I thought this was going to be a piece about Johnny Damon.
Around the world, at all ages, boys throw better — a lot better — than girls. Studies of overhand ball throwing across different cultures have found that pre-pubescent girls throw 51 to 69 percent of the distance that boys do, at 51 to 78 percent of the velocity. As they get older, the differences increase; one U.S. study found that girls age 14 to 18 threw only 39 percent as far as boys (an average of about 75 feet vs. about 192 feet). The question is why.
Since boys generally learn to throw young and do more throwing than girls do, it would make sense that they’re better at it, and Thomas acknowledges the nurture component. “The gap is much larger than it should be, and it would be smaller if girls got more practice,” he says.
To try to distinguish nature from nurture, Thomas studied aboriginal Australian children, who grow up in a culture where both men and women hunt, and both sexes throw from childhood. “Our hypothesis was that [the aboriginal] girls would be better throwers and not as different from the boys as in European, Chinese, Australian and all the U.S. cultures.”
The data bore him out. Aboriginal girls threw tennis balls at 78.3 percent of the velocity of boys — closer to boys than in most other cultures, but still significantly slower. (Throwing distance wasn’t measured.)
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1. Morty Causa Posted: September 19, 2012 at 01:14 PM (#4240206)Anecdotally, in well-trained pre-pubescent kids I'm not sure there's a huge difference (based on the handful of girls I've seen playing baseball alongside my sons in those ages) and that might be an interesting comparison to look for any actual physiological differences. Good luck finding a large sample of 6-11 year old girls who have been taught reasonably decent mechanics or given the same opportunities to learn on their own alongside the boys, though.
Considering the popularity of softball, and the age at which girls start playing, I don't think it would be that hard to find girls that age with reasonably decent mechanics.
But there are a lot of pitchers on MLB teams that don't strike me as the strongest guys on the team.
Are guys like Billy Wagner really strong at other things too, or are they strictly good at throwing a ball?
I would expect that the gap is larger in the US than in most other countries. I have certainly met many European men that throw like a girl.
When I think of the phrase "throw like a girl", it's the idea that the mechanics are so out of whack (elbow gone wild) that the ball goes absolutely nowhere it is supposed to (too short, too far, wide left/right), and often either just spiked directly in front of the thrower (Raul Ibanez!) or 10 feet over the person who is supposed to catch it.
I coach youth javelin throwing, for both boys and girls. Will that do? I like to think that I teach reasonably decent mechanics.
Some numbers that I can give you off the top of my head:
7-8 year olds (300 gram mini-javelin):
Boys: Decent throw: 14-17 meters. Good throw: 18-21 meters. Elite throw: 22+ meters.
Girls: Decent: 8-10m. Good: 11-14m. Elite: 15+m.
9-10 year olds (300g):
Boys: Decent: 20-24m. Good: 25-29m. Elite: 30+m.
Girls: Decent: 12-15m. Good: 16-19m. Elite: 20+m.
11-12 year olds (300g):
Boys: Decent: 25-28m. Good: 29-33m. Elite: 34+m.
Girls: Decent: 16-19m. Good: 20-24m. Elite: 25+m.
13-14 year olds (600g javelin):
Boys: Decent: 31-35m. Good: 36-40m. Elite: 41+m.
Girls: Decent: 22-26m. Good: 27-31m. Elite: 32+m.
15-16 year olds (800g for boys, 600g for girls):
Boys: Decent: 34-38m. Good: 39-42m. Elite: 43+m.
Girls: Decent: 24-28m. Good: 29-33m. Elite: 34+m.
17-18 year olds (800g/600g):
Boys: Decent: 37-41m. Good: 42-46m. Elite: 47+m.
Girls: Decent: 26-31m. Good: 32-36m. Elite: 37+m.
Take that for what it's worth. But the spread in throwing ability is pretty wide across all ages.
This one. "Throwing like a girl" has a very precise biomechanical meaning (well, I'm sure you can make it precise, I am just in the "you know it when you see it". There are boys that throw like girls and girls that don't throw like girls, but idiomatically that's what it means, not strength. The same thing, by the way, is true in basketball -- even at the WNBA level, most female players have very different mechanics (sort of shotputting the ball), to the extent that it's very noticeable when a female basketball player "plays like a guy" (Candace Parker and Maya Moore both do this). Again, that does not mean that a WNBA player is worse than (say) a high school male player -- it's just different.
Several of whom were not even French.
That's surprising. I would have expected the gap to narrow in those middle age ranges (11-12, 13-14), as the girls begin to develop faster than the boys. I've found that to be the case in other youth sports.
No, just velocity and distance, but you raise a good point.
Yea, but Shawon Dunston doesn't strike me as an exceptionally strong athlete either.
I always had a great arm compared to my contemporaries, but I was almost always the weakest member of the team in the weight room. I have to think mechanics and leg strength are the two biggest factors for how well you can throw, while overall strength is not much of a factor. I don't agree with you that everyone at the pro level is on the same level in terms of mechanics. I think it makes a huge difference that a guy like Tim Lincecum has the mechanics that he has.
It narrows a little bit, in terms of girls' percentage of the boys' throws, as I think the number I wrote above would bear out. Most accurately, I think you could say the boys' advantage stagnates for a few years. They start with a big advantage, and then maintain it for a while, and then the advantage starts growing again.
EDIT: And to be clear, I did just come up with those number from the seat of my pants, so if I take a deeper look at them, I may take away a meter here and add a meter there, but they're fairly representative, I think. I have a pretty good handle on relative quality of throws across the age groups.
I was at Cedar Point, where you get to throw three baseballs and attempt to match your own velocity so as to win a batting helmet or somesuch. Feeling fairly content with myself after hitting 64 on the gun, this little wisp of a teenage girl walks up and starts throwing 87 MPH heat. The jaws of all the males observing this (including mine) had to be scraped up off the pavement.
Yes, they are. The swing is pretty dramatic, and more of what I expected to see in flournoy's numbers.
I'm just delighted that 13-year-old SoSHalina can still launch a soccer throw-in farther than any boy or girl in CYO soccer.
One piece rotation referring to the rotation of the hips and shoulders rotating simultaneously ... in contract to the men, who rotate the hips and then shoulders, generating more power.
The challenge, I suppose, is like that of writing a manual on how to ride a bike, or how to kiss. Indeed, the most useful description I've found of the mechanics of throwing comes from a man whose specialty is another sport: Vic Braden made his name as a tennis coach, but he has attempted to analyze the physics of a wide variety of sports so that they all will be easier to teach.
Fallows says that of the many things he's written about in his career this was the single most fun he ever had on a story.
[url="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/08/throwing-like-a-girl/306152"]Throwing Like a Girl
Throwing style is not determined by biology—anyone can learn to throw like an athlete[/url]
As far as the physical physical implications of "throwing like a girl", I had a really good (male) friend who did. I think it has a lot to do with being taught. His father had no interest and he basically learned from himself, and I'm seeing this in a good friend's 9-year-old son as well. My dad and mom taught my sister equally as they did me and my brother, and she has a perfectly natural throwing motion indistinguishable from any (athletic) male.
It remains as awful as ever.
Utter horseshit. The most distinct difference between men's and women's tennis is the quality of serving. WTA serves that could be described as good number in the single digits.
Look at precisely what he said. The men serve harder because they're bigger and stronger, but women professionals serve harder than most male amateurs have ever done. I was a pretty successful junior competitive tennis player, but my big serve came late with growth. I doubt I've topped 105 mph though; I know at 17 the hardest I got it to register was 102 or so. Most amateurs certainly serve much less hard than I do, and I would imagine that at least 75% of women professionals can serve harder than that.
EDIT: also, the claim about "the most distinct difference between men's and women's tennis" was true pre-Federer and particularly in the late 90s-early 2000s, but I think the most distinct difference now is athleticism and speed. You are seriously underrating the number of hard servers on the WTA tour; it's not just the Williams anymore.
IF pre-pubertal children are the same size, why, IF you teach females to throw with the proper hip then shoulder motion are they not able to throw as hard or as far? exactly what is defective?
is there an actual difference in the strength of the exact same muscle of the exact same size and weight?
i know i've asked this before and have not got any answer
Page two of the article proposes that it's something neurological that actually prevents women from getting proper separation between the hip and shoulder rotations.
Money paragraph:
Well, Belgium was part of Medieval France.
I don't think he means a chemical difference in nerve function on cellular level, just that the nerves that rotate the hips and shoulders are hard-wired to work in tandem in women in a way that's difficult or impossible to completely overcome. Kind of like how your body forces you to close your eyes when you sneeze, except correlated with gender.
But the researcher is spit-balling because he can't find a more obvious physiological cause for the observed effect, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it.
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