Paul Kenny explains how to do one of his signature tricks, the hitch turnover. Most turnovers involve some sort of against the spin push. The push is what causes the disc to gyrate and turn over. So for a clock spinning disc, a whip over is done from left to right. The hitch turn over is different. It looks similar to a whip over. However its clock and goes from right to left. Somehow, with a little hitch maneuver Paul can turn it over in the opposite direction than what is seemingly possible. Even after filming the video and asking him questions afterwards I still do not fully understand it. I love tricks that boggle my mind. So, watch the video and explain in the comments how it works. Or ask questions and I’ll try to get Paul to answer.
Tag: turnover
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Paul Kenny Explains the Whip Over – Part 3 – The Receive
In this part 3 of a 3 part series, Paul explains the receive part of the whip over.
For clock, as the disc reaches your right hand try to make contact on the outer edge, not the low point. As the disc contacts, push upward and slowly rotate toward the high point. The disc will center. Spiral your fingernail in toward the center to gain control of the nail delay.
Paul Kenny Discusses the Whip Over – Part 2 – The Give
In this part 2 of a 3 part series, Paul describe the send component of the whip over in detail.
First is the full motion. With the disc hanging in a rim delay on your left hand (for clock, wight for counter) make a down, up, down motion as Paul demonstrates.
Second is the against the spin portion. This takes place on second down motion. So, go down, up, then as you push down again, slide your nail against the spin. For clock this would be from 10 o’clock to 9 o’clock. This against the spin motion is what causes the disc to turn over. On this motion you would also apply angular force to propell the disc from your left hand to your right hand.
In part 3 Paul discusses the receive.
Paul Kenny Explains the Whip Over – Part 1
In this, part 1 or a 3 part series, Paul describes a basic turnover called the Whip Over. There are two elements to it, the give and the receive.
With clock, the give starts on the left hand. Rim delay steep so the top of the disc faces the right hand. Then quickly lower your left hand and then raise it and pull the disc across your body. It should turn over as you shoot it to your right hand.
The receive takes place on the right hand. Just center delay the disc as it comes in. Sounds easy, right? Part 2 and Part 3 go into more detail on the send and the receive portions of this move.
Paul Kenny Demonstrates the Two Handed Turnover
Paul Kenny explains the Two Handed Turnover, one of the most basic turnover tricks in Freestyle Frisbee.
To perform the trick, start with a rim delay. With clock spin, rim delay on your left hand. As the top of the disc turns towards you use your right hand nail to press onto the top at about 3 o’clock. This will cause the disc to tip steeper and eventually turn over. As it goes upside down, use your left hand to pull the disc up onto your right hand so that it is centered on your right hand nail.
One thing to consider is that when the disc is turned over it reverses it’s spin. That is, a disc spinning clockwise while right side up will be spinning counter clockwise when it is upside down.
Spinflower Freestyle Frisbee Turnover
Paul Siefert shows different versions of the turnover, one-handed or two-handed.
Playing with both sides
Jamming, everybody’s jamming. What a beautiful day. “Gimme an upside-downer.” Snap. “Now a rightside-upper.” . . .? A rightside upper? . . . That’s it! Oh, it finally makes sense! That’s why my mind is so captivated disc shaped pieces of plastic. Unlike the rest of the things I have been playing with all my life, a flying disc has two (count ‘em 2) distinct and very different sides. Is that why it is so different from the “objects” of other sports? Sideless baseballs, footballs, javelins, shot-puts, and hockey pucks all operate different principles. Even our fat cousin the discus just missed the point.
But surely not all sporting objects are so underprivileged that they are deproved of sides. No, pole vaulters and swimmers both have a top and bottom. So what’s the difference? The pits and pools don’t spin!
Let’s forget about that and get on to the joyfully limitless innovations of disc players. Once these guys start a disc spinning no part goes untouched. Just like the tired old story of the Indian and their buffalo, great freestylers find a use for every single bit of the disc. They nail delay the top and bottom, rim delay the inside and outside, use the ridge on Wham-O’s C mold, and somehow find flight ring delays on the old models. They can MAC the top, airbrush the side, padiddle a disc, and even breath delay a mini. Now with all this use, what I want to know is why no one hot stamps the bottoms!
These freestyle techniques sure get confusing and, in fact, quite overwhelming. By the time any one of these skills is copied, the state of the art has changed so drastically that there seems to be a constant need for something newer. But like any kind of technique it always goes back to the basics. For me, this is the nail delay, one side at a time.
The first time I saw a nail delay, I was totally mystified. “Hey, did you see that; man, what is going on around here?” I wanted answers and it drove me bananas, because unlike other sports, there was no way I could experience the big star performances vicariously. To relate to Dr. J all I have to do is to set up a six-foot hoop, but a nail delay…? About two months and a thousand questions later, I had attained my first goal; I was confident enough to practice an above-eye-level-clockwise-spinning-right-handed delay in the house. What a thrill; I laughed and laughed and laughed. Really wonderful, I thought. Now I only with my first teacher had told me to slick the disc. . .
Soon afterward I learned to delay a disc that was spinning upside-down. Quite quickly I found that it is in one way very different from delaying rightside-up. There is a longer walk to pick up drops. And slightly after that I learned about rim delays. If you can find one fingernail long enough to reach the corner of the disc, given enough practice, you’ll soon comprehend that slippery creature that changes curves and alters attitudes. Watch out though, for all their revelations, rim delays introduce extra friction. They are always, always capable of burgling the Z’s right out of your hands.
As I got more into this freestyle stuff my partner challenged me to put together a combination. “It’s the next step,” he said. Well the one I wanted to do the most involved delaying both sides of the disc at the same time. In this case I decided that the axiom about the whole being greater fun than the sum of its component parts is more true than ever.
The first time I saw anybody with hands simultaneously on a disc it was in my first copy of Frisbee Disc World (vol. 3 3). I had been delaying a short couple of months (I think I was up to using WD-40), but the trick was so hot, so state of the elusive art, that it captured my mind. Its attainment was a distant, much sought after milestone. Sought after not to say that I was physically capable of doing it, but to understand the disc well enough to comprehend just exactly how the trick would work. I had been playing with balls all my life, so I can sort of understand Dr. J levitating over the rim, but gyroscopic forces on a disc are another matter all together. Chris Taylor, who had written the Frisbee World Disc article, seemed to speak of the trick as though he was still a little mystified by it. The masters told him it was impossible, but still he knew that with the right tools and enough preparation its accomplishment was well within the physical laws of the universe. Such exploration is one of the very essential elements of our sport. People are just beginning to pioneer what a flying disc can do. So to our minds we can only say, “lead us not into limitation, but deliver us…” It’s so easy to get carried away. There I go again.
Back to the story. Before I had even seen a live and in person turnover, I knew that the crux of the matter was that the direction of the spin changed from one side of the plastic to the other. Chris Taylor told us that. So I, just like he, spent my time learning both spins on both hands. It was frustrating watching my friends accomplish more and more complicated single spin moves while I was in the elementary stages of both spins. I told myself that it would pay off and I’d one day put each spin together in a single package. It happened.
Chris said that in a turnover a clockwise spinning disc goes over to the opposite, counterclockwise spin. From playing with this idea and a disc, another self-evident realization came to mind. The disc also goes from one hand to its opposite, and again from one side of the plastic to its opposite. Everything, I thought, goes opposite: upside-down to rightside-up, left to right, and counter to clock. So 2x2x2=8. Therefore, there must be eight turnovers, if you could take either spin on either hand on either side of the disc, and turn them all over to their opposites. (I really am not sure if it is possible to turn them all the way over to anything else, but who knows?)
The fact that there had to be eight possible turnovers was obvious given a little thought. Accomplishing them is another story. Comprehending each one was my real goal, because I knew that would teach me about how a flying disc works. The physical part would come later. It was quite by accident that I learned a little about how our universe works. I told a scientist friend of mine that I didn’t know why the under-side was always spinning opposite its top. “It’s simple,” he said “why can’t you understand it? The same thing would happen if you turned over the earth. It would be spinning the other way.” Food for thought.
After studying the situation a bit, I was able to ask more than, “show me how to turn it over.” I asked everybody to show me their different turnovers. I learned first that it takes a lot of spin to do the trick. A rim delay causes a lot more friction that a nail delay, and a turnover is often both at once. Mega-Z’s are a must, especially at the beginning. A few extra can help us salvage our mistakes.
The next step was learning the pressure points both top and bottom. This essentially means knowing where to push and where to pull. My first turnover was upside-down to rightside-up. I started with my top hand pressing next to the rim and my bottom hand trying to turn the disc over. A rim delay (the top work on an upside-down disc) supported by a nail delay caused almost a total loss of spin. I finally got it though, and learned the risks: even with hot Z’s a turnover takes its toll.
The people who patiently taught me could show three turnovers that started clock: two upside-down and one rightside-up. The pressure points for each one were different. I found a lot more to it than just trying to keep a fingernail in the center. There is a balancing act with a hand on either side pushing the disc out of parallel with the ground. All this before righting it on the other side. Taking what we had learned from the Frisbee Disc World article, my friends and I extrapolated a bit more. Since one turnover started upside-down clock on the right hand, we figured we could learn the same thing starting upside-down counter on the left hand. With practice and experimentation we took the three tricks we had learned and turned them into six we understood.
The disc does go over and come up so we knew that the pressure points we had learned about did work. But I couldn’t help wondering if these points where optimum. What could be realized from trying some new ones? Well, a great thing happened when, for once, I moved off the rims. A lot of spin was left when the disc came over. Instantly I realized how and why the friction factor had been reduced, but more importantly, for the first time I felt the gyroscopic forces of a spinning disc. They were powerful; it was hard to turn the disc off its plane. There was real energy there. It reminded me of holding the axel of a spinning bicycle wheel and trying to change its plane. Now more than ever, I was left questions about the forces that act on a spinning disc. And questions about what else could be done with them.
Soon afterwards I began the familiar ritual of setting myself up, trying to figure out the seventh and eighth turnovers. Mostly I was pushing down on the disc and picking it up off the floor. It’s not such a bad was to spend a lonely afternoon. But all the time I was thinking, “what will happen if I push down here or there.” Finally one went over, and two tries later it was spinning the other spin on the other side on my other hand.
I managed to find out there actually are eight possible turnovers. For a few minutes I thought I knew them all. I was so excited. I was about to really start showing off. Later at home I started thinking about why I should have been able to figure out the last two from what I had known of the first six. “If that pressure point works that way, then this one would have to work this way,” kind of thinking. Clear enough. But, oh no, that means that still another point might work another way. That would mean, if you changed hands or started upside-down or…oh, at least ten or twelve variations, or who knows how many. And they are all related somehow.
Vickers Chambless
Paul says, “turn it over”
The turnover is probably as technical a move as possible in disc
manipulation. It entails both spins, a myriad of angles and potentially the
whole surface of the disc. To do a turnover requires the ability to delay
both spins, to push the disc flat from an angled orientation and an
understanding of the wind’s (which can be self created) influence on the
disc. A basic clock turnover (a “the” turnover if there is such a thing) to
upside down counter would start with a clock delay in the left hand. One
must precess the disc. The nail will go from the center of the disc towards
the rim until the dome side is angled to a point where the disc can be
pushed with such force so the dome side is pushed into the wind and turned
over to a degree (and somewhat flattened). The finger would be inside by
the rim close to the body with the bulk of the disc away from the body (hand
on inside portion). This requires you to find the position which gets the
dome to be in a position to be pushed into the wind. This push is
essentially a skid as you push against the prevailing spin while pushing
into the wind while elevating it somewhat. To complete the turnover the
right hand needs to pick up the (now upside down) disc (somewhat, not
completely as it is at an angle) and flatten it. This is where right hand
needs to push into the dome upwards, making contact near the lowest point on
the disc, on the other side from the body. This push up will force air into
the “cup” of the disc, equalizing the pressure in it and flattening it. As
this is happening, the finger should precess back towards the center of the
upside down disc. It is kind of like digging out the disc.
The underlying key to a turnover will be the push. This is a
muscle-memory/feel thing and is different for everyone. The stronger the
push, the flatter the disc can become but the higher the risk of a
“blowout”. The push has a few components. The less the push the more the
upside down take will be angled becomes more difficult as the incoming angle
is increased towards near vertical. When pushing the disc over you will
push forward towards the wind (or somewhat across the wind) as well as
manipulating it in an upwards direction.
The ability to find the right body positioning cannot be understated.
However done, it results in the dome of the disc pushing into the wind like
an Apollo spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere and a “pull” which is also a
push to flatten the incoming turned-over disc. All funky turnovers will
have the same pressure point relationships. They will manifest themselves
in many ways, but if you could just focus on the disc contact point, they
will be remarkably similar.
Paul Kenny