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Why your shot put goes high but not far

A throw that looks impressive in the air is often a throw with the speed taken out of it.

The athlete finishes well, gets under the shot, and it climbs. Everybody watching thinks it is the good one. It lands short of the throw they were annoyed about two attempts ago.

Angle is a trade, not a target

Distance comes from how fast the implement leaves the hand, how high it leaves, and at what angle, in that order of importance. Release speed dominates. A throw that buys a better angle by giving up speed is a throw that goes backwards, and lofting is exactly that trade.

The forty-five degrees people repeat is the answer to a different question: a projectile launched from ground level with no air in the way. A shot is released from above head height by an athlete who cannot generate the same speed in every direction, so the best angles in practice sit well below that, usually somewhere in the mid to high thirties. Throwers who look like they are pushing the shot out rather than up are generally the ones measuring further.

Where the loft usually comes from

• The trunk collapsing away from the drive leg at the finish, so what is left to push with is pointing upwards.
• The arm starting the throw. If the arm goes before the hips have arrived, there is nothing behind it, and an arm on its own pushes up.
• A block side that never blocks. If the left side keeps travelling, the effort turns into rotation instead of going through the shot.

What StatLap measures, and what it does not

The throws event reports the release angle, taken from where the hand is travelling fastest, whether the trunk stays tall over the drive leg, and whether the throwing arm stays long until the block. On the angle it does give you a reference: under about 30 degrees it calls the throw flat and points at roughly 37 to 38 degrees for the shot and 35 to 40 for the discus, which is wind-dependent; over about 45 it says the throw is going up rather than out. Treat that as a sanity check and not a target. The band is where productive throws tend to land, not a number to chase. An athlete who reaches 37 degrees by slowing the implement down has made the throw worse, and no angle readout can see that trade.

The trunk finding is the one that changes throws. Angle is a symptom; a trunk that folds away from the drive leg is the cause, and it is visible from a single side-on clip.

The drills for this event

Standing throws from the power position, which strip out the approach so the only thing changing is the release. Hip-lead drills against a wall, which make the hips arrive first because there is nowhere else for them to go. Overhead back throws, which punish a collapsed trunk instantly by sending the implement nowhere. Worth knowing which of those the app will actually put in front of you: it attaches a drill to a finding only when it has flagged that finding as a fault, and for throws only the release angle is treated that way. Arm carry and trunk lean come back as information with a cue attached, so you get the numbers without a drill beside them.

This is one camera at the side. It reads a glide or a standing throw far better than a full rotation, because half of a spin happens across the camera rather than in front of it. Film the rotation from behind the ring as well, and treat the side view as the release check it is.

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