Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 1 November 2025
This is my one year anniversary FP. This is number 52 and I sent the first one to Paul at November 1 last year. For some reason I still manage to come up with something to write about every week. Didn’t think I would manage that long and not sure how I have done it either. Coming up with a topic each week can be a bit hard but I try to write down all the ideas I get for topics. Sadly some of my best FPs are gone forever. The ones I write in my head while out fishing and that is forgotten when I return back home.
Lately I have been thinking about what part of fly casting that puts the most stress on the body. My idea is that it is the stopping of the rod on the forward cast. We can add quite a bit of power to the stroke when we pull the rod forward and we end up with the hand far from the body putting the body in a mechanically disadvantageous position. In this position the tendons in the forearm have to take a lot of the shock. The flexors and its tendons in the upper arm also take part of the shock, but are bigger muscles than the ones in the forearm. This gives a good case for the eccentric exercises I have written about previously.
The flexors in the upper arm also has to be part of this work. These muscles are bigger and stronger than the muscles in the forearm but can probably get us into trouble. An aggravated biceps tendon where it inserts in the shoulder can be confused as shoulder pain as it inserts under the shoulder girdle. The flexors will also have to work to stop hauling and the 170 back cast. Stopping an explosive haul like the hamstring has to stop the knee extension during sprinting. As I have understood it hamstring tears doesn’t happen when the leg is pulled backwards during sprinting, it happens during stopping of the rapid knee extension. Making a case for biceps curls.
How the triceps is affected I don’t really know. It is big and strong and I haven’t read anything pain here from fly casting. The body is in a better position to stop the arm mechanically here also. So we skip this part.
Looking at this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7588766/
The most commonly reported injuries from fly casting are elbow tendinitis and rotator cuff tendinitis. Two not so specific diagnoses as there are a lot of tendons involved in those areas, especially the rotator cuff. And if I dare to make a guess we can mitigate most or all af the risks for the rotator cuff with sound technique, the elbow is a bit harder. But we still have the fact that pain in both areas are common for fly casters which leads us in on the one exercise for fly casting. Hanging. Just hanging from a monkey bar, a branch or whatever. A quite basic human function.
So what do we get from hanging? We give the forearms a good workout, strengthening the muscles and the tendons we use to stop the fly rod. Most of the muscles and tendons in the arms will get something. The whole upper body will get a good stretch and mobility exercise. We get one more interest thing here. Hanging can be the best exercise for the rotator cuff also. Instead of writing everything about that out you can read/watch more about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TLwMDKkfE
You don’t want to miss out on the catchy tune in the beginning of the video, “Bob and Brad - The two most famous physical therapists”
There you also get some ideas how to implement the hanging. Or you can just find something to hang on while you are out walking, a tree branch, monkey bars or a chin up bar should not be impossible to find outside. A good start if you haven’t been hanging from something since you were a child can be to find something not so high up so you can reduce the load by keeping your feet on the ground. But it’s all there in the article.
This takes care of a lot of the upper body. Maybe I will write about something similar for the lower body an other time.
I have some new things going on also that will help me with more topics for FPs! I hope it will make some interesting reading.
Cheers, Rickard
PoD: The crazy buss boat in Gothenburg. I don’t understand how anyone dares to go on that thing. It doesn’t look safe for either traffic nor water.