two observations from a student

[Richard]

Hi,

I'm a student in fly casting. I have been doing it for a few years now, had some lessons, read some books and down to the road hope to be passing knowledge along to newcomers in the field, because I just LOVE the game. Therefore currently studying the FFI materials and I bluntly disagree with anyone I like and respect and who would outperform me easily with their hands tight behind their back. I'm trying to indicate that I find it quite cumbersome to type this message, but after 6 months of trying not to, I still feel the urge to give people a good laugh with the following.

For obvious reasons, newcomers are taught not to use the wrist. It's a floppy thing: https://www.perfectgolfswingreview.net/ ... natomy.jpg , in more than one direction, causing mayhem in terms of loop size and tracking. So, the first 6 months you go from 10 to 2 (or somewhere in that range) with a stiff wrist until you move on to the next phase. Which is learning about the 5 essentials. great stuff! You start learning to vary your casting arc, you learn about translation and rotation and after another year's of practice with hardly any wrist you start wondering about the gap between your own casting and that of your instructors'. Luckily, well at least in my case, about that time I learned about Bruce Richards' six step method. It was only then that I could put myself not to look at those gorgeous loops of my instructors, nor to look at when the rod was translating and rotating, and instead focus on the body, especially the arm and WRIST.

So the first observation I would like to share, is that I think it is of utter importance to tell students WHAT TO LOOK FOR. There is so much focus on the loop, hell the best board in the world is called sexy loops, but imho and from a FF teaching perspective 'sexy body' would have been a much better title (and I'm sure the website would get even more hits, Paul!). Enter the dragon, a movie with Bruce Lee, has a scene where Lee says: "it is like a finger pointing away to the moon". a student is mesmerized and stares at Lee's finger. Lee then bops the student on the head and says: "Don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all that heavenly glory". My point is, reflecting on my past years as a beginner, i have focused too much on the loop and the rod and too little on the heavenly glory, which is the movement of the body. If you're an instructor please wonder whether your students are looking at the right thing. Those small body movements are competing for your student's attention with a 9 foot rod delicately bouncing back and forth as well as with a 50 foot orange line magically floating through the air. In summary, don't use the six step method just as a means for error detection, but please tell your students early on about loop <- rod <- body and that body is thus the thing to observe to get a tight loop in the end.

Back to the wrist. Many instructors cast with their wrist. (I used this site for terminology on wrist movement:http://www.ergovancouver.net/wrist_movements.htm ). They pickup with flexion, moving towards the neutral position or even extending on the backward cast. Moreover, there is some degree of pronation of the forearm, bringing the reel outward. Next, on the forward cast the forearm is turned back and the wrist is bend to the little finger (ulnar flexion) to guarantee as late as possible rotation. Now, if all the great casters do this, then why should we not start teaching it to beginners, rather than having them adjust their casting after a year of ‘wrong’ casting? The thing is, it is very hard to unlearn that ‘wrong’ movement and when you start to use your wrist, a lot changes and takes your casting, initially to poorer results, which is not really motivating. I really would like to know what your answer would be to that question.

Perhaps your answer is: well, if people can’t memorise the five essentials, what makes you think they care about ulnar flexion? And obviously, I would have to agree. And I do think that rotating the forearm during casting could be too much to handle. But consider the following.

Imagine you’re a broken robot. Shoulders hanging down, arms hanging down, wrist and fingers relaxed. But good news, your elbow is ok. Now try and lift your lower arm until it is parallel to the ground. Your wrist should be hanging loosely, hand palm facing down. Now bring your hand up until its horizontal (aligned with your lower arm). Now release the tension in your hand again, so that it hangs again. And bring your hand up again until it’s horizontal. Repeat this 5 times and notice how little movement it takes to align your hand, to bring it in the ‘neutral position’ as it is called.
Now grab your rod, line 12 meters out, your arm slightly stretched and your wrist hanging loosely. Now slowly, tuck your elbow in and up, and bringing your forearm to your shoulder. As your hand, that is still hanging loosely comes close to your ears, quickly bring it in the neutral position and stop. Check whether you indeed brought in the neutral position or whether your wrist flopped. Repeat the pickup until you automatically find the neutral position.

When going forward relax the wrist immediately. Because your arm is going forward and your wrist is relaxed, your wrist will now fall backwards. Go forward by bringing down your elbow and extending your forearm, your wrist still hanging backwards. Now when reaching ca. 10 o’clock, quickly bring your wrist back in the neutral position. If you do it right you could put an imaginary pin through your pink all the way down to your elbow. Repeat again this forward movement carefully checking your wrist is backward at first and in the neutral position as you make your stop.

Now, if you’re still here, thank you for bearing with me. Reading a movement is much harder than seeing and copying it. But I still hope you get the idea: even if it were slightly more complicated to teach, it would be so much closer to the movement that one eventually tries to master. It would mean less unlearning, and less time practicing the ‘wrong’ thing. With it, it would be also very easy to explain the terms rotation and translation and it would help to learn to make rotation rather late in the stroke. Finally, it would focus on the movement of the body, resulting in movement of the rod and eventually the loop. A student would thus be more mindful of copying the movement of the arm and wrist, rather than moving the body joltily trying to copy the movement of the loop.

[carlz]

I also agree with you, I start with Joan Wulf "Power Snap" but will try the "keep the wrist straight" to avoid the "Rainbow cast".
The reason people try to teach the "don't move your wrist" is that beginners overdo it.

One day I was assisting with someone else's class and he was a big "don't move your wrist" proponent. I respect him as a professional Physical Education teacher, and maybe it is a decent way to teach, but I don't agree with it. However when I can't get someone to stop the "Rainbow Cast" I will try anything.

[Paul Arden]

Hi Richard, a great read!

It’s true that some instructors teach zero wrist and even resort to bondage in order to stop all movement. I suspect in the past with heavier rods it was even more difficult to control the wrist in the early stages.

I know many instructors who teach a two finger gap between the rod butt and the forearm at the end of the backcast stroke but even that is not really teaching the wrist.

What I do think is that your timescale can be condensed quite considerably! I think if we were actually training someone to cast full-time then we should be able to reach a very high standard in one week. Just imagine what could be done in one month, three months!!!

For example let’s say I did a course of ten one-hour lessons to a complete beginner, one per week with practise time in-between. I would think by lesson 3 I would be focussing on using the wrist more effectively. However if that same person was camped with me in the jungle, we would be dialling in on the wrist by the second or third day at the latest. But if I only see that same person once/year then it’s going to take a long time!

Jon Allen once said to me that he had tried starting casters using the double haul from the very beginning and was getting good results and he couldn’t understand why instructors had them first learn without the use of the line hand etc etc. So I tried it For me it was chaos!! Loops everywhere, slack line in all directions and too many things to focus on trying to get right at the same time.

I think that there is a process that many of us use. With regards the wrist and beginners specifically, I always tend to say things “a fairly stiff wrist” or a “controlled wrist”. When I introduce something that is going to change later I always mention that this is not the b-all and end-all.

I once had a Malaysian mate tell me that when they were inspired to practise 5WT distance years ago in Malaysia, they struggled and struggled and struggled until they eventually undid the stop, and he asked me why on Earth do we teach the stop when we have to unteach it later?

It’s an interesting point I think, but if you start Stopless then you will have to teach the stop later and that’s definitely the harder route to go!

I certainly agree with “sexy body” but I also think “sexy loop” is fundamental too and teaching that it is the loop that we are trying to create, is key to how flycasting works. Many beginner casters focus on the target and not on the loop when learning that the body movement moves the rod, which in turn forms an unrolling loop, that delivers the fly is how it all works. There are actually three points of focus; body, rod tip and loop (which was originally why our casting definitions didn’t fit together by the way, because they were focussed on different things happening and finishing at different times!).

What I definitely believe is that instructors as a whole do not give enough significance to body movement. Indeed some appear frightened to alter it lest they are teaching “style”, which is nonsense. For me instructing is about teaching the body first and foremost. I’ve given up trying to teach the line – at least directly anyway!

Cheers, Paul

[John Waters]

What I definitely believe is that instructors as a whole do not give enough significance to body movement. Indeed some appear frightened to alter it lest they are teaching “style”, which is nonsense. For me instructing is about teaching the body first and foremost. I’ve given up trying to teach the line – at least directly anyway!

Cheers, Paul

Exactly,

John

[Mangrove Cuckoo]

If you think "unlearning" is bad, or maybe not so good, for flycasting "education", then maybe you would be surprised that it is common in a lot of other more important fields?

In fact, it seems to be a necessity, and one of the milestone steps that separates the truly advanced, or at least capable of being advanced, in those fields.

In my personal education toward a degree in chemistry I was shocked at the university when I made it to the upper level classes in physical chemistry, aka the dreaded "P-Chem". On the first day of class the professor started with a statement somewhat along the lines of, "You know all that stuff we made you memorize about how an atom is a nuclear core surrounded by orbiting electrons, and that they (the electrons) inhabit specific shells and such? Well, forget it. That is not how it is... and this class is where you will learn the truth." Welcome to quantum mechanics!

I was so pissed! I had spent hours, days, evenings, weekends trying to comprehend and memorize that stuff, and now I was being told it was a waste of my time? But the fact was, it was all I was capable of understanding at those earlier periods in my education. It was simplistic (in comparison) and not at all useless, it was simply what I could handle. If I had been introduced to quantum mechanics earlier I would have had no chance.

I think there are many good reasons to first teach the simpler concepts in flycasting. Choose your favorite number 4,5, 6... whatever "essentials" you prefer, and get the beginner casting. Not everyone wants to become a wold class caster, many, actually most, just want to fish.

Personally, I often preach the stiff wrist... at first. It might be because most of my students are starting with relatively heavy tackle, say 8wts and up. They need to "learn" to cast with the arm (and body) from the get go. My goal is often to get them to gain control over their wrist as they are essentially unconscious of what their wrist is doing. Getting them to lock it is the first step to them controlling it. And it works well in tandem with getting the cast out of other parts of their body.

University was so many years ago, for me, and I find it quite interesting ( funny?) that "quantum computing" is just now starting to show up in the news. You want to scratch your head on something even the experts admit is beyond logic? Google up what a "qubit" is. I expect we all will be hearing a lot more about this stuff.