Don't wanna wreck my shoulders like all throwers do, but seems to me being able to powerfully & accurately throw small-to-midsize ground litter would be a boon, especially when travelling outside of the States. Any considerations, advice on training, historical role models, and so on you can give me?
The good reader, concerned with self-defense, does not want to wreck his shoulder hurling bricks, but wishes to be able to.
Sir, it took some months for me to get to the gmail box.
For those interested in contacting me about writing or fighting, or if a homeless, 21-year-old Dominic stripper babe that looks stout enough to haul my ruck is inquiring of you as to a proper master, the email I can access 11 months of the year is jameslafond@proton.me. The Gmail I can only access when I stay with certain folks, about 2 months a year.
Your question on throwing as one who once could throw well, and now cannot throw at all, due to shoulder injuries, had sat in outlines as a prompt until I listened to the Iliad last night and, knocked a dent in my forehead turning around in the chicken coop and catching a beam end. Despite wearing a hat, and a hood, and getting nowhere near a concussion, and suffering no disorientation, I earned an injury courtesy of something harder than bone one that still throbs a day later.
I will finish with my practical experience throwing and threatening to throw for self defense. First, we consult the master source, the book that Aristotle said held more truth than any, and which Alexander, the most successful war fighter of Antiquity, claimed held all the keys to war. Modern academics only treasure the Iliad for its verse structure and the many practical analogies the author uses for everyday activity, like weaving, and harvesting grain. One and all they laugh at stone throwing as a method of war. The use of hurled and even clubbed stones is more prominent than sword use in most battle scenes.
Patroculus hurls at Sobriedes, Hector’s driver, hit the “forehead, crushed both brows and smashed the bones and both eyes fell down in the dust in front of him.”
Island and mountain slingers were highly valued troops, with a reduced size of missile and an artificially extended arm by way of the strap. There was also a type of light troop drawn from slaves and youths who fought with sticks and threw stones. Might the man who never lost a battle, trained up for war from birth, have known something about war that modern scribes do not?
Alexander’s father had his shoulder crushed by a stone. The man who most emulated Alexander, a hundred years later, Phyrus of Epirus was killed by a roof tile. Homer describes often how stones crush helmet and head within. Alexander himself would fight in more sieges than battles and his skirmishes, where makeshift missiles are often used from ambush, were many.
The ancient Greeks practiced and competed in throwing large stones, a discus, something then, but not now, regarded as practical for war.
Smashed bones is the most permanent injury that does not kill by bleeding or organ damage, maiming a man. The houses full of pensioners after the various black powder wars and the stacks of amputated limbs during the American Civil War attest to the lasting nature of bone crushing injuries from low velocity blunt missiles. Though Alexander lost few killed in battles and sieges, he always left wounded veterans behind who were unable to march any longer, but could still fight well enough to defend a fort. This speaks to hip and leg injuries.
David slew Goliath with a stone from a sling. But Ajax could have done it without a sling.
At the dawn of firearms, Verrocchio, Leonardo’s master, had once been found guilty of killing a youth of a rival band in a stone-throwing fight.
Finally, we should not forget that stone-throwing, from the wall tops, and at the walls with machines, were methods of warfare from the earliest times, represented by Homer when he describes Hector smashing the gate to the Greek camp with a great stone, and in references to the aims of war and the plight of women.
“Our city and our women,” said Palidamis to Hector, on the war aims of Achilles.
The great chorus of mourning Trojan and Dardan women got by “sacking many a great city,” crying for their master Achilles over his best friend Patroclus, represent the vast haul of “booty” such as Alexander got at Mount Haimus, consisting predominantly of, to put it on postmodern English, BOOTY!
I wrote something years ago about my spear-throwing experiments as a youth.
When I was 31 I went to engage 3 youth and two men in front of my house, who had come to take my oldest son for failure to comply with reparations recovery in front of Ham’s liquor store, when he ran rather than give up his wallet and outran the unbeatable, unraceable Gawds of all sports!
The two big prison groes in front were my aim, the three punks just there to pile on. The man with the scar on his face had a brick, the other a bottle. I was probably getting hit in the head with one of these items while I took out the other with my jobolo wood baton. So, I got my gun and ran them off with a much better mineral-throwing device.
About this time I was stoned by a pack of 12-year-olds in the front yard of Mayor Martin O’Malley while his cop guard read the sports illustrated swimsuit edition. If they had been men, who knew how to throw, I may well have been killed.
Attacked in a supermarket once by a fellow worker who was a powerlifter, a man who picked up the pallet of canned goods between us in a rage and slammed it down, I grabbed one of these cans of peas and backed away.
He shambled after me talking of crushing my bony form.
I extended my left hand, fingers pointed between his eyes, knowing I had but one cast, laid the can in my right hand, back over my shoulder, grabbed the rim of the can with my long fingers like a pitcher does the seems of a baseball, and determined not to throw until his face was almost touching my left fingers, almost insuring contact. He got it, circled me for many minutes and eventually suffered an adrenaline dump and went off crying.
In 2020 I had this experience in Utah with a large dog and his pack. The dog had a sense for when I could hit him and how close not to get. A motorist broke it up with his car.
I cannot practice throwing hard, but have practiced easy close range casts to examine the tumble of missiles.
The best object to throw, is as Home said, one that fits inside the hand, a baseball or lacrosse ball, or a stone of that same size.
Common items that work best are:
Short canned goods, with rims top and bottom, like cranberry sauce, condensed milk and corned beef, that will tumble rapidly if the fingers are used to initiate spin, which increase the chance of hitting with the rim.
Rounded river rocks that are often used for landscaping in the burbs.
Quarter bricks.
Half bricks.
Jagged chunks of concrete.
Short slab chunks of asphalt. If it is too big, I have been able to break these in pieces with my hands.
