I dont teach SH to any great level Paul just the basics really, I have no qualifications in SH rods, DH rods are what I teach.Paul Arden wrote: ↑Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:14 am Very interesting Springer. I do this with the SH rod, and I can see how this would be excellent method when working on this issue. Obviously everyone seems intent nowadays on teaching the lower hand. How do you teach the feel?
I’m looking forward to getting my DHD soonish! Are there any exercises like Circles, Eights and Straights that could be shifted to the lower hand? I’m pretty sure circles would work, not so sure about 8s?
Cheers, Paul
I do think working with a rod with the line still on the reel is a useful thing to do though, it gets beginners or anyone for that matter to focus on the positions they need to be in and then the movements they need to make.
Interestingly other than complete beginners a lot of students roll their eyes to begin with thinking that they can already work with the line out whereas I think the line can be a distraction, 20 mins later they usually see the benefit. I dont do it with everyone, just those I feel need it. Listening to the noise the blank makes during the forward cast can also help people to develop the correct tempo for progression from the back to front stops. Usually most start too fast so you hear the long whoosh of a rod struggling to get faster, when I get them to listen to my higher pitched hiss instead of a whoosh they seem to understand the building up of speed easier than any other demo methody Ive came across.
With the DH rod its quite amazing just how few beginners or even improvers struggle to properly flex a rod with no line on it, they have never experienced what a loaded rod feels like in their hands. Generally they either hold the butt relatively still and shove the top hand back and forth or they do it in reverse with the top hand remaining still and waggling the rod back and forth using the bottom hand. I demonstrate it by holding the rod out to the side on the horizontal plane so we can see the blank flexing, I point out that the point of rotation is somewhere between my two hands (slightly towards the top hand) and that with very small equal and opposite opposite movements either side of this point the rod will load up very easily and significantly. Many people panic a bit and fear they will snap the rod because they can now see it it is bending so much, they have no idea how much it actually bends during a properly loaded cast. Just make sure the joints are either taped or checked before doing it. Once they feel and see this in the horizontal plane I go back to the forward cast movement and ask them to look for both the shorter hissing sound and also to recreate the feel of the loaded rod. Ive taught this since around 2007 and it works with most people, obviously some pick it up better than others.
I encourage students to worth with just the butt section of a DH rod as well because its easy to do at home in the garden or in front of the wardrobe mirror on a rainy day, that way they can practise 24/7/365 as I did in the early days. Its amazing what 5 mins a day can do for muscle memory. I tell people to think about the principle of Tai Chi, a series of slow highly controlled and disciplined movements that can be learned and practised at a slow tempo, once learned you can speed them up with ingrained accuracy. You can go through a whole cast with just the rod but including weight shift. Most people tend to naturally put their top hand thumb up the cork so I never discourage it to begin with. I give them reference points for their top hand thumb tip and if they can control that small part of their body they can then control the rod tip of any length rod as the tip will copy what the thumb does. Its easy for me to snap some pictures of them holding the rod in the right places and send them to them, they can then reference this in the mirror at their leisure.
I dont understand the terms circles, straights and eights, its not something Ive came across but I teach that the bottom hand movements control a lot of what the rod tip does in many parts of the cast. For me DH casting is far more about pushing the rod tip around to make d-loops and then pulling it forward to make tight loops, the reverse of what a top hand dominant caster will do.