As an ex-HS/div3.5 College pitcher, and an amateur kinesthesiology guy, I’d say it has something to do with the weight/muscle distribution above the pelvis(pivot point) versus below the pelvis.
I can attest to women throwing underhanded baseballs just as fast(~90 mph in some cases(not me, I was a junkball guy.)) as we threw them overhanded.
Except they couldn’t throw the wicked breaking stuff.
But the changes could be twice as devastating.(At least to us.)
As an ex-HS/div3.99 College pitcher, and an amateur kinesthesiology guy, I’d say it has something to do with the weight/muscle distribution above the pelvis(pivot point) versus below the pelvis.
I can attest to women throwing underhanded baseballs just as fast as we threw them overhanded.
~90 mph in some cases(not me, I was a junkball guy. Fastest pitch I ever threw may have been 82, but I hurt myself throwing it.)
Except they couldn’t throw the wicked breaking stuff.
But their changes could be twice as devastating.(At least to us.)
**Throwing like a girl ** is the result of not rotating the shoulders in the windup.
In a girl-like throw, you do NOT rotate your shoulder back as you begin to throw. In a correct throw, using a right-handed example, you rotate your right shoulder back as you bring your arm back in the windup for the throw. When you begin the release of the ball, you bring your right shoulder forward, right shoulder ending in front of your left shoulder.
If you throw like a girl, you do not rotate your shoulder. And you look like a wuss. Same deal with the shoulder rotation in a good golf swing, or in a tennis serve. I am female, and I can throw pretty well. My tennis coach in college taught me this.
Female anatomy differs from male anatomy. One of the differences is that their arms are oriented slightly differently. Men’s arms tend to hang straight down or with a slight inward bend and the back of the hand towards the front. Women’s arms tend to be rotated further outward to have a slight outward bend with the back of the hand towards the rear. This is so that a woman’s lower arms don’t hit her hips (which are normally wider than her shoulders for obvious reasons) when walking with the arms swinging naturally. (Note that this is a generalization, and individuals vary enough that this may not be true for specific men/women.)
The throwing differences may be linked to this in that the “guy” throwing motion may be less natural to the normal range of arm motion for most women, requiring more training/practice to master (i.e need for a conscious rotation of the elbow outwards rather than this being the natural movement due to the hinging differences). Add in the fact that most women don’t get the required training/practice, and the result is “throwing like a girl”.
In grad school, we had a pick up softball game every Saturday with the students and teachers. One day, a prof said he had invited a girl to come out for some practice. She was nice and the prof said she could play short stop. I was playing 1st base and wasn’t sure about this, but what the hey. The first grounder to short stop and let me say, she didn’t throw like a girl, she didn’t throw like a guy, she threw like a pro. It hurt so bad I had to pull two fingers out of my glove. And absolutely right on the money. She had played college softball and at that time had no where to play professionally (1976). She had great moves too.
Girls can be taught, she looked like a girl, but threw like a pro player.
