You grew up in a vacuum of big brothers, cousins and neighbors? Only because nobody specifically set up a “let’s learn to throw” session doesn’t mean nobody taught you.
I wanna have her babies.
I volunteered to help coach my son’s baseball team when he was little. I love watching baseball, but I have never played. My husband had to teach me how to throw before practices started, which was more than a little embarrassing. But I can assure you that of the group of 12 brand new, 5-6 year old, male baseball players, about two-thirds of them also had to be taught to throw properly.
As I said, nobody ever taught me and my friends how to throw (a baseball, that is - people did give advice on throwing a spiral in football). Nobody ever taught my boys how to throw. I’ve never seen anyone teach anyone how to throw (though I’m sure it must happen with people who go in for organized sports).
Little kids who are one and two years old throw things. As they grow up, if they keep doing it, they get better at it. That’s all there is to it. (Again, unless they go in for some sort of organized sports.)
My anecdotal input is that even high-level women’s softball players have a throwing motion that is recognizably, if subtly, different from men’s softball or baseball players. Something about the wave of the motion (which starts from the feet, passes through the hips and torso, and eventually travels out through the elbow and fingers) has a different pattern. It’s not necessarily any worse or better, but it’s visibly different. Whether this is a remnant of training differences even for high-level players, evidence of kinesiological differences, or a mixture of the two, well…
I think you’re defining “taught” too rigidly. Probably no one ever explained the kinematics of the arm and corrected your form.
The way you teach kids to do stuff is to demonstrate it to them, then practice it over and over. Which is exactly what everyone who threw a ball around with you (probably from such an early age you don’t even remember it) did.
Eh, high and outside. Typical girl.
And how the hell did she keep one foot on the ground?
We’ve had this discussion before. It is not physiological. It is purely a matter of skill.
Throwing a baseball is not something you are born knowing. It is a learned skill. A boy who hasn’t thrown before will “throw like a girl.”
While most people learn to throw by just doing it over and over again, you CAN be taught to throw. It should be borne in mind that
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Almost everyone who does so has mechanical flaws in their throw and actually could throw harder, more accurately, and with less chance of injury, were they given expert advice. Common errors include
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A person who “throws like a girl” can be taught to throw with a reasonable degree of competence very easily. It doesn’t take much, really.
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Beyond a certain amount of “learning by experience” a person will fall into the habit of throwing a certain way they find comfortable and will not improve further, which leads us back to Point 1.
Throwing problems usually involve and overemphasis on the use of the arm, which I know sounds like a weird thing to say but it’s true. “Throwing like a girl” usually involves a person throwing using only their arm, which does not work. A proper baseball throw commences with having your body aligned correctly, and the motion begins with the feet, not the arm. The entire body is used to generate force and ensure true flight of the ball.
You’re wrong about this. No one demonstrates to kids how to throw. Kids see other people throwing and mimic them.
This applies to both boys and girls. It’s not the basis for the difference.
Just semantics, but in this thread I think people are using “teaching/learning” to cover things like observing people with proper throwing motion throw over and over again, which you (and me and many other men) probably did many times as kids, while girls probably spent less time “learning” to throw in this way.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. You acknowledge that “most people learn to throw by just doing it over and over again”. And yet, most boys do not throw like most girls. So while it’s possible to improve your methods by coaching, as you suggest, that is clearly not the basis for the difference between boys and girls.
I don’t agree that people learn to throw by “observing people with proper throwing motion throw over and over again”. I think they do it by themselves throwing over and over again.
That is what I’ve always thought. You have very little leverage when you step forward with your right foot and throw with your right arm.
I suspect that it’s due to an innate biological difference:
This is only part of it. From the video in the OP, she is stepping with her opposite foot. Although TBH, I don’t think she looks too “girlish” in her throw. Part of it, is just timing with the elbow. People that “throw like a girl” tend to not pivot their torsos and then lead with their elbow longer than they should.
My personal experiences with this matter would suggest to me that some of us – including some folk of the male gender, which I belong to – just do not have whatever it needs, to “grok” the “manly” way of throwing things: we would just never get it, not whatever way.
I am admittedly a wimp and “indoor plant” with a lifelong hatred of everything to do with sports and “shit involving balls”; but I’ve known other males, not necessarily on my extreme end of that spectrum, of whom the same has been true. “It does not come to us, end-of”: people can attempt to instruct and teach and preach until bovine-domicile-returning-time, but it’s all wasted effort. I was told and told, way back, “do it with a flick of the wrist”, and “don’t do it like an ancient siege-catapult”; that stuff, and all the “how to” material which I’ve read on this thread, came and comes across as no more than Charlie-Brown-type ”BLAH” – and, I feel, always will. There are IMO those of us who simply can’t do this thing, and have to live with that fact.
My husband coached my son’s baseball team from elementary school through middle school. There are plenty of boys who “throw like girls” - they wash out of playing baseball around middle school and are completely gone by high school. The girls who “throw like girls” aren’t playing softball by high school either. The number of late elementary school boys who are still trying to push a ball forward is not small.
Throwing is something that some people just know how to do effectively, most people need to be taught, and some who are taught never catch on to.
You should see my wife (first base) and her best friend (short stop) play softball. I have determined that I never want either of these women throwing things at me, I am not fast enough to survive.
I really wish we’d stop using, “<Anything> like a girl” as an insult.
Exactly. It’s an inadvertent demonstration, but it still is a demonstration.
Yes it is, because by the time boys and girls get to the “they have cooties” phase, girls have stopped throwing altogether… if they learned in the first place. Many of us never learned, because while it was all right for our brothers and male cousins to do it, it was not acceptable for us.
So it sounds like you now agree that it’s practice/experience, as I said in my first post to this thread.