Tennis Update

This is one of those blog entries that you should skip if you don't play tennis. I'll try to make it readable if you don't, but I won't try that hard. Expect to be bored. Even if you do play, you may or may not want to read.

Today, I thought I made a breakthrough. Let me explain what's going on. I've been trying to redo my forehand for about 9 months. It's taken a very long time because it requires me to adjust my wrist and arm at an angle so that it resembles the way the pros hit. I have a camcorder with a tiny playback. It's so tiny that I can't quite tell if I'm hitting the ball the way I want.

I have to take that video, upload it to my computer, where I can then slow it down and see if I've hit it right. That feedback loop is awful. That means, rather than fix my shot then and there, I have to wait until I get home and then, usually, realize I've hit it wrong. That can be depressing.

OK, so let me tell you what I'm trying to do. To explain this, I'll use a touch of physics. Imagine you had a frying pan. The surface you cook on has a "normal". To understand the normal, imagine you have a pencil. You put it on edge so the eraser is on the pan bottom and the point of the pencil points straight to the ceiling.

The pencil is perpendicular to the entire surface of the pan.

Now replace the pan with a tennis racquet, and the idea is the same. When you say a racquet face is "pointed" to a certain direction, it is the normal of the racquet face that points in that direction. That is, if you had that pencil, it's the direction the pencil points.

When you hit a forehand, you are hitting on the right side of your body. This is the power shot for most players.

If you watch pros hit, the forehand can be broken down into three parts. There is the takeback, where the player moves the racquet so it points to the back fence (the player faces the net). Then, there is the swing to contact, where the racquet moves forward until the racquet hits the ball. Finally, there is the follow-through. That's the part after hitting the ball until you finish.

While there's quite a bit of variation among the pros in the takeback, the swing forward has a lot of common attributes.

In particular, most pros have their racquet face pointing right. Now, when I looked at myself hitting a ball, I found that my racquet face pointed down. That is, to the ground. And occasionally, to the left.

I thought it would be easy to fix. Just rotate the wrist. But it isn't that easy. Small changes in the wrist cause huge orientations of the racquet face.

After many months, I realized a few things. First, the closer you swing the racquet to your body, the more likely it is to be closed, especially if you bend your wrist. I found that I generally bend my wrist a lot to hit the ball. The combination of bending the wrist a lot and swinging close to the body means the racquet face is closed.

It points down.

And I've spent months trying to figure out why I do that.

Part of it is muscle memory. When I swing, I stop thinking about how my wrist is oriented. My body just wants to do what it wants to do. I've thought about using various devices, but I'm just not that clever to do that. I know I need to bend my wrist less and I also need to move my arm further to my right.

I thought I had figured out a way to swing so that I don't get too closed. But, alas, it's not what I do.

This is why video is important. It shows me what I think I'm doing and what I'm doing is different.

Right now, the most successful thing I do is to think about one spot when I hit. That is, the racquet when it is right by my side. I make sure that is correct, and that seems to help the most. If I don't think of this reference point, then I end up closing the racquet.

The sad thing is, I can shadow swing, and do it the way I want to time and again. And then when I do it for real? I mess up. It's infuriating. The body just refuses to listen.

But I still try it and at least, there are things closer to where I want to be, but it's easy to make mistakes and slip to old habits.

Too easy.

I have an idea that I may give a whirl. I have a wrist brace. I can use that an a butter knife to make my wrist a bit more rigid. I should see if that helps or not.