Podcast #136: Avoid these three huge technique mistakes! (Part 1)
Announcer: Welcome to the Essential Tennis podcast. If you love tennis, and want to improve your game, this podcast is for you. Whether it's technique, strategy, equipment–or the mental game– tennis professional Ian Westermann is here to make you a better player. And now, here's Ian! Ian Westermann: Hi, and welcome to the Essential Tennis podcast: your place for free, expert tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game.
Today's episode of the Essential Tennis podcast is brought to you by TennisTours.com. Thank you very much for joining me today, this episode of the Essential Tennis podcast. I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to download today's show, and give it a listen. I hope that it's going to helpful to you, and give you some ideas about how you can improve your tennis game, and move up to a higher level of play. It's always my goal when I create each and every one of these shows. Before we get to today's topics, I want to send a message out there to all of you gearheads, all you guys who are infatuated [laughter] by rackets, strings, grips, and footwear and clothing, and all of that stuff. If you're a huge gearhead, and you'd love to have an outlet for that, I'm looking for a writer to write for my Gear Review blog at EssentialTennis.com. I've had a really hard time keeping a writer for that blog for some reason. I've gone through tons of them. If you feel like you could be reliable, and you would enjoy writing content for that blog, I'd prefer that if you had some kind of certification or experience actually working with equipment. If you're a master racket technician, etc. that would be best, but I'm not going to make that a requirement. Either way, just send me an e-mail at Ian@essentialtennis.com. I'd love to hear from you if that's something you'd be interested in. This is something that would essentially make you published. You could put it on your resume as being a writer on a tennis website.
So send me an e-mail, and hopefully I can find a new person to start getting some great reviews of rackets and strings, and all other types of tennis gear on the blog.
Alright, let's get down to business. Sit back, relax, and get ready for some great tennis instruction.
Alright, let's get started on the first question in today's show. It's a simple one, but one that's excellent, and something that's going to create a lot of discussion here on the podcast. Ben G. in Lexington, Kentucky wrote in and said,
“What do you think about a podcast of the worst habits of the worst habits you see in teaching? As in: what are the things the player should go out of the way to NOT do?”
Well Ben, that's an awesome question. I thought about having a guest on to talk about that's another teaching pro, but kind of ran out of time in doing that. So I'll just go through it myself. What I've outlined here are–in my opinion or in my experience–the top 3 technical mistakes that recreational players make. And this is just based on what I've seen teaching full-time over that last… I guess it's been about 6-8 years now, spending 30-40 hrs. a week on a tennis court trying to help recreational players just like you guys listening improve. In my opinion, these are in my opinion, the 3 biggest mistakes that will lead you guys down the wrong path as you try to make yourselves better tennis players. These are extremely common things.
So Top 3. #1: a short and tight swing on ground strokes, both forehand and on backhand side. This is definitely the #1 technique issue that I battle with every single day as I'm on the court, trying to get my students to improve. Most often when recreational players try to hit the ball harder on either their forehand or backhand side, their technique gets shorter. This is what I see most commonly. Not all the time. In my experience, it definitely depends on what kind of background players have playing other sports.
If you've already played a lot of golf, or if you've played baseball, or maybe lacrosse or hockey–or some other type of sport or game where a long swing was needed to create really good results–maybe you're lucky enough to go ahead and do it naturally, correctly, which is to make a racket path that goes through the ball with good length so that you can really create the most amount of power and racket speed as possible. But from what I've seen with kind of average level athletes and just your typical person off the street who has decided that they really enjoy tennis and they want to get better at it, when I see that type of person try to create more power, usually their stroke actually gets shorter instead of longer. This is due to their muscles tightening and tensing up as they make their swing. The result of that is a shorter racket path and less racket speed.
Now even thought the racket moves faster because they're trying to accelerate it more, so they to move it real quickly through the point of contact, even though everything might tighten up and tense up, and their overall length of swing might get shorter, it might be that they actually do speed the racket up ultimately. In other words, compared to an average paced swing or a rally ball where they're just trying to get it in play. It's very possible that, even though they get tighter, the racket might move faster, but in the long-term, that technique is not going to serve you very well. It's going to choke off your potential to continue making your ground strokes better and better down the road as you keep on working on your game. This reminds me of–I tell this story a lot. I think I've only talked about this one other time on the podcast, and it was quite awhile ago. I was listening to a golf podcast. This is probably 1 yr. ago, back when I was really into golf and trying to improve my technique. I heard an excellent quote from one of the top instructors in the U.S. The person who's interviewing him asked him, “What was the #1 mistake that amateur golfers made as they tried to hit a good golf shot?” He said, “Amateur golfers too often try to hit the ball.” [laughter] That should strike you as odd right off the bat! He said, “Amateur golfers try to hit the ball.” That's a huge mistake! This 100% applies to tennis as well, and in my experiences, really transfers over for amateur tennis players as well.
What he means by that is: rather than making a high-quality swing and using high-quality technique, and simply letting the ball be in the middle of that swing. And kind of just letting the ball get in the way of that good technique, and just focusing on the technique, both golfers and tennis players tend to consider the contact point as being all important.
Don't get me wrong. The contact point is hugely important. And what happens just before and just after contact is a massive part of what make a shot successful. But what this instructor was talking about was having the contact point be the #1 focus for a golfer, or in this case, a tennis player. So these players can just focus on that part of the wring, and the result is kind of a bracing for packet.
The racket is being accelerated towards the ball just to make contact with it. And very tennis players have this brace: Here comes the ball and I'm going to hit it! And there's just this quick, jerky acceleration towards the ball. Everything just comes to a halt as soon as contact gets made. There's a lot of tension there. Everything gets shortened up. That is no good! Both on the golf course, and on the tennis court. I'm going to ahead and stop using golf references now. [laughter] Because I know a lot of you aren't big fans of golf. But there's a lot of technique similarities between golf and tennis. Which I found really fascinating as I was trying to improve my swing about 1 year ago.
So that's #1. Worst Habit, Biggest Mistake #1, is a short and tight ground stroke. Do yourself a favor by focusing on having a long swing. A relaxed swing. Being nice and loose, and don't even really think about the contact point. Make sure the racket moves through that area smoothly, like you're just not even really thinking about it. Just focus on the finishing position, your finishing spot of your swing, and accelerate to that point. Don't accelerate to the contact point. Don't accelerate up to the ball and then have that be your goal, and then everything stops as soon as you make contact. Accelerate all the way through to wherever you're finishing your swing, and make that #1 goal on your forehand and your backhand. Alright, Worst Habit #2 is that recreational players move their racket a lot on volleys. [laughter] If I could cure 1 technique in tennis across the entire world, it would be this. It just agitates me so much! Volleys should be very simple. They should be very straightforward. There should be no extra stuff in terms of technique. They should be a calm and relaxed redirecting of the ball. That just doesn't happen for so many players. This is definitely in my Top 3.
In fact, this may be #1. I don't know. It's close between this and the short, tight ground strokes on both the forehand and backhand side. It's a close call for me. But this is a huge one.
Two things that you should not do on your volleys. #1: I hate the word “punch” for volleys. Don't punch at your volleys. I mean, just think about a punch. If you're watching boxing or missed martial arts, or whatever, and you see somebody punch somebody else. Or you see somebody punch a heavy bag in training for boxing, or martial arts, or whatever. You'll see a short, abrupt, intense contact between the fist or the glove of whoever is doing the punching and the bag or the body of whoever they're trying to punch. This is not good technique for volleys. You should also not swing your racket, meaning: your racket head and your racket face is moving back and forth across your body like it would for a ground stroke. That's not something you want to do either. What we want is something in between.
Again, I dislike “punch” a lot. You also should not swing at a volley. That's not a good idea either, because that's where things start to get sloppy.
