Tips From the Tennis Pro: Good to Great … A Complete Start
Developing Athletic Balance and Coordination in Young Tennis Players
Below is the text of my talk at the Second Annual New York Tennis Expo. It was a great day, with record-breaking attendance and a great time had by all. Many thanks to Long Island Tennis Magazine and New York Tennis Magazine for organizing an amazing event. Also, thank you to eight-year-old Taylor Goetz who helped me demonstrate balance and coordination skills … she was a true star!
Tennis is increasingly becoming a sport of enormous foot and racket speed. As the modern game evolves, so must our teaching methods. I've been fortunate to work with some of the best fitness trainers in the country in my 35 years of coaching tennis, and I've learned three valuable lessons I'd like to share. First, the best place to develop some athletic skills is off the court, second the process starts early, and third coaches should be a part of it.
The background
As a young player, I often heard conflicting instruction about how to set up to hit a tennis ball. Most instruction explained to "run as fast as possible then stop and set" but others suggested to "move thru the shot" which is the style now in vogue. I noticed the best players did both, depending on the situation, but always with balance. We all know balance when we see it. It's the ballet like grace of Roger Federer, the catlike quickness of Novak Djokovic and the explosive power of Serena Williams. Unfortunately, knowing what balance looks like is not enough to effectively teach it, In fact, coaches often talk about balance before undermining young players by teaching adult racket skills.
To instruct this skill, I knew that I needed to fully understand it. Balance is defined as “The ability to control weight and equilibrium in relation to the force of gravity to achieve zero acceleration.” Simply said, it's constant movement or constant stillness. Today, there's a disturbing movement towards early tennis specialization, and this singular focus is the enemy of developing balance. Tennis is the sport of a lifetime, but a lifetime's worth of cross-courts by the age of nine is excessive. Maybe Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule for mastery of a skill is being taken too literally by some. The modern game emphasizes power, but power without stability results in movement compensation, correcting mistakes and injury.
"With great power comes great responsibility," I think Spiderman's Uncle Ben said that and tennis coaches have a responsibility to learn the language of movement specialists to safely train players both on and off the court as a team.
The problem
America dominated the world tennis stage for generations, but times have changed and the 800-pound gorilla in the room is now "How do we successfully create the next generation of champions?" The industry solution has been a shift in core philosophy to "10 & Under Tennis." QuickStart is a much-needed developmentally appropriate program because it recognizes that children are not little adults. It makes the game more interesting for children, but critics suggest that it's not a complete start because it doesn't do enough to develop a foundation of body awareness and athletic IQ. We can look to the progressive practices of China, Russia and Eastern Europe to understand the importance of developing body control with coordination and balance before teaching racket skills. Clearly, resized courts and equipment are not game-changers if young players cannot first support their body weight. Programs that focus on correct movement posture with steep forward shin angles, strong lower to upper body connection and explosive starts with precise stops will truly be a quick start. Optimum athletic balance can be trained by focusing on speed, fitness, conditioning and injury resistance.
The language that coaches need to learn with demonstration
The components of speed:
1. Coordination: The ability to control your body rhythmically. Specifically, the arms must work in harmony with the legs to move efficiently. Poor arm movement is the limitation to speed in non-Olympic sprinters.
2. Agility: The ability to coordinate quickly.
3. Spatial orientation: Awareness of the position of the body in space. It is where both rhythm and synchronization come from.
4. Rhythm: The ability to create efficient movement in time to performance.
5. Synchronization: The coordination of movements of two or more body parts.
6. Speed of reaction: The ability to respond to stimulus.
The components of fitness:
1. Flexibility: The range of motion around your joints.
2. Mobility: The ability to control this range of motion under force. In the real world, it's the ability to move.
3. Strength: The ability to displace at a maximum effort.
4. Power: The ability to express your force quickly to adapt to the changing environment.
5. Stability: The ability to hold still and resist force.
6. Neurological sequencing: The ability to fire muscles in the most efficient order.
The components of conditioning:
1. Conditioning: The ability to perform efficiently with an elevated heart rate and greater oxygen demands.
2. Endurance: The ability to repeat sub-maximal efforts and the stronger you are, the greater the ease in repeating these efforts.
3. Movement adequacy: The efficiency of movement and strong efficacy will help reaction time provide greater endurance and be less taxing to your conditioning. It is closely related to kinesthetic awareness with the application of appropriate muscle tension.
Injury resistance
1. Symmetry: Front and back, right and left, lower and upper body equivalent function. It is a balance of mobility and stability which allows you to move with high function. This comes from training as tennis makes us lopsided (front over rear, dominant over non dominant) and a lack of symmetry is highly correlated to injury potential.
