Learn the throwing feint in handball: fake the throw, make the goalkeeper react too early and then shoot at the right moment into the free corner.
A throwing feint is a faked throw: you wind up as if to throw and get the goalkeeper or defender to react too early. Afterwards you throw in the other direction or at a later moment. The rules stay the same: at most 3 steps and 3 seconds with the ball [1].
The honest answer to "Does it really work?": It depends on what you fake. A review of studies on penalty throws in football and handball concludes that deception about the place (where do you throw?) works less in real play than in video tests. In play, goalkeepers rather look at timing. The authors therefore advise manipulating the temporal information, that is, when you throw [5].
This fits what goalkeepers do: against long-distance throws they start moving on average 193 ± 67 milliseconds before ball release, and in a less uncertain situation as early as about 349 milliseconds before [2]. That is roughly a fifth to a third of a second. Your window for deception is tiny.
How long it takes to get an effective feint depends on where you start; there is no solid study figure for it, that is coaching experience.
The best feint is the one that starts like a real throw.
First make your throw the way you always do and film it from the front and the side. That is your template: the feint must start as exactly like it as possible. A study with 788 disguised and 792 normal penalty throws by novices and experts shows that experts disguise their action far more similarly to the real throw than beginners; the difference grows the closer you get to ball release [4]. Milestone: On video, your partner cannot tell which is feint and which is throw until the moment of release.
Wind up as for the throw, stop the arm briefly and pull the ball back instead of throwing. The trunk fakes along, not just the arm. Milestone: Your partner reacts in the wrong direction in 6 of 10 cases.
Because goalkeepers mostly look at timing [5], vary the pause: sometimes early, sometimes later. Do not throw on the same beat every time. Experienced goalkeepers wait longer before their vertical centre-of-mass movement than inexperienced ones and stopped 67% of long-distance throws, inexperienced ones only 24% [3]. No standard feint works against them. Milestone: You throw feint-throw with three different pause lengths.
Fake one corner and throw into the other. Or fake the throw, wait, and throw when the goalkeeper is already going. Milestone: 6 of 10 throws go into the corner the goalkeeper did not go to.
Now everything comes together: run-up in the three-step rhythm, throwing feint on the third step, throw. Mind the limits of 3 steps and 3 seconds [1]. Milestone: You manage feint and throw without a steps violation.
The feint itself is harmless if you land cleanly afterwards. With jump-throw feints, the landing is the dangerous moment: in a video analysis of 20 ACL tears in women's handball, 4 of 20 were one-legged landings after a jump shot, with a nearly straight knee [7]. Land on both legs or softly on one leg with a bent knee.
Repeated throwing motions load the shoulder. A shoulder programme, done three times a week in the warm-up, lowered shoulder problems from 23% to 17% (odds ratio 0.72) in a study of 660 elite handball players [8]. Ask your coach about such a programme. This guide explains and motivates; it does not replace supervised training or a coach.
Feint with time, not with place. If goalkeepers in play rather look at timing [5], throw them off rhythm with a short delay instead of just switching the corner. Even experts do not manage a perfect disguise: the closer the release, the more visible the differences become [4]. So do not save the feint for the moment just before the throw.
A faked throw that tempts the goalkeeper or defender into an early reaction. Afterwards you throw in the other direction or later.
Partly. A review of penalty studies says deception about the place works less in real play than in video tests, and advises manipulating timing [5].
On average they start about 193 ± 67 milliseconds before ball release, and about 349 milliseconds before when uncertainty is lower [2].
Partly. Skilled goalkeepers who received video training improved, but less on deceptive throws than on direct ones [6].
Hip Shot in Handball: The Throw Under the Block