How to make best use of technical instructions

How to make best use of technical instructions

So the question that remains is how one person’s greater level of experience can help another person. The short answer is that a valid instruction derived from experience can help me if it guides me to my own experiential discovery of any given stroke possibility. From the point of view of the student, the question becomes how to listen to technical instructions and use them without falling into the Self 1 traps of judgment, doubt and fear. For the teacher or coach, the question has to be how to give instructions in such a way as to help the natural learning process of the student and not interfere with it. If insight can be gained into these questions, I believe they would be applicable to the learning of skills in many different domains.

Let’s begin with a very simple yet common instruction given by many teaching professionals: “Keep the wrist firm when hitting the backhand.” I would guess that this instruction originated from someone’s accurate observations of the relative consistency and power of backhands hit when the wrist was firm compared to when it was loose or wobbly. As obvious as this instruction might sound at first, let’s analyze it before casting it into the bronze of dogma. Can the backhand be hit with a wrist that is too loose to give control? Certainly. But can it also be hit with a wrist that is too firm? Yes, of course it can. So as helpful as this instruction might appear, you cannot use it successfully by merely “obeying” it. Instead you use the instruction to guide your discovery of the optimal degree of tightness of your wrist. This of course can be done by paying attention to the feel of your wrist during your stroke and does not necessarily have to be put into language. You will hit some shots with too loose a wrist, others perhaps with too tight a wrist, and automatically you will find what is comfortable and works best for you and settle with that. Obviously the exact degree of tightness you discovered worked for you would be very hard to put into definitive language; it is remembered by its feel.

This is a very different process from obeying the instruction. If I believe dogmatically in the “firm wrist” instruction, and if in fact my wrist has been too loose, my first shots with a firmer wrist will probably seem better to me. Then I might say to myself, “Firming my wrist is good.” So on subsequent shots I remember to tell myself to firm my wrist. But on these shots my wrist was already firm, so now it is too tight. Soon the tightness is spreading all the way up my arm, to my neck, my cheeks and my lips. But I am obeying my instruction, so what went wrong? Soon somebody has to tell me to relax. But how do I relax the right amount? I go back in the other direction until I am too wobbly again.

So I believe the best use of technical knowledge is to communicate a hint toward a desired destination. The hint can be delivered verbally or demonstrated in action, but it is best seen as an approximation of a desirable goal to be discovered by paying attention to each stroke, and feeling one’s way toward what works for that individual. If I want to give the instruction, “Hit from low to high to produce topspin,” to avoid Self 1 overcontrol, I might first demonstrate with the student’s racket and arm approximately what those words mean. Then I might say, “But don’t try to do it, just notice if your racket is coming from high to low, is coming through level with the ball, or coming from low to high.” After a few shots are hit from low to high, I might ask for more subtle awareness of the degree of low to high of successive shots. In this way the student experiences the relationship between the degree of low to high and the amount of topspin achieved, and is able to explore a range of possibilities and discover what feels best and works for himself without the constraint of thinking there is a specifically right way to do it to which he must conform.

If you asked a group of teaching professionals to write down all the important elements of hitting a forehand, most would find it easy to distinguish at least fifty, and they might have several categories for each element. Imagine the difficulty for the tennis player dealing with this complexity. No wonder self-doubt is so easy to come by! On the other hand, understanding the swing, and remembering its feel, is like remembering a single picture. The mind is capable of that, and can recognize when one element in one picture is slightly different from another. The other advantage of using awareness to “discover the technique” is that it doesn’t tend to evoke the overcontrolling and judgmental aspects of Self 1, which wants to rely on formula rather than feel.

The remainder of this chapter will offer a few technical instructions that you can use to help you discover effective technique for each of the major strokes in tennis. The effort is not to give all the instructions that you might eventually need, but to give enough of a sample that you can better understand how to use any technical instructions from any source as a means toward your discovery of your optimal stroke production.

Before beginning, let me simplify the external requirements of tennis. The player has only two requirements for success: hit each ball over the net and into the court. The sole aim of stroke technique is to fulfill these two requirements with consistency and enough pace and accuracy to provide maximum difficulty for one’s opponent. Keeping it simple, let’s look at a few of the dynamics for hitting forehand and backhand ground strokes over the net and into the court. One thing we will see is that the officially approved techniques for doing this have changed considerably over the years. That which was dogmatically true is no longer so true.