Re:Missing the shot put up front! Urgent!!!!!! - Throwing Events Discussion

I put "Urgent" in the title because our conference championship is saturday and I have a big problem. One of my female throwers is constantly having the shot put bend her fingers and wrist back and slip off at the finish. It has been making her hand and wrist sore. Yes, there are times when she drops her elbow, there are times when she pulls away from the finish, and there are times when her angle of release is way to high. We have worked on those problems a lot. With that being said, she will have throws that look great technically but the shot put still snaps her fingers and wrist back and falls out.

Has anyone ever had this problem? Does anyone have any idea what could be going wrong and some insight on how to fix it? Yesterday, a couple throws looked like when she got to the end of the glide she just started pushing the shot off her neck. This made me think that the energy she created in the back and needed to transfer into the shot had been expended before she even pushed the shot from here neck. Is it possible that she is leaving the shot on her neck too long and needs to start pushing it earlier?

Without being able to see your thrower, my initial guess would be that she is holding the shot too high on her hand/fingers. Otherwise, narrowing the fingers so that you get more contact on the ball.

Otherwise, if her arm strike speed is too fast the ball may have a tendency to roll off. Make sure that the strike speed/delivery speed/arm speed match the speed of the ball. If the arm is moving faster than the shot at release than your athlete is losing contact with the ball.

Not sure if any of these things help, but they are some common reasons for a thrower having these release problems.