Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 29 November 2025
There is no denying that we as flycasters can learn from other sports. Both how we teach and coach off course, there we are lacking a lot. And by we I mean the whole collective. Some excellent teachers and coaches have picked up a lot of these things and are applying them. But we can also look at other sports and learn how to move more efficiently. This becomes most obvious when we are looking at all out distance casting.
The first sports we tend to look at are throwing sports. Quite logical as we are casters. Casters should look at other casters right? We can learn a lot here as an all out distance throw looks quite similar to throwing a ball, a javelin and so on. But we are not throwing the rod, we are throwing the line. We are throwing the line using the rod as a tool doing so…
Even if we cannot agree on what properties in the rod are the best for throwing we seem to agree upon that some bend in the rod is helping us and some of us even know that it isn’t just the bending of the rod that makes the fly cast work.
But the rod is for sure part of the system, so we should probably look a bit at sports that are using some kind of tool to propel some object away.
I also think that we need to look at it a bit differently depending on what line we are throwing. A shooting head versus a full line. A lighter versus a heavier line. I find that I do or at least can throw a MED7 differently than a MED5. With the MED5 I am more responsible to add speed to the line, here I have to add more speed with the hand/wrist. Why I am not sure about, if it is some biomechanics involved or just pure physics. But thinking about it like this I got the idea that floor ball might be something to look at. It can be very close to 5wt distance. Using a light, somewhat bendy thing to propel something almost weightless. Looking similar to ice hockey but the object to propel in ice hockey is much heavier than in floor ball. In floor ball they seem to have the idea that the wrist can add speed to the shot, I don’t think they have the same idea of the importance of the wrist in ice hockey. Ok, that last statement I just made up, as I remember from play ice hockey we did have something called a wrist shot. But that wasn’t about speed, that was a short but quick shot.
In both floor ball and ice hockey they know that a flexing stick is better than a totally stiff one. And that different flexes fits different persons. Now we are getting quite close to fly casting, right? But we have something quite unique with the haul going on though.
Have a look at these two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suMPKdPk38E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpNFpJbUS5U
Do you think I am on to something or totally lost?
Maybe I’m just going crazy from the darkness and cold we have right now. Not much casting practice getting done and the practice I get is mostly spent at the snakehead shot at the moment. I wish that I could have expanded further on this topic and idea but it just came to me when I sat down to write this weeks FP. Sometimes time and inspiration is hard to find and I got stuck in the middle of the other idea I had for this weeks FP so I had to go with this one.
Cheers, Rickard
PoD: Using the whole body