Visualization

I realize I'm now spending a ton of posts talking about tennis.

In any case, here's yet another one. A lot of good tennis advice provides useful visualizations. It can be difficult to give accurate descriptions in words. You might talk about holding a racquet at a certain angle, and follow a certain trajectory, and in the end, the stroke still looks awful.

Provide a more nebulous visual, and it may be the visual cue you need. For example, I just read a comment in Youtube where the tennis coach said he had heard advice given to Agassi from his dad saying to hit his forehand like a boxing uppercut. Now, I'm no boxer, but I get a vague sense of what an uppercut looks like, and the boxing analogy (Agassi's dad was a boxer) seems to convey a certain level of aggression that might be missing from my game.