Duration: 9:59

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For most of my time in this sport, I've been baffled by this question. I'm not alone. The data in the real world seems to indicate that upper body strength isn't important in throwing the disc far. With a few exceptions, the guys who throw the farthest, historically, are lanky beanpoles like Shusterick, Lizotte, Barella and McMahon. This fact flies in the face of a general truism in sports: being stronger is better.

So what's really going on here? And more importantly, why doesn't strength appear to matter in force production in the backhand? In this video, I tell a personal story about my attempts to answer this question. My experiments took me to a local gym, working with a personal trainer for the first time. What I discovered there completely changed all my assumptions.