Forehand / Sidearm

Fixing Your Forehand

Kill the wobble and the early roll-off.

Why it matters

Two faults account for nearly every bad forehand: wobble, and turning over into a roll. They look like different problems and they usually have the same root — not enough spin, which means not enough wrist snap, which usually means the arm is doing the work. Fixing the cause fixes both at once.

How to do it

Diagnose wobble first. A disc that leaves the hand oscillating has too little spin; everything else is downstream of that.
Get the spin from a late, hard wrist snap rather than a faster arm. Slow the arm down deliberately and snap harder.
Release out in front of your body. A release beside or behind you is both weaker and more likely to turn over.
Keep the disc flat or slightly hyzer. A dropped outside edge turns the disc over to the left for a right-handed forehand, which is what produces the roll.
If it still turns over with a clean release, use a more overstable disc. Forehands need more stability than backhands at the same power.

Common mistakes

Treating wobble as a grip problem and only adjusting the fingers.Check the grip once, then look at the wrist. Wobble is a spin problem far more often than a grip problem.

Fighting a turnover by throwing harder.More arm speed with the same spin turns it over faster. More spin or more stability, not more effort.

Changing three things at once and not knowing what worked.One change, twenty throws, judge the group. This is the only way to learn anything from a field session.

Practising the forehand at full power while it is still broken.Sixty percent until it is clean. Power added to a bad forehand produces a worse one, loudly.

Key points

Wobble = too much arm, not enough wrist snap.
Keep the disc flat and release out in front.

The drill

Drill · Spin before speed — 30 throws at 60% with a deliberate wrist snap. Thirty throws at sixty percent effort where the only thing you try to do is snap the wrist hard and late. The disc should come out quiet and flat and not go very far. That is correct — you are separating spin from speed so you can build the first one, and the distance comes back on its own once it is there.

Watch: How to Instantly Get a Better Forehand in Disc Golf (Tutorial) — Gannon Buhr