The frisbee is one of the simplest pieces of recreational equipment ever invented. With just a plastic disc, a little open space, and someone to throw it with, you can inject a boring afternoon with an ample dose of fun. Successfully throwing a frisbee, however, isn’t as obvious as it would seem. Most beginners try to muscle the disc through the air, only to watch it wobble, dive, or veer wildly off target.

A good throw depends less on power and more on smooth mechanics. With the correct grip, arm motion, and wrist snap — as outlined above — anyone can make a frisbee fly fast and true. Once you learn the basics, getting it to your target, even just across the yard, becomes surprisingly satisfying.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to know how to give a commanding whistle with my fingers in my mouth. You know. The kind you see people give in old movies when they’re hailing a taxi or trying to get the peanut guy’s attention at the ballpark. It just seemed like a cool skill to have. But alas, I’ve spent my entire young and adult life frustrated that I couldn’t uncover the secret to this age old trick.

Many of you out there reading undoubtedly feel the same way. Believe it or not, covering how to whistle with your fingers has been one of our most requested articles. Most of the emailers shared how they had a grandpa or dad who knew how to give a loud, forceful whistle with their fingers. Like me, they thought it was a cool skill, but one which unfortunately hadn’t been passed onto them.

So I finally made it a goal to once and for all figure out how to whistle with my fingers, so that I could create an AoM tutorial on the subject. After just forty minutes of annoying Kate with intense practice, I finally mastered the skill that had eluded me since I was eight years old. Achievement unlocked!

Below, I show how you too can whistle with your fingers.

Watch the Video

1. Choose Your Finger Combination

Your fingers do two things that allow you to create an ear-piercingly loud whistle. First, they keep your tongue pushed back, and second, they keep your lips tucked back over your teeth. The pushed back tongue and tucked lips will create a bevel which will produce a tone when you blow.

There are a myriad of finger combinations you can use to get the desired effect. I’m going to show you my two favorites.

Two-Handed, Middle/Index Finger Combo

Extend your middle and index fingers on both hands, keeping them close together, while your thumbs hold down your ring and pinky fingers.

Place your two middle fingers together, forming an “A” shape. 

I feel like I get a louder and more forceful whistle using this finger combo.

One-Handed, “OK” Sign 

This combo allows you to whistle with just one hand. All you need to do is form an “OK” sign with either your thumb and index finger or thumb and middle finger.

2. Wet and Tuck Your Lips Back Over Your Teeth

Lip placement is key. Give your lips a quick lick to wet your whistle. Tuck your lips back over your teeth. It’s what you do when you pretend you’re an old man without any teeth. Your lips need to cover your teeth in order to whistle successfully. Feel free to adjust how much or little you tuck your lips back. It’s going to vary from person to person.

Your fingers will help keep your bottom lip tucked over your teeth.

3. Push Tongue Back Into Mouth With Fingers

This step is the master key of successfully whistling with your fingers and also the trickiest to get right. It was for me at least.

Some people say you just need to push your tongue back in your mouth with your fingers. That advice was a bit too vague for me.

What worked for me was folding the tip of my tongue back on itself and holding it in place with my fingers, as you see in the illustration above. Here’s how to do it with the two-handed, middle/index finger combo:

• Place the tip of your fingers underneath your tongue right at the tip.
• Push the tip of your tongue back with your fingers. You’re basically folding the first 1/4 of your tongue back on itself.
• Push your tongue back into your mouth until your first knuckle reaches your bottom lip.

4. Blow

With your fingers in your mouth, keeping the tip of your tongue folded and lips tucked back over your teeth, close your mouth around your fingers. You want to make sure you have a complete seal around your fingers.

Here’s how it should look:

Give a soft blow out your mouth. You should feel the air only go out over your bottom lip. If you feel air coming out the sides of your mouth, close your mouth tighter around your fingers. Remember, perfect seal.

Make sure you don’t see your tongue make an appearance in the hole between your fingers! It’s blocking the air from coming out.

You probably won’t get a sound right off the bat. That’s okay. Adjust your finger placement under your tongue and experiment with different finger angles and varying degrees of lip tuckage until you find the sweet spot. Experimentation is key — keep making little adjustments. You’ll know when you’re getting close to your whistle sweet spot because you’ll start producing a noise that sounds sort of like you’re blowing over a beer bottle. Start blowing more forcefully, until you get that high-pitched and loud whistle.

A word of warning: make sure to take a break between blows when you’re first starting out. I’m not kidding. If you keep blowing and blowing, you’ll just hyperventilate, make yourself feel lightheaded and dizzy, and give yourself a headache.

5. Practice

Keep practicing until you get it. I was able to get it down after 40 minutes of dedicated practice broken up over two days. If you’re married or live with other people, go outside or in a room to avoid driving your loved ones insane. A good time to practice is when you’re stopped at traffic lights while driving alone. Once you figure it out, you’ll wonder why it took you so long to master this awesome skill!

Illustrations by Ted Slampyak

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2014.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

With March Madness getting under way, you may be thinking about what you’d do if you found yourself with the ball in your hands, your team down by two, with a second left in the game. Could you make the game-winning shot?

Like most athletic skills, shooting a basketball is less about raw talent than repetition — building a consistent motion so that your body can perform it the same way over and over again. Proper mechanics start from the floor, using the legs to generate power and the upper body to direct it in one smooth, continuous motion. That’s what makes longer shots feel fluid instead of forced, and why players who rely too heavily on their arms often lose accuracy as they tire.

If you tend to feel like you’re trying to shoot a square peg into a round hole, the encouraging part is that even small adjustments can produce quick results. Use the guide above to work on having a better stance, cleaner hand placement, and a more disciplined follow-through — all of which can help the ball come off your hand more easily and with a more reliable arc.

At the same time, remember that good shooting isn’t about forcing your body into a perfectly rigid set of positions. The best shooters develop a motion that’s consistent but still natural — aligned with the basket, balanced, and repeatable, even if it doesn’t look exactly like a textbook diagram. Rhythm and feel matter as much as form. Practice the basics, then let your shot become your own.

Putting up a decent jump shot belongs in the same category of basic athletic competence as throwing a football or swinging a baseball bat; even if you’re not using this skill to secure a championship, it comes in handy for playing pickup ball, coaching your kids, or just putting up shots in the driveway.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Over its long history, the whip has been tool for a variety of men.

Cowboys in the American West, South American gauchos, and herders around the world carried whips to move cattle and sheep. The crack wasn’t meant to strike the animals but to startle them with sound, nudging the herd along without contact. Out of this tradition came the “stockwhip” and the “bullwhip.”

Teamsters and coachmen once used whips to keep their horses in step. The lash might brush a flank, but more often the crack alone was enough to guide a team down the road. Cavalries often issued short whips to horsemen and pack drivers as part of their kit.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the whip moved from utilitarian use into the realm of spectacle. Circus trainers used them to tame lions and tigers, while trick-whip artists developed flourishes that showcased control and precision.

Later, pulp heroes carried them alongside revolvers, turning the whip into a symbol of adventure. Half tool and half weapon, it was ostensibly useful for a variety of tasks: latching onto beams or branches to swing across gaps, coiling around small items to grab them, knocking an object out of someone’s hand, cracking to intimidate and keep foes at a distance, or lashing an opponent directly. (Some of these techniques, of course, work better and are easier to execute on screen than in real life.)

If you want to harness your inner rancher or treasure-hunting archeologist, this illustrated guide will get you started with the art of whip cracking. Whip cracking is just physics: you send the energy of your arm into the thong, it travels down the length, and accelerates until it breaks the sound barrier and creates that satisfying “POP!”

Every whip-hand starts with the cattleman’s crack. It’s a simple up-and-down snap that will give you a grin-inducing pop, and help prepare you to raid tombs and fight Nazis.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

Among the many quintessential summertime activities is swinging from a rope over a lake or river. If there isn’t a rope swing by your favorite swimming hole, here’s how to make one safely and use it like the King of the Jungle. 

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In the world of baseball, few skills are more foundational than a proper bat swing. Whether you’re playing in a competitive league or just enjoying weekend softball with friends, mastering the mechanics of your swing can transform you from an easy out to a feared power hitter.

In this illustrated guide, we look to Ted Williams — arguably the greatest hitter who ever lived — for some pointers. Williams approached batting with scientific precision, breaking down every element of the swing in his classic book The Science of Hitting. We’ve distilled his wisdom on the science of slugging into practical steps anyone can follow. Put them into practice, and maybe one day you’ll be able to say the same thing about yourself that Ted Williams said about himself: “If there was ever a man born to be a hitter it was me.”

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Whether you’re stuck indoors on a rainy day or looking to entertain friends at your next poker night, launching cards across the room with quick, pinpoint accuracy offers a simple yet satisfying diversion to those moments of boredom. With the right grip, proper wrist action, and a bit of practice to hone your technique, you’ll soon be sending cards sailing through the air with surprising speed and control . . . and feeling a bit like Gambit to boot. 

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

In the McKay household, I’m the official “Put the Lights on the Christmas Tree Person.” I’ve done this job every year since Kate and I were married. And every year, I’d end up muttering swear words under my breath while Nat King Cole crooned in the background about the joys of a decked-out tannenbaum.

I kept running into a set of perennial problems that made putting the lights on the tree an exasperating task. But over time, I slowly worked out remedies for each that have made the job easier and increasingly efficient. 

The first problem was that the lights wouldn’t work after I put them on; it’s a terrible feeling to get all the lights strung on a tree only to discover they’re defunct because a single bulb is burnt out. Thus, I now meticulously test each strand before it goes on the tree. 

Another problem that kept popping up was that when I strung the lights from the top of the tree to the bottom, by the time I got to the bottom, the lights would look too sparse. Since the bottom is wider, it takes more lights to fill it out, and I’d end up having to add some strands, but in a more haphazard way, since they weren’t part of the around-the-whole-tree flow. So now I begin to string the lights from the bottom, which allows me to plug them in before I start, and ensures that I can see how they look as I go and affirm that I have enough lights at the base before moving on up.

A final reoccurring issue was that the lights wouldn’t look like they had enough depth. In years past, I’d just sort of hang the lights on the ends of the branches, resulting in a tree that didn’t have a look and brightness that was sufficiently three-dimensional, and again forcing me to add in more lights after I thought I was done. To solve the problem, I’ve learned to alternate stringing the lights in towards the trunk and out towards the tips of the branches as I work my way up the tree. 

By implementing these techniques, my annual lighting job now goes a lot smoother. Hopefully they’ll work for you too, so you can save your swearing for when you’re fixing the furnace. 

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There are few more potent symbols of confinement than the straitjacket. And few more potent symbols of liberation than escaping from one.

Which is why doing so was one of the most thrilling spectacles Harry Houdini employed in his act.

Houdini first conceived of escaping from a straitjacket — which restrains a person with sleeves that enclose their hands, cross their arms over their chest, and get secured with straps or buckles behind their back —  while touring a mental hospital and seeing a patient fight to get out of one. The image obsessed him, and he wondered how an audience would react to seeing the same.

Yet when Houdini first introduced the straitjacket escape to his repertoire in 1899, it wasn’t a hit. Believing that the audience didn’t want to see him struggling to remove the restraint, he initially performed the escape behind a curtain. But the spectators figured an assistant was helping Houdini while he was out of view. The feat was significantly more thrilling when he demonstrated it in front of the crowd, sweating and writhing on the stage. He added even more anticipation, tension, and suspense by escaping from straitjackets while suspended from buildings and cranes (you can watch him in action here).

Houdini played up the intensity of his struggle to make the escape seem nearly impossible and heighten the dramatic effect, even spreading the rumor that he had to dislocate his shoulder to get out. But while escaping from a straitjacket is no easy feat, it isn’t quite as difficult as Houdini made it appear, and popping body parts out of sockets is not required. There’s no magic to it; it just takes the creation of some literal wiggle room and a lot of physical exertion.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.