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Showing posts with the label Learning Tennis

WE'RE TEACHING TENNIS ALL WRONG

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As tennis teachers, we've become obsessed with teaching how the strokes should look, the outward appearance of the stroke, rather than the Fundamentals. It's as if we're more concerned with creating picture-perfect strokes than a fundamentally sound stroke. We're trying to craft a visual masterpiece, but often at the expense of the core skills; the Fundamentals. Fundamentals are our game's building blocks,  while  the way a stroke looks is the Form. Whenever any new player reaches the top of the tennis rankings, Coaches look closely at that player's style and try to copy what the player is doing technically to make them so successful. They're unable to diagnose the new player's strokes more deeply, so they are left with looking at the "cosmetics" of the player. Anyone learning tennis through the  form  method never learns to adapt to different types of balls or correctly analyse what they must do on each stroke, nor what is causing their errors...