Bigger Better Tennis - Paul Dale

WHEN YOUR PARTNER GOES INTO HIDING... If your friends go into hiding each time you look for a doubles partner, it's probably because your serve sucks. There's nothing more frustrating in doubles than having a partner who constantly double-faults.  Or that feeling of wanting to run for cover to protect yourself every time your partner serves one of their weak serves. Nobody wants to play with a partner who has a weak serve. But it doesn't have to be like that because improving your serve can happen quickly just by improving your wrist. Your wrist plays two very important roles when you Serve. It not only helps make the ball go faster, it also works like a "target finder", helping direct the ball to your target.  If you can keep the wrist loose while serving, it will take all the pressure off your shoulder joint, and prevent injuries in the long-term.  So these are the advantages of using your wrist to serve, but how do we make the wrist supple and relaxed when we...

Eighty percent of all the mistakes you will make in tennis will be either in the net, or out over the baseline (the other 20% of the mistakes will come from hitting too far right and too far left). We can address these two most common mistakes directly, because contact is responsible for both of them. If you hit the ball too short, your racquet face was too closed on contact with the ball.  If you hit the ball too high and out over the baseline your racquet face was too open at the moment of contact. WHY PEOPLE GET CONFUSED W hen trying to master feel for net clearance don't ask topspin to give you feel for height accuracy, that's the job of contact, not spin! For height accuracy you need to send your awareness to your racquet face, and particularly the degree that your racquet face is open or closed. An open racquet face increases the height of the ball and a closed racket face decreases the height of the ball. This should be your sole method of achieving net...

Often, all a player needs to do to improve their groundstrokes is to better understand the various components of the stroke and understand the particular function of each part. THERE ARE 3 PARTS TO A SWING   There are 3 parts to a swing. The 3 parts are (1) The Back-swing (2) The Contact, and (3) The Follow Through. Here is a breakdown of each of these 3 parts of the swing. THE BACKSWING:  The purpose of your backswing is to supply power to your Contact. The bigger the backswing the more power you can generate. A return of serve, for example, doesn't require much back-swing because the power you need mostly comes from your opponent. Strokes where you commonly want to generate most of the power yourself are general groundstrokes, and it's common to see players taking big backswings on high balls and mid-court "put-away" shots because they want to generate extra power. The amount of backswing you take determines how much available energy (power) you can ta...

Today's greatest myth in tennis is that a perfect swing ( form) equals  a perfect game.  Players and coaches everywhere focus on training form, hoping it will translate into better results. Players and Coaches everywhere are teaching form over function That's simply not true. Golfers can work on their swing at the driving range for hours, perfecting the smallest details and seeing great results later.  Golf, however, is a "Closed" skill sport. Picture a golfer standing over the ball, having already decided what club to use and with the luxury of calmly deciding the specific flight they want the ball to travel. With Closed skill sports, you have time. Closed Skill: "A skill performed in a stable or largely predictable environmental setting. The movement patterns for closed skills can be planned in advance"     - Oxford Dictionary Closed-skill sports also often rely on a similar, repetitive movement each time.  High board diving, snooker, and archery ar...

When you hit a ball with late or early contact, that can be a positive thing or a negative thing. You either did it on purpose or by mistake,  Let's look at late and early contact in the positive sense first. To master the tennis rally you need to be able to direct the ball both down the line and cross court at will. This is where the ability to hit late and early on purpose is crucial. INTENTIONAL LATE AND EARLY CONTACT: If you contact the ball early with in the contact zone the ball will go cross court.   If you contact the ball late within the contact zone the ball will travel down the line or inside out ( depending on how late you hit the ball) This is the positive aspect of late and early contact. UNINTENTIONAL LATE AND EARLY CONTACT: However, most players think of late and early contact in the negative sense. This is when they can get fixated with only one contact point and start to struggle with timing the ball in the one spot within th...

F FUN WITH THE LANGUAGE The huge billboard on the expressway to Bangkok’s old Don Muang airport always made me chuckle.  I could picture the Thai workers diligently putting it up in the hot sun, but not really knowing too much about its message.  The billboard graphic was of a muscular guy standing proudly in his underwear, six pack tensed and with the caption below reading “ MEN   SUNDERWEAR”.   For several years I entered my apartment block where a sign on the front door asked those who entered to be “QUITE PLEASE”.  This was a sign brought from a business supply store and I can only imagine that several thousand of these erroneous signs were sold around Thailand.   I often wonder why many of these businesses didn’t have the English checked before putting signs up in public, like the restaurant near my home with the street sign out front saying “BOND STEET STAEK HOUSE” and the donation box for stray street dogs announcing “MEN’S BEST FRIEN...

Whenever the Thai National tennis teams trained for an important event such as Asian Games or SEA Games, we often travelled to the northern Thai province of Chiang Mai.   Training up in Chiang Mai helped the players by getting them away from the distractions of Bangkok. It was also ideal because of the opportunity it gave us to run up Doi Suthep, the mountain that overlooks Chiang Mai.  It’s a daunting run but it always meant that my players were in the best possible shape when competition time came around. Doi Suthep was our endurance building block and I would see the benefits of all the hard work done in Chiang Mai come out in the important matches later. We had two alternative morning runs in Chiang Mai , Either a lap of the city or partway up Doi Suthep. These morning runs were always competitive and although I would be first on the runs at the beginning of our sessions in Chiang Mai, after a week of training the players would be running past me duri...