Alex Massie Alex Massie

Throw like a girl? You probably needed an elder brother or two…

Era Klein flags up this decade-old James Fallowes piece as his “paragraph of the day”. Fallowes is addressing the vexed, nay controversial subject of why some people – especially women! – throw “like a girl”:

If you are right-handed, pick up a ball with your left hand and throw it. Unless you are ambidextrous or have some other odd advantage, you will throw it “like a girl.” The problem is not that your left shoulder is hinged strangely or that you don’t know what a good throw looks like. It is that you have not spent time training your leg, hip, shoulder, and arm muscles on that side to work together as required for a throw.[…]

What Goodman discovered is what most men have forgotten: that if they know how to throw now, it is because they spent time learning at some point long ago…This brings us back to the roots of the “throwing like a girl” phenomenon.

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