Learn to Throw like a Pro with The Method

There is, perhaps, a bit of madness behind every method. This teaching system is the result of almost 20 years of research, all of it done with a single goal: Understanding why 99.9% of players play the sport at one level, and a tiny fraction play it totally differently.

I spent over half my life working on this enigma, and I could not solve it. I couldn’t solve it even when I threw thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of drives at the problem. Then, in March of 2023, I found my answer. I found The Method.

That initial insight has spawned an entirely new tool, a simple way to teach anyone, in any body or with any athletic ability, the crucial feelings of bracing and leverage.

This video tells the initial story of how I got here, and where I hope to go.

So why listen to me? Who am I anyway? There’s no simple answer to that, but I’ll try. I’m a disruptor.

I’ve spent my life acquiring both knowledge and understanding. That quest has been tireless, and uncompromising. I tend to doubt traditional thinking, and rely instead on intuition and experimentation. When I discover something new and important, I share it.

This video tells much of my life story, beginning with my ascent in the world of Magic the Gathering in my teens, where I innovated something akin to The Method. That insight led to “The Deck”, a powerful design that completely transformed how people thought about and played Magic going forward.

The video then recounts how my friends and I founded a tiny game studio in New Zealand, called Grinding Gear Games, that has grown from a passion project in a garage into a global colossus. Our principal game, Path of Exile, has been played by tens of millions of people around the world.

The story concludes with my work in the disc golf space, in relentless pursuit of “pro” biomechanics. Those mechanics eluded me over half my life, and when I finally found them, I knew I had to tell the community. That is the purpose of this entire docuseries, I hope you enjoy it.

All of reality is physics. It informs everything you encounter in your life. Everything you see, everything you hear, everything you touch. It undergirds every force, it binds everything together.

Harnessing physics in disc golf means harnessing the principle of leverage. Leverage, of course, is the simple fact that when a larger object exerts force on a smaller object, it causes the smaller object to accelerate. When an object accelerates it gains energy, and when it gains that energy rapidly, it gains weight.

When you throw a golf disc using The Method and the kinetic chain, it accelerates from nearly stationary to blindingly fast in the blink of an eye. The fastest throwers can take the disc from 5 MPH to 80 MPH or faster in just around .05 seconds. That acceleration is equivalent to 68 Gs, which makes the 175 gram disc at the end of their arm lever feel like it weighs 26 lbs!

This weight resists the muscles of your legs, your core and your arm. Your body feels that resistance, and bears down on it. It’s just like how your brain knows it can safely output a ton of force to lift a heavy barbell in the gym. Your mind understands how heavy the thing is, it calculates the expected resistance, and it gives you the energy needed to lift it. This happens faster than your perception, it’s as autonomic as breathing.

It all begins with the simplest of intentions. That simple internal twisting of the trailing leg establishes the brace, which allows you to generate powerful reciprocal ground force when you extend the plant leg. The resultant shockwave from the ground flows sequentially up the body, through the core, and into the throwing arm. Exercise physiologist Jacob Kysar explains how it all comes together.

So what is The Method anyway? Why does it work so well? Quite simply, it is pure efficiency.

The human body is a true wonder. Of all its incredible features, one has particular relevance to disc golf. The human arm forms a perfect, three-part biomechanical lever. This imparts exponential acceleration to almost anything swung in the hand. We’ve known this for ages, it’s utilized in established sports like baseball and tennis. But there has never been a comprehensive way to get most disc golfers to feel that acceleration, until now.

The chief insight of The Method is that in order to learn a new motor skill as an adult, you first have to start fresh in the brain. The instant you stand on a tee pad, your adult habits and your “handedness” betray you.

You’re used to doing everything in your life with your dominant side, but you cannot begin the disc golf swing with your arm. If you do that, you get your upper body ahead of your legs, and you accelerate the disc slowly. When a light object accelerates slowly, it doesn’t gain any extra weight. This is a problem, because your brain doesn’t trust it can add energy to a light object.

This video shows you how you can begin to reprogram your brain, to remove your adult instincts and find the organic feel a child might find naturally. It shows how to perform the simplest motion, a one-legged twist with the trailing hip into the balanced and stable dominant leg. The Method teaches a feel, it’s a bit like riding a bike for the first time. If you learn to do that exact motion correctly, and find that feel, you can then build on it to create an organic swing.

Once you create that swing, you will quickly understand how to add energy to it with your legs. That increases the acceleration, which in turn increases the weight of the disc. Once the disc gets heavy, your brain will understand when it can add energy with the throwing arm, and the whole mechanism comes together in an instant.

This is how you create what we’ve long called “Pro form”. It’s been an elusive secret for decades, but The Method reveals it completely. Good luck in your training!

Everyone’s body is different. Some people are taller, some are leaner, some are naturally more athletic. Not everybody learns at the same pace, and some people can master the basics of The Method in just minutes.

Those players feel the new biomechanics and leverage immediately, and are eager to start adding momentum and power. In this video, Sebastian Behme, co-creator of The Method, explains how to best start that process. We are calling this technique, “The Alternate Brace”.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of The Method, and you’re feeling both a solid brace and leverage, you’re ready for the next step: adding momentum. It turns out, that’s not hard at all, assuming you stay fully-balanced.

In this brief video, The Method co-creator Sebastian Beheme demonstrates how to effectively add some sideways momentum to your throw. The key is making sure you maintain balanced positions throughout your X-step, and that you spend as little time as possible with your weight in two places. You’ll find out why this is so important in other videos.

It’s time for the empirical proof, the case studies! We begin with Avi, a 44 year-old father of eight from Seattle.

Avi’s case study is critical to this project, as his experience matches so many others trying to learn and progress. Despite more than two decades of work and countless practice drives, Avi has been capped around 50-52 MPH with his backhand. For all the time he’s invested, he’s never learned a proper brace, or produced consistent biomechanical leverage. Consequently, Avi is arming the disc to throw it, spinning in a big slow circle and dragging the disc around his body.

This clip chronicles a roughly hour long lesson I gave him on the first day of our film shoot, along with the aftermath.

The results speak for themselves. In no time at all, Avi was able to feel a true hard brace for the first time, simply by focusing on activating the internal twist of his trailing leg. Once he had that down, he had no trouble feeling leverage in his throwing arm and in the disc.

Avi went back home for a week of practice after our lesson, and returned to Juel Park to check his progress. His improvement after just a few days was shocking. Gone was his spinny, inefficient form, and in its place was leveraged efficiency. The drives he produced with putters and mids dazzled him and the camera crew. His testimonial was giddy with delight. I’ve never seen him so happy!

Next up is Corey. Corey is an interesting case for this project, as she came to us from an extensive competitive background in ultimate frisbee. Corey is 27 years old, and for the last few years, she’s been making a serious attempt to compete at the pro level of disc golf, in the FPO division.

Corey is extremely strong and athletic, so she’s been able to get a lot of power out of her adapted ultimate frisbee form. However, because she’s not bracing, she’s throwing the disc inefficiently, and letting her upper body get ahead of her legs. This has capped her velocity around 56 MPH, with low amounts of spin and kinetic energy.

Corey was a bit of a skeptic before our lesson, but she was willing to see what I had to teach. We spent about an hour working together at Juel Park, before I sent her home to practice The Method on her own. She was diligent in this practice, sending me daily updates of her standstills into a net.

When Corey returned to Juel Park for our follow up, she was transformed. A week of solo practice with The Method, many just standstills without a disc, had taught Corey real bracing and leverage. She began her follow up tentatively, but within a few throws she began to trust the mechanism more. What came after that was truly breathtaking.

While our assembled crew looked on in amazement, Corey began to just BOMB drives down the fairway. First she flew past the basket at 340 feet. Then she overthrew it by 50 feet. Then she adjusted her trajectory and started blasting drives out over 400 feet. She threw the farthest of these around 430 feet, and hit the rarefied threshold of 60 MPH. Just wild stuff.

In just one week, The Method took Corey from an aspiring Pro with average power to one of the hardest throwing women in the sport. I’m so excited to see where her new skills take her in 2024 and beyond!

We conclude the case studies with Lydia. Lydia was just ten years old when we met, and had been playing disc golf for a few years with her dad Dan.

As soon as I saw Lydia throw, I knew I had to invite her to participate in the documentary. She was so polite and engaging, and she could throw quite far for someone so small. On top of that, she was a lefty, which presented a teaching challenge. Critically, Lydia had begun a journey down a path that would make it very hard for her to acquire proper bracing and leverage as she developed her game. She was using a lot of her arm to throw the disc. I hoped to course correct her learning with The Method.

Lydia was a blast to work with, she learned extremely quickly. By the end of our 45 minute lesson she was really getting her throwing arm moving with her trailing leg, creating a whooshing noise that made her laugh at her tingling fingertips. I gave her some solo homework, and sent her on her way.

Lydia’s follow up was quite informative, and taught me a lot about what to expect when smaller children learn The Method. Her week of practice had taught her good balance and bracing, which completely changed how her discs were flying. The putters and mids she threw on camera spun with intense energy, hovering above the ground like a UFO.

However, Lydia struggled a bit to handle the heavy weight of her disc with her light body, particularly from standstill. We could have avoided this problem by having her practice with discs in the 130-150G range, but had none on hand. Regardless, she was delighted with how well her discs flew, and she departed her follow up excited to learn more. I’m confident she’ll be throwing well over 400 feet when she gets bigger.

Proper disc golf biomechanics come down to three key things. Balance, sequence and leverage. As The Method co-founder Lee Wence is fond of saying:

“Motion without balance is falling, and exertion without leverage is wasted.”

One of the hardest things to master in disc golf is when to actually use the throwing arm. You definitely need to use it of course, but how do you know when to do that if you’re not bracing? If you’re not fully connected to the ground, and your torso is free to swing ahead of your legs, you’ll accelerate the disc in a big circle around your body. This makes it very hard to know when to release, and causes strain from head to toe. The Method corrects all of these issues at once.

By removing everything but the initial balanced stance and the trigger of the trailing leg, The Method allows your body to brace and sequentially move energy upwards the right way. It allows you to maximize your efficiency of energy transfer, so that you can produce the same or better result as before with a fraction of the effort. Whenever you can accomplish something with less work, it’s more repeatable and easier on your body.

When you sequence correctly, you’ll actually feel the flow of kinetic energy through your hips and core, which then pools in your loose throwing arm. This added energy increases the weight of your arm, which in turn passes its energy onto the disc via the principle of leverage.

That leverage and added-weight are the key to everything else. As soon as you feel the disc gaining energy under exponential acceleration, it feels heavier in your hand. Your brain understands that heaviness, trusts it, and pushes more energy into it with your legs and your core. That in turn speeds it up more, making it even heavier. This heaviness resists your entire upper body, and you can bear down on that resistance with your throwing arm. It all comes together intuitively.

This mechanism is the E=MC2 behind what we’ve long called “Pro Form”. The Method teaches you the entire sequence, with perfect balance, from bottom to top.

Fundamentally, we love this sport because of the people who play it with us, and because the flight of a disc evokes childlike anticipation and joy in everyone. Disc golf is special because of its accessibility, its replayability, its integration into nature, and because of its community. Thank you for being a part of that community.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to learning proper mechanics with The Method is finding that initial feel. It’s not terribly different from riding a bike, in that once you’ve done that the first time, you can build on it rapidly. The first section of this video helps you to easily find that feel, doing something we’ve all done before. It’s as simple as pushing a broom.

Disc golf is an athletic endeavor, and anything athletic is aided by flexibility, balance, and strength. The second exercise in this video helps train all three. The more comfortable you are in The Frame, the easier it will be to add power and explosiveness to your swing. This drill is wonderful because you can do it anywhere you have space, without even requiring a disc!

Many exercises can help you gain strength and flexibility to benefit your backhand, but few are as specialized as the Copenhagen Plank. This simple exercise requires only a chair and your bodyweight. The Copenhagen Plank will help build strength in the legs and the core, specifically in the abductor muscles alongside the hips. These muscles are vital to keeping you balanced while learning The Method.

So much information, so many questions! Sebastian Behme, co-creator of The Method, is here to help. This short video addresses some of the most common inquiries we’ve faced when teaching The Method in lessons. If you have any other questions, feel free to post them on our forum.

The Method’s docuseries is new, but I’ve been teaching this system steadily for over a year. In that span, I’ve taught dozens of people new biomechanics that have completely transformed their ability to both play and coach the sport. This video showcases testimonials from some of those people. It is hard to truly express the joy people feel when they have huge breakthroughs in their backhand after years or even decades of stagnation.

Seventeen years of research in this field has answered two central enigmas. Why is the disc golf backhand so difficult to learn in the first place, and why does The Method work when so many prior teaching systems have come up short?

Fundamentally, it comes down to the idea of “handedness”. Everyone knows that most people have a dominant hand, with roughly 90% of the population reporting they’re right-handed. When you’re a right-handed person, the motor control centers on the left side of your brain govern most of your physical actions.

No matter the task, whether it’s eating, or throwing a ball, or writing, or driving a car, the moment you have the intention to use your dominant side you’re all but helpless to prevent your dominant motor control center from taking over. The brain always wants to do things as efficiently as possible to save you energy and work, so it’ll automatically default to dominant behaviors. This is extremely problematic when you are trying to learn to throw a golf disc with proper backhand mechanics.

The central issue lies in the idea of “sequence”. A proper biomechanical backhand swing unfolds sequentially in the body, from the ground up. This sequence is discussed at length in chapter three, “Why it Works: The Physics Behind the Method.” That sequence imparts a feel, which you then build upon to construct the entire swing. The sequence begins in the trailing leg, in your non-dominant side. Without that sequence, you’ll grip the disc tightly, and your dominant arm will impart force too early. This gets the upper body ahead of the brace and wrecks everything.

Frisbee legend John Kirkland takes center stage here, to explain how the sequence unfolds in the body. Critically, John talks about how everything is linked to an intention that comes from the non-dominant side of the body, and how that sets you up to feel a firm brace.

That brace halts rotation of the lower body in exactly the right spot, which allows the upper body to move sequentially. Once that happens, a loose throwing arm feels heavy leverage, and the brain immediately understands when to add power.

This is the sequence you see in the biomechanics of every player you see exhibiting what we have long called “Pro Form”. The Method can get you there incredibly quickly, once you overcome the enigma of handedness.