Abundant energy for ball striking and movement .
There are 3 sources of energy available to a tennis player. I have laid out briefly the best choice for a player of any level (recreational beginner to an advanced national and international player) should opt for.
● Hand - In executing the stroke, we "swing" with our hands towards the ball using it to be the energy source. This is the single most debilitating factor in most players' game. And exclusively taught at clubs around town in the name of building eye hand coordination. I have explained this more in the article titled "use of hand, wrist, and elbow".
● Ball - the oncoming ball has energy which we can use to send the ball back. If we are accustomed to this being our source, we certainly don't like playing players whose balls just float deep over the net making us produce our own sense of energy.
● Ground - Yes this is the best source of energy to use. Newton's 3rd law, for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As we push down, the ground pushes back giving us the beginning of the stroke production.
A word about movement to add to ball striking energy discussion. It is faster to move through the air than it is to move on the ground. The idea being is that everytime you take a step to catch the ground to move, you slow down. Every milli-second you can stay in the air you will move faster. So how do we move faster is to take larger steps; the bigger the step, the more explosive the step, the more distance we cover per each step. Almost all the tennis movement is based around this concept.
Then what about the adjusting steps or small step that we hear so much about? We only need those in case we make an error in our big step movement. We don’t want to teach adjusting steps as a mainstay of our tennis movement. We want to get big steps, get in a loaded or coiled position, and strike the ball with big muscles meaning summating the forces from the lower body to the upper body. The priority is not the small steps, they need to be reserved only for very special cases, for example the ball bounces funny and you need to adjust using smaller steps.
A player would benefit greatly from using the 3 Principles of motion.
1. Law of inertia: How do we break from a standing start. Your split step is helping you break inertia. A lot of tennis is about this important step. Principle states that every object continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
2. Law of acceleration: How much force to apply. Mass is your body weight and acceleration is how quickly we can move. Here strength training comes in play. The principle states that the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on the object, is in the direction of the net force and is inversely proportional to the mass of the object.
F= ma or a= f/m
3. Law of Action Reaction: the relationship with movement. Eg. on the recovery step. The lateral recovery step. We have to get our angles right to move in and out of the position to change direction. Angle in and angles out must match for efficiency. The principle states that whenever one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.
There is a genetic component to this. There is a ceiling to every athlete. We can turn a bad athlete into a good athlete.
Understand the brain-body connection. Nervous system fatigues before muscular or celular systems. When the nervous system is tired, the athlete simply cannot produce as much explosive movement which means they are slower. Henceforth, any movement training is recommended to be conducted in the beginning of the playing session rather taxing the body at the end.
Tennis stroke and movement are essentially linked. The strokes begins from the first explosive movement step which moves the upper body all at once, if we let it, the fascia lines (connective tissue) will move correctly putting you in the optimal coiled position from the ground up. This movement is mislabeled as "unit turn" and sorely misunderstood in most teaching circles. All that is left is to uncoil using the larger muscle groups and let the arms come along for the ride (more on this idea in a different article).
Challenges occur when we interfere in this natural rotation and try concocting a movement that we "think" or "imagine" we should be doing, albeit we mean well to try putting ourselves in a coiled position to then strike the ball, this does eventually mess us up when we are faced with time-space thresholds. And at each playing level, players are faced with this time-space conundrum.
To battle these time-space thresholds, we then start to come up with shortcuts such as move faster, swing faster, "turn shoulders" quicker, jump, and all the while missing the real point which is easily fixed by paying attention to your entire chain from the ground up. Done correctly, this will solve most of your tennis problems! Regardless of age and experience.