What it Means to “Throw Like a Girl”
Learning (or Re-Learning) Command of Your Body
Among the boys in my elementary school, the only thing worse than being really good at spelling was if you “threw like a girl.” Didn’t matter if you were a girl or a boy—at eight years old, there was one girl in the class who started her growth spurt way early and she could absolutely smoke the rest of us at basketball and baseball—if you threw like a girl, you were lame, and everyone (girls and boys) would tell you so. Yup, school kids are jerks.
I’ve had occasion to remember that over the years as one person or another complained about this kind of teasing within my hearing—enough that I started watching the way kids move. It turns out, there is a particular style of motion that boys use more often than girls when kicking, throwing, hitting, and swinging—the lack of this type of movement is what the playground bullies are picking up on when they tease someone for doing X “like a girl.”
Arrested Motor Development
This observation would be a mere curiosity if it wasn’t for the fact that, as childhood play has virtualized, the skills deficit the bullies are picking up on has universalized; it’s not just something that very young children—and disproportionately girls—suffer from anymore.
Children start off throwing with two particular sorts of movements.
To throw something light, they swing whatever-it-is from the shoulder like a whip. When they let go, whatever-it-is hits the ground/wall/vase with a satisfying THWACK!
But something different happens when they pick up something that’s too heavy for them to swing. They pull it into their chest, get their hands under it, and push with all their might. They can be very accurate with a throw like this, but they don’t get much distance.
Accurate is what counts when you’re a toddler. You want to control the force you’re unleashing on the world, especially if you’re very susceptible to parental disapproval and you don’t get an insane giddy joy out of watching things explode (which is more likely to describe girls than it is boys).
This is the motion that kids are spotting when they tease their classmates for “throwing like a girl.”
Why do girls throw this way more often than boys?
For one reason, boys compete a lot. Who can throw a rock the farthest and hit the jerk from the next block in the back?
For another, fathers and uncles have always made it a priority to teach boys how to throw, but not girls. Why?
Because it’s what their fathers and uncles did. Beyond that, they can’t say. But there is a reason.
It turns out that the same motion which can throw a ball can also throw a knife, a boomerang, an atlatl, a spear, and a punch. It’s also the same motion that swings a bat, a club, a hammer, a sword, an axe, a whip, and a mace.
No joke: Teaching a son to throw is a tradition that dates back to the dawn of time because it increases the son’s odds of success. A young man who can hunt, split wood, fight, and swing a hammer—even in our world where such activities are strictly optional if your career is lucrative enough—is more attractive (and, frankly, more marriagable) than one who can’t. On the other hand, as long as she doesn’t hail from a sporting subculture, a young woman suffers no decline in her marital or dating prospects simply because she can’t throw a ball (or punch, or use tools, or use weapons) very well. Thus, there is no parallel tradition for girls.
In other words, though they don’t realize it, fathers teach their sons to throw because it helps their sons get laid (and it actually does, even today).
Unfortunately, this does mean that a lot of girls get robbed of both physical prowess and kept out of the reindeer games. It also means that, as more children of both sexes are growing up without present father-figures and without unsupervised outdoor play that would give them the opportunity to discover the mechanics of throwing on their own, children’s general command of their own bodies is declining.
This isn’t speculative. I have noticed a sharp and marked decline in general physical competence among my younger acquaintances of both sexes over the past decade, and effects of this deficit ripple out and touch all of life from confidence (and, thus, mating drive) to resourcefulness and self-reliance (as it retards the ability to diagnose and fix everything from hedge clippers to air ducts to tires to engines).
Fortunately, it is a fixable skills deficit.
So, without further ado, here’s how to throw well—and how to cross apply that to anything you do that requires swinging your arms.
Different Kinds of Throws
You remember the two kinds of throws that babies and toddlers use, right? There’s the straight-arm swing—let’s call it the “fling.” The second is the shot-put move, which we’ll call the “push.”
The fling is pretty effective if you’re swinging something comparatively light and you need to throw it as fast as possible—it is, however, a very low-power move, so the thrown object won’t transfer a lot of momentum to whatever it hits.
The push is good for moving something over a short distance if it’s too heavy for you to swing. Lots of power, but no real range. This is why Olympic shot-putters shuffle or run before they throw—they’re getting every last ounce of momentum they an to transfer into that heavy little canon ball (i.e. the shot) that they’re pushing downrange.
With a fling, you hold your tool or projectile tightly. With a push, you cradle it or possibly grasp it with both hands to make sure it stays under control. But with a throw, you hold your projectile lightly, so lightly that it may feel as if it could fly out of your hand on its own accord (as it did for a lot of us when we were learning to throw).
How else does a throw differ from the other two? A throw’s momentum comes from your legs first, moves up through your torso, and then is directed by your arms.
To throw a baseball (assuming you’re right handed):
Step forward with your left foot
Twist your hips and torso to throw your right shoulder forward.
As your body starts to move, cock your throwing arm behind your head, elbow pointed up in the air
As your torso begins to twist:
uncoil your arm
lead with the elbow
snap the arm straight from the elbow and release the ball
But don’t stop moving. Instead, follow through. Let your arm, torso, and body all finish the motion with a second step onto your right foot to transfer that momentum back into the ground.
The throw’s full-body momentum puts far more strength behind the object than your arm ever could.
With only slight modifications, the same motion powers axes, sledge hammers, and little tools like hand-hammers (though for these smaller tools you flex your legs instead of stepping, and twist your torso much less dramatically).
The follow-through ensures that you waste absolutely no power in stopping your movements.
The loose grip lets you control the tool precisely. The muscles you use for dexterity (like the ones you’re using to scroll the phone or the mouse-wheel as you read this) are quite weak. With a loose grip, you have great latitude to control a massive tool with the merest effort. If you tighten up, your fine muscles have very little chance of manipulating the tool when it’s under power. As with so much else in life, the more control you try to exert, the less power is at your disposal.
On the matter of grip, a tip for tools that doesn’t apply to balls:
Hold any tool with a handle as low as you can possibly manage. The lower you are on the handle, the more power multiplies at the end of the tool. Holding a hatchet or hammer at the handle’s base in a moderately-intense swing, and you will increase the impact force by tens to hundreds of pounds vs. if you choke up.
Think back to elementary physics; this technique makes heavy use of inertia and leverage. Your body is a built around a skeleton, which is to say “an articulated set of levers.” How those levers move is limited only by your flexibility and by the construction of the muscles from which they draw power. This is something that active children (especially those with mentors who give them shortcuts) learn long before their school teachers assign “lever” and “inertia” in vocabulary lessons.
Every hand tool you will ever come across is either a lever (crow bars, shovels, a dog-ball-thrower, etc.), a pendulum (which is just a lever with a weight on one end—hammers, axes, weighted ropes, etc.), a push (planes, saws, and knives), or a torque multiplier (wrenches and screwdrivers). Twisting your wrist and pushing objects are skills everyone practices endlessly whether taught or not. The skills involved in levers and pendulums are one step beyond, because they require several major muscle groups working together in a coordinated fashion. We only discover these tricks on our own if we need to—otherwise, they are taught to us, or we do not learn them.
If you’ve had trouble getting the power and/or accuracy you need out of your hammer blows, hatchet strikes, and dog-ball throws, or if you’ve always been scared of your knives and so grip onto them with white knuckle fierceness (and secretly envy the people who seem to move them fluidly and without fear), it might be worth taking a little time over the next week or two to learn, or re-learn, to throw a ball.
Master that, and the entire physical world opens for you.
And if you know a kid who’s struggling with motor skills, take them out for a game of catch. They may not think to thank you for it later, but the value you create in their life will not only benefit them, but every lover they ever have, every boss they ever work for, and every life they ever touch.
This essay grew partly out of background research for Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible, which will see publication later this year.
If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?
When not haunting your substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.
Great article. Thanks
I wasn't taught how to throw a ball as a kid, but as an adult I worked in the U.S. for three years and my son went to Little League. I learnt by watching him learn. Now we're back in the UK and he's an adult, we still play catch in the field behind our house in the summer.