Hammer Help

The corn has come up since I was at your spread, makes it look like your throwing in the Highland Field of dreams.

Thanks for the hammer input, I tend to hold my breath the entire
throw as well as tighten up. Will give this a go tomorrow.
Myles the voices said "if you invite Vierre they will come". Remember
your bicep from throwing the shot over the sheaf tower..

From the looks of it you have a problem hitting the ground on your final wind and that is why you suck your arms in also.  Cast it slightly farther out in front of you and that will not only help your orbit, but will help your arms to stay relaxed and long also. 

make sure to remember to counter with your hips and extend behind your head on the final turn.  These are just a few things to work on.

You know what turned a huge corner for me in hammer?

I sent Mike Pockoski a PM, and he wrote back.  I really like how Mike throws hammer, so I just asked him questions and being the class dude that he is, he wrote back.  Flat-out truth.

Flat out truth was that Mike has a way of expressing what he's trying to say that sunk into my head. I've done a workshop with Ryan V. and I came away with two good things, which I used to set a new PR but I didn't radically change how I throw.  But Mike got me to radically change how I throw.

OK, I will paraphrase.  There's the usual "relax" and "chest up".

What Mike said was that he practiced moving his weight from side to side....like so much that essentially ALL his weight was on one foot, and then the other. 

What we spend a lot of time doing is getting a really strong base. We don't want to fall over or lose our balance so we spread our feet wide apart and really get a good anchor, a really solid stance. Then, when we try to throw, we wiggle our hips back and forth a little bit and pretend that we're cranking the hammer around that way. That sure looks like what you are doing and it's exactly what I did for three years.

NOT.

We must break out of the "stable stance" concept.  We are not  locking our bodies in a stable configuration and swinging a hammer around our heads. NO.  Instead, because of what Mike said...we will pull our feet closer together so that we move our bodies OUT of that locked stance. We will RADICALLY rock our weight from one side to the other.  The way Mike put it was that he thinks about his hips being attached to a piston wheel on a huge steam engine, ramming them back and forth.  None of this "wiggle back and forth" your WHOLE BODY has to move from side to side, RADICALLY.

Look up, chest up, push the knees out and "get down"...attach the hips to that steam engine wheel and rock/ram your weight from one side to the other. Your shoulders are relaxed and damn, but if that hammer doesn't start moving around, almost on it's own, it seems.

That's the visual that got me to totally change how I throw hammer.