In various posts and pages on this site I’ve covered the mechanics and biomechanics of fly casting. (It’s all there in the menu section to the left.) That knowledge, together with some basic understanding of sensory motor learning changed my objectives for improving my casting and the revised practice regime I use to pursue those objectives.

Introduction

Some years ago I started using a quote from R. W Emerson in my sig line – “The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.” Graceful movement is beautiful because what we see (consciously and/or unconsciously) when we watch it is the economy of effort with which it is performed. That’s how I want to fly cast. Functionally and self expressively I want to move efficiently and therefore gracefully.

Mechanical science led me to look for efficiency gains in my casting technique. It did not, however, not tell me much about how to change my movement patterns. It informed the choice of outcomes but had little to say about the process of obtaining them. Understanding more about Sensory Motor Learning was more useful and laid foundations I have built on more recently. Experientially, I found that efficiency was the gift that kept on giving and Santa became much more generous after I ditched the idea that casting longer meant casting better.

Fast forward a year or two and back in October 2022 I announced my complete departure from an “athletic” model of fly casting, choosing instead a qualitative goal of minimising effort to fully replace any vestiges of the quantitative goal of maximising distance.  Having done that I wanted to turn more towards the art of movement and away from the science of it.  I wasn’t dissing science but recognising that I’d just had enough of it for the time being at least.  It had ceased to add significant value to my casting. The limits of science will be further discussed below – that’s me trying to make objective sense of a powerful intuitive insight.

Efficient Movement

In exploring the teaching of movement I found myself again researching how people learn movement – what helps and what hinders that process. That led, eventually, to boning up on movement at large – well beyond the playing fields, tennis courts and golf ranges. I freely and happily admit that this remains a work in progress. However, research to date has thrown up a splendidly fundamental idea that seems to owe much to the influential work of Moshe Feldenkrais. It had that bedrock feel when my research shovel first connected with it and the feeling hasn’t changed with further research and practical experience.

Feldenkrais’ idea is that efficient movement is made without any superfluous effort. It is a simple idea that, once grasped, sharpens the focus considerably.  It certainly had that effect on me. The idea of eliminating all superfluous effort was soon given a field trial in a practice session and…. bingo, there it was – more distance from less effort, especially in the finish of the stroke – back and forward. A web search of “efficient movement superfluous effort” threw up some interesting results and one of them was from Todd Hargrove’s blog (the old one)

Hargrove is a manual and movement therapist who has trained in the Feldenkrais Method and Rolfing. Two quotes from him will give you a taste:

“As applied to the body, efficiency means the ratio of useful work performed compared to the energy expended to do the work. Put another way, efficiency determines how much of the energy you expend by muscular contraction creates a successful movement, such as running, kicking, throwing, standing, walking or breathing.”

“In my opinion, efficiency is an excellent measure of how coordinated any action is. In other words, the higher the efficiency, the more coordinated the action is and vice versa. In fact, I would argue that the optimal way to do anything, whether it is breathing, walking, standing or playing sports, is the way that maximises efficiency.” [My emphasis]

Efficient fly casting is producing the cast you want without superfluous effort. This is much more than a minimum effort casting drill that has been normalised into standard casting technique because the stroke used may or may not be efficient and we might be simply stalling the casts. An efficient casting stroke uses the least possible effort, at every stage, for the given distance and type of presentation being attempted.

Ok then so good technique is smooth, co-ordinated and (comparatively) effortless and that comes from using energy efficiently. That means it is mechanically and biomechanically efficient. How do we get there?

I can think of two possible answers. First we might try developing good technique and then, as a secondary stage or refinement, we could try reducing the effort used to perform the movement. I’m pretty confident this is what most fly casting instructors would recommend.

However, given what I’ve been doing for several years and reading most recently, here is an alternative approach. What if we turn that around and start by deliberately minimising the force used which consequently leads to improving our technique (faster). The first way we might get to efficient casting with better technique permitting less effort. Effort reduction, however, is somewhat of an afterthought or byproduct. The second way we start with the objective of efficiency, of eliminating superfluous effort. Now the quantitative outcome, like how far we cast, becomes more like the afterthought or by-product. Ok so maybe that’s a big ask for a beginner at their first session but I’m now convinced that if we want to get seriously good, good enough to be graceful, getting rid of superfluous effort – all of it – is a very useful endeavour especially when It becomes the primary objective. Here’s a nifty way of looking at this. Technique does not facilitate the use of greater effort. Technique is achieved by eliminating unnecessary effort. With efficiency as the primary objective of technique, the level of effort required becomes the key performance indicator of technique. Less is more.

One last observation from both the literature and my own experience. Using superfluous effort makes it far more difficult to fix faults in technique, probably because it is at least partly responsible for the faults being there in the first place. This explains why it is preferable, more effective, far easier and much more pleasurable to work on technique at medium distance rather than at long distance. In addition to its redundancy, excess effort has a lot of downside and no upside I can think of. It leads to:

• Greater mechanical and biomechanical inefficiency (eg. slack and SLP problems like over rotation)
• Impediment of improved technique (eg. poor tracking, tailing, accuracy and yes, even outright distance)
• Impediment of timing, co-ordination and smoothness of power application

The Limits of Science

Conventional science has been useful but it has its limits. It helps with choosing outcomes but doesn’t have much to say about the process of obtaining them, about the learning of movement as a subjective experience and process, much less addressing the bigger picture of human movement. Movement literature tends to come from a different place and therefore perspective. It’s about how movement, including highly skilled movement, is something we learn, do, and refine in ways that are built into our species. From the movement perspective we can observe and analyse how we move and learn to move. It then informs and promotes the subjective experience of movement instead of just the abstracted (objective) analysis of how best to achieve movement outcomes.

Here’s the pointy end of understanding, practising and teaching fly casting as movement. When I think about what makes movement both effective (outcome achieves goal) and aesthetically pleasing (graceful) it is the flow of the movement, its completion a) as a whole and b) without superfluous effort.  It is not my experience that scientific examination and analysis gets us anywhere nearer to the wholeness of a movement, its learning and/or its teaching as such. Performance of movement always and rightly has a strong subjective component. Objective science takes an ever more detailed inventory of the disassembled parts identified as contributing to function, efficiency and even fluency. This reminds me of an internal combustion engine with its bits spread out on a workshop floor, no fuel or vehicle in sight. Science has never made a presentation to a spooky fish nor has it driven an F1 car at race winning speed. It can add value to those endeavours but it generally lacks a big picture of them.

Play and Variability

If you want a wider and more detailed account of movement, play and variability then I recommend Playing with Movement (2019) by Todd Hargrove. Also check out his blog including this post. Much of what follows is informed and supported by his work.

Not being a social media fiend, much less an aficionado, I have recently begun to suspect that talking about movement has become a “thing” and there is something like a movement “movement” going on. In some ways that’s good, especially if it leads more people to better health. It would, however, be a pity if trendy half baked guff took hold instead of a solid combination of science and thoughtful experience.

Personally, I have been consciously into movement in a wide variety of modes for most of my life. Getting into the literature of movement has affirmed my personal journey and, it has to be said, raised a regret that I didn’t explore the literature sooner. Sigh. The journey is always the journey. No point in worrying about speed instead of enjoying the travel. Here is a brief account of some more of the things I’ve learned since deciding to explore what lies down the movement road.

We Are Not Machines

Human beings are complex organisms. It makes much more sense to understand ourselves as an ecology than as a machine. Our systems, physiological and psychological, work together collaboratively rather than sequentially or separately. This applies to our movements, both internal and external. To pick fly casting as an example of an external movement, what we see while watching the rod arm performing the simplest fly casting stroke belies a host of hidden activity. We can’t make that foundation stroke without having enabling contributions from our senses including sight, touch, balance and proprioception which work in concert with our body bits which are organised and controlled by our central nervous system. Hopefully, all this produces one functionally well timed and coordinated cycle of flexion and extension of one arm. All these contributors, and others, self organise to produce an intended movement outcome capable of towing a fly line from the rod tip and forming a loop which travels through the line resulting in its extension.

So, “simple” movements are the result of complex processes. That is not, however, to say that we will learn to move better by delving ever deeper into the complexity. Rather it is important and pragmatic to go about learning and refining movement skills by doing things harmonious with how we naturally move and learn to move. In simple terms, the question is how best can we support and facilitate the movement self organisation which evolution has provided for us. Equally, how do we avoid getting in the way of self organisation? That’s a clue on choosing between external and internal cues to learn and teach movement. Internal cues focus our attention on what the body bits are doing.  External cues focus our attention on what they (body bits) are meant to achieve ie outcomes. It’s an important subject which informs relative choices for complex organisms living in a relative and complex universe. It is definitely not mechanistic, zero-sum stuff from the world of clockwork humans living in a clockwork universe. Might get back to some of that at some point.

Movements Have More or Less Complexity

“Movement skill is the ability to efficiently solve movement problems” (Hargrove, Playing with Movement (2019) p.14).

Movement skills and problems come in different levels of complexity. I have recently had the pleasure of watching my granddaughter learning to move: from lying to sitting to rolling to crawling and then to walking. She didn’t need instruction or even demonstration to efficiently solve her movement problems. She was allowed to explore at her own pace and in her own way which is instinctive rather than cognitive. She learned to move by exploration through trial and error. Watching her was even more delightful having read Feldenkrais and read about his work – from the original book (Awareness Through Movement, 1972) and from movement folks like Hargrove who are heavily influenced by him. Many of Feldenkrais’ ideas about movement were inspired by watching babies learning to move. I’m not about to bore you with a detailed analysis of his work but I do find his ideas about movement extremely interesting, not least because of the fit with my own experience with fly casting movements. Likewise, watching my granddaughter helped me to join some theoretical and experiential dots.

My granddaughter is working on lower and more fundamental levels of movement – first posture and then co-ordination of large limb movements to crawl and to walk before she eventually starts running. These skills can be acquired by exploration – by play if you like or “by trial and error”. Skipping past the intermediate levels of movement complexity, fly casting is a complicated and specialised throwing movement at the top level of the movements scale.  As we travel up the scale the demands for co-ordination and control increase and as they do we need to put in more work, through repetition and practice, to acquire and to improve those skills. Throwing things accurately is unique to our species. Basic throwing movements come somewhat naturally from typical play activity (at least they used to !) but high level throwing will probably require more work. Specialised throwing movements like fly casting do not come “naturally”. We need to do work to perform them well and a lot of work to perform them at an elite level.

Ultimately, however, each of us must find our own movement solutions to the movement problems of presenting the fly where we want it to land and how we want it to land. The nature of the problem varies, especially out on the water, so the solutions we organise our bodies to provide also change. We find solutions by exploring what works and as we get better we increase both our range of standard solutions and our ability to solve new problems or devise new solutions – to improvise. Expertise in a complex movement like fly casting requires control in both repetition and improvisation. For this we need both work and play. I’ve written quite a bit now about casting practice. It is the work part of the deal but that should not be confused with drudgery which is pretty much the opposite of being playful.

Play

Before I go any further two things need to made clear. First, if you are interested in movement as a learner, a teacher or both (preferably) then Hargrove and Feldenkrais are well worth a read. If nothing else make sure to read Chapter 10, Skill, of Playing with Movement. It will save you a lot of time chasing rabbits and ploughing through academic, peer reviewed literature. His work is based on scientific research and publications.

Secondly, I’m going to discuss play and its role in learning to fly cast better and when I use the word “play” I don’t mean frivolity or mucking around pointlessly. For my money play is having fun through creativity, innovation, adaptivity and exploration. Play is a means of learning things experientially – individually and interactively with others. We share this delight with many other animals that learn all sorts of seriously essential survival skills by playing, often with family or wider group members. Play might seem frivolous to the critical, uptight eye of reductive observers but they are missing the point. Play has purpose and play is focussed but it is different because it is more about the process than the outcome. Play helps us deal with uncertainty, just like it does for other playful animals.

Hmm ok, but how is play going to make me a better fly caster, golfer, cricketer or footballer? A short and simple answer is that it will enhance our openness and responsiveness to changes in our environment. Play enables us to deal with uncertainty by becoming adept and adaptive when faced with the uncertain and the unexpected. I’m not going down the path of detailed analysis and explanation. For now I would offer that basically either you “get” play or you don’t and if you don’t it might be worth looking further into it. Play is something I want more of in my fly casting. We need to consider that neither play nor structured practice (drills) hold all the answers. The mix is different for different types of movement. Babies don’t need structured lessons or practice to learn to roll, crawl or stand. As complicated as these movement tasks might be they are not in the same league as driving a golf ball down the middle of the fairway or landing a fly in a hat lying on the ground some 60’ feet away using a fly line towed by a 9’ flexible extension of your arm.

The more technically demanding movement skills seem to require more structured learning and practice. Previously I would have said that casters like musicians need to master skills before becoming free to improvise – that is to play freely. Now, the jury is out on the both sequence and the mix. Maybe it would be a good idea to balance, say, 30 or 40 minutes of more structured practice (work) with 10 or 15 minutes of relatively unstructured “play time” either by dividing the practice session into two blocks or spending it with alternate or intermingled attention to work and to play. I’m going to try all those approaches and see what stands out as most enjoyable and most useful. Yep, I’m going to play with it and see what works best for me. I won’t be surprised if they all work and that shifting between different mixes works even better.

Let’s look at three champions in three different sports being playful. (I usually watch this sort of thing with the sound muted.)

The first example is Donald Bradman . This guy, if you don’t know of him, is still regarded as the finest cricketer ever to have held a bat. Here he is throwing a golf ball against the rounded base of a tank stand and playing cricket shots to the returning ball using a cricket stump as his bat. Notice the variability of the ball’s movement in bouncing off a round and uneven surface. Notice the size of the contact area between a golf ball and a cricket stump, both of which are narrow and round. Consider the precision and co-ordination required just to make contact much less to direct the ball into a cricket shot. Trust me, the degree of difficulty is off the scale. You might want to overlook the play element and classify his actions as a drill but I think it is both.

Next is Tiger Woods repeatedly juggling a golf ball against a club face before playing a shot with the moving ball. No way you would call that a drill but is it nothing more than a party trick?

Lastly here is some footage of Lionel Messi in training. You will notice that at least part of his regime is structured and repetitive and he is practicing different forms of agile changes of direction and avoidance of an obstacle similar to a tackler’s outstretched leg. Have a look at this one for more juggling. Now watch any of the related YouTube videos of Messi playing actual football matches. Wow. Noting but skipping over the huge list of superlatives for his technical and improvisational virtuosity, what I see is a distinct playfulness in both his evasion of opponents and his goal scoring. His work has enabled his play.

My point in linking to these videos is that all of these maestros of their sports have managed to combine the discipline of achieving technical skill and the fun of improvising in the exercise of their skills. Moreover, they all do it expressively, in different ways with different mixes.

Now I want to switch to variability which obviously a good fit with playful and creative exploration. Improvisation is creative variation. My recent reading has supported and enlarged my decision to practice with more variation and less repetition.

Variability

What is variability in our context of fly casting? It happens at both the unconscious level and at conscious/intentional level (and probably somewhere between the two). It means that not only do we never step into the same water twice but when we cast we never move EXACTLY the same even when we are casting in the same overall manner to the same target.

About a century ago Nikolai Bernstein realised that repetitive movements, even those of an expert blacksmith hammering on an anvil, were not identical. The overall pattern and outcome were repeated but after extensive observation he concluded that “none of [our] actions is repeated but every action is constructed anew; it’s just a matter what level regulates this construction”. I haven’t read his work and might never do so. What matters to me is getting past the illusion of identical repetitions by humans as machines. We are complex living organisms. Control is what we are really after rather than a selection of fixed programmes to be executed on demand. Variability is not a fault, it is rather a noble practice by which the central nervous system (CNS) controls our movements and learns to control our movements. Control then is relative, dynamic and relies on variability which is, actually, the “programme”. So, it makes sense to embrace variability and to practice it deliberately to give the CNS what it wants – variation.

As we perform each cast we will vary and adjust the movement and the effort we exert in performing it and we do that consciously to some extent and unconsciously to some extent. Now that will raise some eyebrows in the instructosphere but I’m not too worried about that. I’m now convinced that we can help our casting control and movement skill by mixing things up a bit, especially after basic movement skills are acquired. All of us need to find our own ways of making variation work for us. I’ve consciously added more variation to my practice sessions casting, for example, to the different targets at different distances and with a mix of techniques – side cast, overhead, backhand, forehand, dynamic rolls and so on. Sometimes I vary the finish – hard stop, boink stop with an extra bit of wrist or finish “stopless” meaning soft and easy with full arm extension. Each requires changes in the effort profile of the movement. I do this to help improve movement control rather than to make sure I have a particular set of technical arrows in the casting quiver.

The problem with endless repetition is that it runs the risk of becoming drudgery instead of enjoyable work. For me that started to happen when the repetition no longer provided much learning, enjoyment or improvement. The red flag goes up when it ceases to provide enjoyment. That’s when mindlessness begins to set in. Above all we want our practice to remain mindful and purposeful. Rather than damn all repetition as inherently boring I’d say that it served me well for quite a while and it might serve you well too in really nailing the movement skills of fly casting. There is, however, more to motor learning at a high level of skill than doing exactly the same things in large blocks. Series can kick in. Variation can widen the options further.

I still practice accuracy at different distances but I now find it more interesting and helpful to do it with much more intentional variation. Previously I set up a line of golf balls on spikes at 10 foot intervals starting at 50’. I would then make repeated casts to each ball and between them in the pursuit of consistent accuracy with nice extension and loop shapes. Later I used the targets as measures of how far I could cast without noticeable effort.

What about now? Let’s say I pick out a short to medium distance target – a leaf, a tuft of grass or whatever. I will cover it a few times using an overhead action, sometimes PUALD and sometimes with one or two false casts. Then I might change shoulders and do it backhand. Then I might switch to dynamic rolls, again switching shoulders. Of course I might just switch around at random. Next, I’ll pick another target and play around with covering it in the same sorts of ways. I might then take a few steps and cover it or a different target from a different angle and wind orientation. You get the idea. Mix it up. Play with your food.

For longer distances I sometimes have a couple of targets in front and one behind me as well. I present to all of them and see how effortlessly I can perform the cover. If I’m not happy I’ll shorten up and refresh the sensation of casting without superfluous effort. What I don’t do is keep casting in the same way at the same target in the hope of sorting problems out.

The exception to this new general “rule” is using medium distance casts to demonstrate to myself what is needed to make shorter and longer casts with the same effort profile. For that it can be handy to reinstate the old row of ground targets separated by about 10 feet. (As it happens I recently did exactly that to work on capturing the feel of casting effortlessly and repeating that feel at different distances and with different casting strokes.)

Summing Up

• Play is purposeful in its exploration and creativity.
• Variation is not a weakness or fault but rather a natural and normal aid to improvement of movement control.
• Incorporating both in our practice helps define and strengthen fundamental features of casting technique.
• It’s a good idea to play with variability.

Trial and Error

Trial and error is neither inherently flawed nor is it a second rate learning method.  As described above play and variability are inherently driven by trial and error.  It’s how we are meant to learn. I don’t recommend mucking around or trying anything and everything to find what works. First narrow the areas of exploration to a sensible size and then have at it.

Having (re)learned and adopted play, exploration, variability and, most importantly, the removal of superfluous effort in my fly casting movements, my casting is now a good fit with what I need and want. I will continue to try things out and keep playing with the things I like until they either find a place in my movements or get dropped as interesting but ultimately unproductive modifications. In no sense am I claiming to have all the answers for anyone but….me.  If I haven’t already convinced you to stop looking for casting gurus please don’t think I’m trying to become one. If some of my ideas help your exploration of fly casting that’s great. If they don’t, well at least I tried.

I wrote above about my delight in watching my granddaughter learn to move through instinctive exploration of her postural and locomotive movement needs. You could describe this as “trial and error”. What is trial and error?  The first part is easy. We try something. The second is more loaded – if we err we are making mistakes. In fact, from a motor learning perspective, it makes a lot more sense to see trial and error as a positive or at least value neutral process of trying things out. What works we do more of; what doesn’t we do less of. Babies learn to move by trial and error and by repeating what works they get better at rolling, crawling, standing and walking. The discovery of what doesn’t work isn’t about making mistakes except, like my granddaughter, to learn from them. In short, it is an inherent and essential part of learning and improving movement skills. The central nervous system (CNS) makes judgements about what works because that is valuable. The CNS does not make value judgments about how well we are moving, about how this will look on Instagram. We, unfortunately, add that crap later on and it doesn’t help our fly casting skill one bit.

In learning to fly cast we rightly seek to reduce the iterations of trials by reducing errors. Because we are not likely to discover efficient fly casting just by mucking around with a fly rod we need to start with the basics learned from other people. In the early stages we will probably need some internal (limited!) focus on body bits to assist with the external focus on what we are trying to achieve. For the teacher in this process I pass on this thought:

“ [G]ood coaching is about providing the athlete with ‘problems not solutions’. The game is the teacher. If you set up the right constraints – the right game in the right environment, with the right opponents and teammates – the systems that control movement will self-organise, and you will learn the right skills. The job of the coach is to help arrange these optimal learning conditions.” [My emphasis] Hargrove, Playing With Movement (2019) p.172.

Optimal learning conditions necessarily change with students, tasks and the environment.

For the learner, at whatever stage of expertise, I would advise treating other people’s recommendations as ideas to be tried out. Our job is simply to find solutions by trying things out, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t.

It is doubtless true that some people just want to be told what to do. Presumably, they then attempt to reproduce these casting movements according to the prescription(s) with, I’m guessing, varying rates of return on performance and skill retention. What happens when the instructors aren’t there to instruct and correct?  What are the chances of learning by exploration and adaption?  Let me be blunt.  Getting the what-to-dos from an “instructor” might work for beginners but without a healthy dose of trial and error, of self discovery, progress to higher levels of skill will be limited at best.  The most valuable “what to do” instruction for folks who are no longer raw beginners is to find what works for you.  Finding what works takes work.

Drills and the infernal focus on body bits can help people begin to learn complex and technical movements like fly casting but too much of that carries a serious downside of excluding exploration. That often results in practice becoming boring. Game over.

Self discovery and self organisation need both trial and “error”. Good teachers will guide their student’s exploration rather than issue commands. They will tend to present the student with movement problems for which the student seeks self organised movement solutions. Movement variability isn’t the enemy, it’s the GPS. Error isn’t wrong – it’s the gateway to trying something else that works better.

Here is the bottom line. The greater the casting expertise we aspire to the more likely it is that our casting will ultimately be self built. We have to make the movements ours and to do that we have to build them, metaphorically speaking, from the forest or from the timber yard. Flat pack golf swings and fly casting strokes are going to be somewhat brittle and lacking in versatility. In the face of challenges from the environment they are much more likely to be found wanting because control demands adaptability and that comes from the experience of working out what works best for each of us. In turn that comes from exploration and experimentation.

Some years ago I was taken by something Bruce Elliot, a renowned Australian expert in biomechanics, wrote on this subject and it’s relationship to his science. I’ve mentioned it before but it’s bears repeating:

“There is no question that players striving for more power, more control, or more variety in stroke production through trial and error are the primary determinants in changes to stroke mechanics. However, I have shown that biomechanics certainly plays a role in the process of change. General theory provides a base on which modifications can be made, and an understanding of individual stroke mechanics inevitably leads to improved performance.”

He is talking about improved and improvised solutions to movement problems.  I don’t doubt he is right about that but what he may have missed out on saying is that we are built by evolution to do things this way – to learn movement by trial and error.  A good teacher will consciously work to facilitate that natural process. Like fly fishing, fly casting involves continuing learning for continuing improvement.  I don’t expect to perfect either, ever. That’s the fun of both.

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