Boosting your throwtential: Worth the risk and time

Change can be scary. Maybe it's a new option at your favorite pizza place. Maybe it's when mom started bringing around a man who smelled like new floors and asked you to call him "pop." Maybe it's a new hairdo - whatever the thing is, chances are you'll have a little bit of trepidation about the new thing.

And, my little changeling, I was going through this very same thing for about a league to learn my new throw. And it sucked the entire time.

Trying something new isn't always fun.

You may remember my adventures in learning Monica's throwing style. What I like to call Dr. K's Miraculous Throwing Process for Better Results and More Consistent Throwing™, or the very easy to remember acronym: DKMTP(f)BR(a)MCT.

Now, I don't want you to think it was just like, one single league that did the trick. I went to a bunch of different things while learning this throw (since the US Champs in March, where I asked Dr. K if she'd teach me). So that's what...4 months?

And in that time - refining and figuring out the pitfalls and making it muscle memory - well, dear reader, it sucked. It made me feel like a very bad thrower. It felt like I was betraying my old throw, as goofy as it was, in favor of something I wasn't even sure would work.

It was a dark time...a dark time...

But I stuck with it, despite my slipping average and growing losses. Because sometimes you gotta [[something inspirational. Imagine it. Maybe like a walrus who believes it can fly? That'd be inspiring, I bet]].

Give yourself time to create a bigger ramp.

And while I'm certainly not, like, fuggin just destroying every competitor I come up against (if you've seen me throw/know me, you know I'm not really anywhere close to being, uh, "pro level elite"), I do feel a lot more confident in my throw, and more consistent by a whole lot. The last few months have been a slog, and I kinda had to get out of my own head about how much worse I was doing before I started getting better.

That's kinda the point I am getting to: I had to accept I was gonna do poorly for a while in order to get better than I was ever gonna get with my untrained, very higgledy-pigglety throw. I had to take the hit, as it were, go back down to basics, and. then build myself back up. It wasn't fun, I'll say, but I am starting to feel the same excitement I did when I started throwing AND started throwing better. It kinda revitalized me in the sport, which is a gift all its own.

Understanding your own throwtential

The way I think of it is this: there are certain techniques/skills that have a theoretical limit to how much you can progress with them. My old throw, for instance, had a ramp of "growth"... let's call it throwtential that looked like this:

very scientific and enlightening.

This new throw (and to be clear, this is highly subjective and based only on my gut feeling) has a throwtential that looks like this:

WHOA SO DIFFERENT!

And because I know you little scientists wanna see it, the side-by-side for full effect:

There was only so far I could go with my old throw, and I felt like I'd pretty much hit the end of the ramp - with no real way to get any further. But this new throw, the DKMTP(f)BR(a)MCT, feels like it's much more expansive with how much further it can take me both in consistency and in skill level.

Getting better is worth getting worse

Why am I telling you all this, dear reader? Well, to put it bluntly: because I didn't have anything else to write about, at the moment. But ALSO because I think there's a real hangup throwers can have around pulling apart everything we've learned so far in order to make ourselves stronger throwers overall. We get into grooves with what we understand, and are hesitant to abandon those things when they level out, skills wise.

So, if you find yourself noticing your throwing has reached that dreaded plateau and you're just not advancing the way you'd like, consider whether it's time to rebuild how you're doing things - maybe it'll be a little fix that won't require a complete tear down/build up, but maybe it will. Either way, it's worth the effort to break out from the fear of change.