s one of the takeaways from a new study by Yale and Harvard professors on the physics of throwing. The findings might interest quarterbacks, dunking booth participants and anyone throwing wadded-up paper into a wastebasket. If you’re missing a lot, try throwing a little slower.

The paper, published last week in Royal Society Open Science, is not likely to take the sports world by storm, with its talk of the “dynamics of the projectile” and “propagating distributions with non-infinitesimal variance.” But inside is quite a bit of solid advice for athletes who throw things.

It is well known that there is a trade-off between throwing fast and throwing accurately. A reason for this, many people believed, was that throwing fast made it harder to release the object at just the right moment.

But the study finds that even after the object is released, faster throws are less accurate. “The speed at which you throw the ball affects the curvature of the trajectory the ball takes,” said one of the authors, Madhusudhan Venkadesan of Yale.