Click the title below or the book cover to learn more about, Infinite Tennis.
Infinite
Tennis
"Unlock and Unleash
your Hidden Potential to Play Your Best Tennis Ever!"
Click the title below or the book cover to learn more about, Infinite Tennis. Infinite
Tennis
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Biofeedback for Tennis: Use your Senses as a biofeedback machine © 2001, Roger Haeske Did you know that you can learn tennis through your own internal biofeedback machine? In fact learning tennis is always done through biofeedback. The problem is that many people don't know how to best to use it to their advantage. The key is in using the three senses that can be applied to tennis: feel, sight and sound. I've found that feel and sight are the most important senses, with sound coming in a useful third place. These three senses if consciously used can help you to learn tennis very quickly, even if you don't feel you are a natural athlete. This is because natural athletes rely highly upon feel and visual results to help them learn quickly. By using these senses you'll be mimicking the learning technique of natural athletes. Let's go over how to use the all important factor of feel. Each shot you hit in a tennis match produces a certain physical feeling. This feeling can tell you a lot about the shot you just hit. You can tell if the ball hit the strings, frame or sweetspot or somewhere in-between. You can feel how much spin you put on the shot. You can feel if you were balanced, whether or not your stroke was fluid and how much power you put into the shot. You can also feel where your racquet head was on impact with the ball. These are just some of the things you can feel. Feel is one of the most important feedback mechanisms in tennis and in sports. Once you understand the basic mechanics of a shot, you can use feel to help you develop an even better shot and to help you fix errors in your stroke. Unfortunately I've found that many players don't trust their feel. Many tennis students come to me wanting to learn the so called correct way to play tennis. They want to know how to do every little move in tennis, the exact correct way. Then I tell them that I didn’t learn tennis that way and that they shouldn't either. Too much thinking can lead to stiff robotic play filled with errors. In fact, I was never
consciously aware of every single aspect of my strokes when I first learned
them. I had to start teaching people tennis, before I became aware of many of
the things that I was doing. It was not necessary to know every aspect of
mechanics to actually do the mechanics. The same as it's not necessary to
understand how electricity works to turn on a light. During a recent lesson I was
explaining to a student that I learned to take small steps just before hitting a
tennis ball without anyone teaching me that. It was a skill that I picked up
through experimentation with feel. It wasn’t necessary for someone to teach me
how to do it. You’ll find this is the same for you in many parts of your
tennis game. Much of stroke mechanics can actually be learned without
consciously understanding the mechanics. The thing with feel is that it
gives you a more complete instruction than simply verbal commands about
mechanics. When you learn by feel there is no frustration like in traditional
teaching methods. The reason for this is because this is how we naturally learn.
It also uses the student's perspective rather than the teacher's perspective. Feel is a right brain function
and this is the part of your brain that should be active while learning and
competing in tennis. Using verbal commands is a left brain function and that can
often become difficult to translate to the Inner
Language of your subconscious mind. You see the instructor can
observe a student but the student cannot observe himself unless watching a video
of himself or a mirror. So it is very easy for the instructor to make comments
like drop your racquet head down and step into the ball. The only problem is
that this is not the Student’s Perspective while learning. Since it is advice
coming from outside the student’s perspective the student has to be adept at
translating that instruction to his own Inner Language. Many students are not
adept at translating instructions to their Inner Language. So if you the student
can learn with instructions that are already in your own Inner Language, there
will be less confusion and frustration to integrating new skills like topspin
and slice to your game. Many times a student can get
confused and frustrated by too many verbal commands. Natural learning is by feel
and by getting consistent results. It is very easy to pay attention to how a
shot feels to you. Techniques for using Feel:Here is how you can use feel to
quickly improve your game. The first thing you have to do is become more aware
of how a shot feels to you by paying more attention to feel. You also have to
start trusting your feel more. If you can get consistently good results and the
shot feels good, then you know that 98% of the time you are hitting the shot
correctly. At some point you may want to
improve the shot that you arrived at through feel. I’m not saying that if you
use feel you will have perfect shots right away. It takes time to mold your
shots like sculptor chiseling away at the rock to produce a beautiful statue.
You can always go back to experimenting with the feel of a shot and with visual
results to further improve a shot. Here is how to quantify the
feel of your shots. Let’s say you want to use your sense of feel to see how
much topspin you are hitting. After you hit each shot, rate your results from
1-10. If you hit as much topspin as you could possibly imagine you would give
yourself a 10. If you had no topspin you would rate it a 1. This will give you a
more concrete idea in your mind of how much topspin you are hitting. Maybe you
just want to rate the overall feel of the shot. Rate each shot 1-10. By doing
the rating you will be improving your shots because you are trying to get the
highest possible score. You can rate yourself on almost
anything imaginable to you. I helped one of my students rate himself on his
positioning. To make this rating simple we decided he was either in good
position or he wasn’t. So whenever he was out of position he yelled the word
out. He was in good position most of the time so it would have been impractical
for him to yell every time he did it correctly. But when you are just hitting on
your own you can say to yourself whether you’re in great, good, average or
poor position to hit your shot. You can tell by how comfortable it feels to hit
the ball. Improving based on feel alone
is not enough. You do need to get consistently good results like I mentioned
before. You need to tie in your visual sense with your feeling sense. You can
also tie in the sound of a shot. The sound of the shot can tell you if you hit
it flat, with topspin, hit the sweetspot or frame and how much power you put
into the shot. So don’t forget to use sound as an additional feedback
mechanism. How to tell if you are hitting with topspin:Here is how to use your senses to tell whether or
not you are hitting with topspin. When using feel you need to feel more friction
on your strings during contact with the strings. You should be feeling your arm
move in an upward direction as well with a follow-through over your shoulder.
You can also try to feel the angle of your racquet head at impact. (You can tell
this also by where your shot went after you hit it.) From a visual perspective you
can notice if you see the ball spinning very quickly. A good way to do this is
to use Spin-Track balls from Penn. I don’t know if they sell them anymore.
Those balls have two colors on them instead of one and it makes it very easy to
see how much spin you are hitting with. Or you can just color one part of the
seams of a ball red with magic marker and leave the other seam with the original
color. You can also tell by how quickly the ball dips down just before it lands
and how quickly it rebounds towards your opponent. A topspin shot will go down
because of excess air pressure on the top of the ball caused by the spin. Flat
balls only go down by the force of gravity but topspin balls go down with the
two forces of air pressure and gravity. The sound of contact can also
tell you if you are hitting with topspin or not. Hit a flat forehand and listen
to the sound it produces, then hit a shot with heavy topspin and notice the
different sound it produces. Or get someone who knows how to hit those shots and
listen to the difference in the sound of the shots. Topspin sounds more like
whish, while a flat shot makes a popping sound. Once you consciously know
whether or not you are hitting with topspin you will soon be hitting flawlessly
by using your built in biofeedback machine.
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Copyright © 1999-2005 Roger Haeske
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