Is there such a thing as a "girl's throw"?

Diana - I had a little think about this and first of all, we probably need to define what a girl's throw is. I think it's probably when you try and throw something overarm and you just use perhaps the lower portion of your arm; So, the upper portion where your humerus and bicep and all that is, doesn't really move and it's just your forearm that's doing the throwing, and your hand of course. So, the question is, why would only a girl be throwing in this manner and I think it's actually probably something that's a bit more cultural than necessarily anatomical because...

Chris - Learned helplessness. Is that what you're saying?

Diana - Yeah, learned helplessness(!) But I think a few decades ago, perhaps not so much now, the practice was to take your daughter and give her dolls and make her do girly exercises, and then with your boys, you take them outside and play football with them or play catch and throw, and that kind of thing. So, I think for a lot of girls, they probably just didn't learn the techniques of throwing properly and so, the sort of automatic response to throwing something is to kind of do it in this funny over arm way and perhaps not underarm or using the proper sort of baseball throw.

Dave - I was not a very outdoors boy and it took me until I was about 11 or 12 to learn how to do that throw which seems to involve throwing your elbow forward, storing energy in your elbow, and then flicking your hand over...

Chris - You do a physicist's throw. So do you analyse this in a sort of physics way and go, "How can I impart the maximum kinetic energy to the ball by adopting the following anatomical posture?"

Dave - It was more that I noticed that when I did this anatomical thing that it seemed to be working rather well both kind of sideways and upright.