Which Grip Is Best For Javelin Throwing?

Mar 193 min read

Fork Grip

Pros: Easy for beginners to supinate their wrist, and throw over the top. This is good for when the athlete has little throwing experience throwing a javelin, and has bad shoulder and chest mobility, throwing over the top and getting your armpit to the sky when you throw is essential to protect your elbow and allow the bigger muscles in your upper body like your chest and lat to power the throw. Also since the distribution of power in your hand is coming from a split hand technique, it is easy to stabilize the javelin tip on the side of your eyebrow and throw it straight. With the other grips since your fingers are only on one side of the javelin grip, it can easily swing out to the side and the release will be across your body too much causing the flight of the javelin to be impaired.

Cons: Easy to prebend the throwing arm, drop your wrist, and causes lack of spin on the javelin. Pre bend is something you want to avoid as that causes a lack of pull on the javelin and puts the elbow at risk for injury. Dropping the wrist is something that causes the javelin to throw through the handle rather than through the point. And lastly, lack of spin on the javelin will cause the javelin to die out in mid air. In order to throw anything fast you need to put RPMs on the object you are throwing. Baseball, has back spin, football has a spiral, and javelin has a spiral as well. The American & Finnish grips allow for more of that football spiral release, as opposed to a knuckle ball grip with the Finnish grip.

Tim Wakefield baseball knuckleball grip — Tim Wakefield demonstrates his knuckle ball grip

American Grip

Pros: The pros of the American grip is that it will allow you to get more spin on the javelin than fork grip. This also may work as a good halfway point if you are trying to eventually switch to Finnish grip which is the grip the most elite and rotational throwers use.

Cons: The cons is that because your hand is a little bit more forward on the center of mass of the javelin, it can cause you to pull down on the handle of the javelin which results in "Topping" the javelin. Topping the javelin will have the flight of the javelin aggressively tank down before it is ready to land. This results in the javelin landing at a very high angle in the ground, rather than sticking in at a low angle which is more ideal for perfect flights.

High Angle as a result of topping on the left, low angle as a result of throwing through the point on the right.

Finnish Grip

Pros: The most rotation, best for throwing through the point, best for arm health, best for rotational throwers (wrapping), and best for a longer pull.

Cons: Most advanced, hard to get the feel of when you are first starting out, due to only having 3 fingers on one side of the grip (American has 4 on one side of the grip, & Fork has one stabilizing finger on each side)

But definitely is worth the long term investment of learning how to do this if you want to excel at this sport.

Video and photo demonstrations below