It is perfectly possible to go through a lesson without ever giving a body centric instruction. I’m not sure it’s totally desirable but, once you get the hang of it, it’s not at all difficult.
Yep I agree and mostly my beginners’ lessons are not focused on the body at all nowadays. At least not from their perspective. They usually always ask for “proper technique”, how should they be moving their elbow etc.? I’m like, you tell me
But that’s what it really is; they need to explore for themselves. Stick the arm in the air and wave it about like a windscreen wiper and see what happens to the loop. If they haven’t tried that then I want them to do so.
I think this changes later on, certainly it does for me, because ultimately it’s body movement that we are coaching.
I get rather a lot of experienced fly anglers as students, for example, who don’t use the wrist. This has happened because either they have been taught not to use the wrist, or because it’s something they have read. It’s certainly unnatural to throw a ball with a frozen wrist, but for flycasting it’s often (bizarrely) taught this way.
So then the problem is how to unfreeze it? Lift and Flip Drill is a good one, where the forearm blocks and momentum transfers to the hand/rod. We can give imaginary or even real targets, but I think for this particular change to happen there needs to be some focus on the body movement itself. Basically I think we are correcting poor teaching.
In other words, to correct a fault that has been mistakenly installed using internal focus, we need to shift attention back to how the body moves. Sure we can say imagine that sleeve collar strikes an imaginary rubber block (external focus), and then flip the rod butt towards a bell (external focus), but I think that the student needs to be aware of what we are trying to accomplish, particularly when it’s body movement that has been taught to them another way and is preventing their advancement.
With advanced students we can get highly technical and they will absorb it. But we still need to break everything into drills. And that’s a better way of doing it because we are teaching a drill and not trying to directly change an existing movement pattern within a cast. Then we can transfer the movement across.
We have a common student, incidentally, who has this problem. Training the slow to fast MCI exercise they can’t generate enough speed from their forearm to create the fast loops, and so end up shifting weight to try make this happen. That’s a weakness of the frozen wrist approach. The speed has to come from somewhere!
Cheers, Paul
