Should you cock your wrist to throw a backhand?

That question, like so many others, is a lot more complicated than it might seem. If your coach is saying you must cock your wrist at the start of all your throws, they’re wrong. But if they’re saying you should never do it, they’re wrong there too.

Let’s look at some examples of throwers and their wrists, many of them taken from Joe Marmerstein’s helpful archive of throwing form.

(Note: on all these Youtube videos, you can go frame by frame by pausing it and then using the comma and period keys – the ones that have ‘<‘ and ‘>’ as their SHIFT characters.)

(Another note – if you’re on mobile, the videos may not start in the right place. I don’t know why they haven’t fixed that yet, it’s been like that for years. I’ll put time stamps in, but you’re better off looking on an larger device.)

[5:37]

Pat Earles’ wrist is like a brick here – barely any movement at all. All the rotation appears to happen at the elbow.

[2:13]

Robyn Wiseman’s wrist appears to cock during the throw; it’s definitely not cocked at the beginning.

[0:23]

Rob Mcleod is a proponent of cocking the wrist¹ at the start of the throw. He can throw further than most mortals. And you see here his wrist is indeed cocked early, right at the back of his reach. That seems good evidence of the efficacy of cocking early.

[0:29]

But Paige Pierce’s wrist is not cocked at the back. You can see a better frame rate of Paige here, but I can’t embed it – https://thumbs.gfycat.com/IllegalSingleCoqui-mobile.mp4

When someone that size is able to generate the distance that she does, you’re forced to respect her technique – and it starts with a neutral wrist.

[5:57]

If you look closely just as Jimmy Mickle starts to drive his elbow through, while he still has the disc in both hands, his wrist actually gets a fraction less cocked right at the beginning of his throwing motion. The elbow is driving through with the disc still fairly stationary and therefore the wrist slightly opens up. It looks like at some point in his development he’s focused on cocking his wrist to start the throw, but that starting position isn’t actually fully reflected in the throw itself.

[1:08]

Here’s Rohre Titcomb throwing a shorter throw. If anything she opens her wrist right at the beginning, almost cocking it the other way, before it comes in during the throw. It definitely doesn’t start cocked by any stretch of the imagination!

So, there’s probably more going on than you might have thought. There’s a fair bit of variation in style, and it’s not immediately obvious that ‘cock the wrist’ is useful advice for a novice thrower.

Of course, we don’t always know that these people are doing it ‘right’. Perhaps they’re just so strong or so smooth that they can get a successful throw with some weird mechanics; maybe it’s not optimal, but it’s good enough, combined with their physicality, to achieve what they want.

And sometimes there are some things that really leap out at you as being sub-optimal – here’s Walden Nelson from that throwing archive, for example, doing almost everything I would coach people not to:

[0:43]

The disc hides behind his body early, so that he can’t pull it through straight. And not only is there relatively little wrist involved, but even the elbow stays fairly stiff and it all rotates directly from the shoulder. Looks weird to me, and presumably to others, based on this comedy reddit thread and the video linked therein.

So we do know a little about what makes good form, even if we don’t fully understand every detail. But we should generally be wary of all-or-nothing rules like ‘you should cock your wrist’ unless we can find some evidence to back it up.

That said, I do of course have my own thoughts on what the wrist should be doing. It isn’t the same on all throws. But I’m interested in hearing other people’s opinions unsullied by my own ideas.

What should the wrist be doing on a backhand throw?

¹ Rob didn’t write that article for his site himself, but he does comment in agreement with it further down.