Simple Pleasures of Tennis

Haven't blogged in a bit. Thought I'd toss this out.

I got a degree in engineering and computer science which involves a fair deal of math. I've met a lot of people since then that are very bright.

To be good at engineering and such, you need to know math, and to know math, you have to think in a certain way. Mathematical thought isn't easy for everyone, which is why everyone doesn't do it. However, the human mind is clearly able to manage and organize these abstractions.

At times, I must have thought like Mr. Spock. That there was a logical way to intuit the things you needed to know about math. If you worked hard enough, you didn't need creativity. There was an answer. Indeed, those who have avoided math or science often imagine these disciplines to be perfectly logical, reinforced by their high school classes that graded in terms of right and wrong.

Little did they know that such thinking was only for the convenience of the teachers who wanted something tidy and easy to grade.

Some people perceive programming in this way. Occasionally, I would be called up to a hearing over someone who had cheated in their program, mostly by copying some parts of their code from someone else. The case would often be presented to non-technical sorts of people and they had to try to pass judgment whether cheating had indeed occurred.

If they thought computer programs were all written as if there was one magical answer which they class would eventually converge on, that would have been a mistake. Programming is a bit like, say, catering a large event. Two caterers may be given a description of the event, the numbers of people, and so forth. They may be told to make Mexican food and to allow for vegetarians. But beyond that, you would hardly imagine two groups would handle things identically. There might be vastly different interpretations that satisfy the basic requirements. Writing programs is like that. There is some level of creativity in programming.

So people learn basic principles of programming and how to write code that is robust, safe, and extensible. This experience often takes years of practical programming to develop. In the process, one learns to organize one's thoughts, and how to deal with bugs in the code. A certain proficiency in problem solving results, and for some, it leads to amazing productivity.

Now, this skill can be developed in any number of neighboring fields including mathematics.

If an engineer or computer scientist or mathematician were asked how they do what they do, they might be hard-pressed to answer. They would undoubtedly agree that it takes a certain kind of "mathematical maturity", a way to reason about numbers and properties of mathematical elements.

Surely, you are now wondering, what any of this has to do with tennis.

Did the poor man forget what the blog was titled? Writing one title, and blogging on something else completely different?

Here's the deal. You get someone like this, and ask them to learn tennis. It doesn't have to be tennis, per se. Any sport of sufficient skill should do.

And what do you discover?

They have no idea how to proceed to learn the sport. Sure, some are OCD enough that they will read prodigiously on the topic, treating said problem like they do any other problem. With enough research, you can probably get some idea of what to do. The web, after all, is more than just a means to find solutions to your programming problems.

For some reason, however, the people who have tried to learn tennis (or similar sports) haven't always looked for the "right way" to do things. I remember I played table tennis about half an hour a day, five days a week, for nearly a year. I got pretty decent, at least, in a recreational sort of way. But my technique was awful. I hit the ball fine, but over time, it was quirky and therefore not totally reliable.

I could have looked on the web for lessons, but I didn't. I didn't fully realize this until I played tennis and tried to learn it as technically well as I could. I know, roughly, what I need to do on, say, my tennis forehand. I can show you slow mo video and break down the nuances I am seeing. To be sure, I miss at least as much as I see, but at this level, I think I am paying a lot more attention that most would.

Now I had the advantage of already playing tennis before, and with web resources growing ever more plentiful, there's a lot of resources to learn tennis from a technical viewpoint.

Yet people don't.

To give an analogy, there are people that play musical instruments, but because they are too shy, they don't sing. For some reason, plucking strings or pressing notes seems very objective. Controlling one's voice seems more mysterious and it activates a person's modesty meter. It's more revealing of a person to sing than to play a musical instrument, even if both are about music.

If math/science/programming is about how to organize your brain to solve problems, then playing sports is about how to get your body to do things, and much like music, it only comes from a lot of repetition, and repeating the "right things". You can certainly learn sports the "wrong" way and be quite proficient.

I say "right" and "wrong" in so-called scare quotes (I don't like that term because I think it implies I am trying to scare people, and I'm not) because with sports, there's a lot of latitude about what is right or wrong and people often discover, through trial and error, that there are other valid ways to do something. If you watch tennis over its long history, you'll discover a lot of changes in how players hit the ball, some of which has to do with the equipment.

Hitting a ball has evolved over time, and may continue to evolve, as players discover different ways to do the same thing.

But beyond hitting a technically sound stroke, there is the practice. You can think of tennis as a real time physical game. Balls are hit in very similar ways, some higher, some lower, some with spin, some without, some with more power, some with less, some over here, some over there, and you are constantly having to solve these problems in real time.

If players struggle, it's because they often solve a certain kind of problem, say, a flat ball deep, but not too deep, over and over, to the detriment of solving other kinds of problems. While there are the occasional a-ha moments, they aren't usually the same as in math problems where a clever trick can greatly simplify a problem, the right frame of mind making all the difference.

Learning tennis is a little like learning music. Musicians know, even as talented as they may be, that success comes with a lot of practice. There aren't a great deal of shortcuts. Learning a sport is learning to cope with one's own body, to make it do what the conscious mind says it should do and then to move beyond that so it comes without thought.

The body learns things by repetition. It takes a lot of convincing, especially if you've trained it to manage a different sport. Indeed, when people struggle learning a new sport it's because they apply principles from other sports. This makes sense. When someone is learning a new programming language, they often apply ideas from a programming language they already know. Now, as anyone who has learned a few programming languages knows, you can't always do that. You should learn a new language like experts in that language learn new languages. You should imitate them.

And that is also the same lesson about learning any sport. Rather than apply what you know from another sport, you should learn how practitioners of the sports learn it. But so many people prefer to side-step this. They learn it any old way.

Why? Well, they convince themselves, perhaps quite rightly, that they don't care about the sport that much, and so they don't need master it beyond a basic level of proficiency. I find that a bit odd since they have often mastered some other part of their professional lives with great mastery. But, much as playing music and singing music are two distinct skills, so are mastering mental proficiency and physical proficiency.

One reason I like tennis is because it allows me to apply some thought to a physical task. Since tennis is a physical sport, you want to get beyond constant analysis. The game moves too quickly, and you need the body to respond semi-automatically. This is one reason you rarely see a pro make major changes to their stroke. I've seen seniors play on the champion's tour that have made some changes, but nothing dramatic. John McEnroe, for example, isn't going to use a semi-Western grip and hit like Rafa. It's too dramatic a change when he hits the ball perfectly fine.

A player on my level, on the other hand, hasn't developed the same kind of technical proficiency that McEnroe has. That doesn't mean that it makes it any easier for me to make changes. Indeed, one might argue that McEnroe, being more physically gifted might adapt more easily. However, McEnroe has a much bigger downside. Since he hits so well already, he would have to develop the shot so that he could at least match his current level.

Meanwhile, my forehand isn't as good, so I can afford to spend time learning to play better.

In a nutshell, I find that tennis exercises a different part of the brain, in addition to being exercise. I like the strategy, learning to hit different shots, and trying to learn the "right" way to hit a ball.

Forehand Progress

About a year ago, I bought a camcorder. I wasn't planning to make video of my kids since I don't have kids. I wasn't planning to make a movie, though the idea is certainly appealing. I wanted to record my tennis strokes.

Video isn't exactly new to tennis. Back in the 1970s, Vic Braden used to take high-speed videos of tennis players. He famously advocated that players use a very low toss for their serves much like Roscoe Tanner, the best server of his day. This was routinely ignored, especially in Europe, where the opposite occurred: extremely high ball tosses. Braden probably popularized the notion of wrist pronation vs. wrist snap, and that has been far more influential than the low ball toss.

But Braden had an expensive tennis facility and an expert making those videos, so it meant the average player couldn't look at his own strokes. You needed two things: low-cost camcorders and video software to slow down the action. Without being able to slow down your stroke, it's hard to notice where problems occur. While I don't have the benefit of high-speed high-def cameras, I don't really need them.

I use a mini-DV camera which is good enough (though not HD), and I use IMovie '09 to slow down the video. That is also good enough for me.

I first started modifying my forehand in probably October of 2007. At the time, I chose to model Novak Djokovic. I don't even recall why Djokovic, other than he was a rising star and that he was pretty funny. You have to understand that Djokovic had a huge breakout year in 2007. He literally came from nowhere and jumped to number 3. While people were distracted by epic Nadal-Federer finals, few noticed that, by Wimbledon, Djokovic had made his second consecutive semifinals, essentially matching Federer and Nadal, and made his first US Open final that same year.



The one problem with Djokovic's forehand, at least, at the time I decided to stop using his forehand as a model, was the following. Pause the above video. Notice that Novak's racquet face points behind him to the back "fence" (a wall, in pro events). He then lowers the racquet face down so it points down the the ground behind him (pause at 0:13), then turns the racquet face to the right tilted somewhat downwards (pause at 0:14), before pulling the racquet to contact.

To me, that seemed like a lot of excess motion, and I wanted a simpler model.

So I went to the forehand everyone said was the best, at least at the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and that was Roger Federer.



At the beginning of this video, Roger's racquet face points to his right. Contrast that with Djokovic, who brings the racquet behind him. In fact, this pointing to the right was something I had a hard time doing because my body awareness wasn't so good. By body awareness, I mean I would point my arm in one direction, but think it was pointing in some other direction. So I would probably think I was pointing to my right, and was actually pointing behind me.

How could I make such a huge mistake? One reason was simple. I wasn't looking. I was focusing on the ball, so when I stuck my racquet behind me, I didn't really know where it was. I could have asked someone, but it never occurred to me that my mental model of where my arm was and reality diverged so much.

Video really helped me see this.

Now, it turns out, Federer also has some motions that add some complexity to his forehand.

Pause at 0:04, and you see his racquet face pointed face down, and the tip of his racquet head pointed to his right. If you were take an overhead view, lined up so the baseline is "west-east" and Roger is hitting "south", then his racquet face initially points west, the moves north, and indeed a little north-east.

By the time it's pointing north-east, (pause at 0:08), the racquet face points right and slightly down. This is the common racquet orientation for pretty much every modern player, and occurs when they are about to accelerate the racquet head to contact. Up to that point, players do all sorts of things. I would say, at least for the better players I see on public courts, that the Djokovic model seems the most popular. Why? I don't know.

I discovered, after watching videos of myself, that I kept my racquet face down a lot, that is, almost the entire swing to contact. I only open the face right when I hit it, but otherwise, it stays closed.

There were several reasons, but one huge reason was because I feed the ball too close to my body. Feeding yourself the ball means to drop the ball and hit it. Most people drop it near their right foot, and that it simply too close to the body. It should be tossed maybe 3 feet to your right. You want your arm to be out far to the right so it gets more of a full extension.

The other reason was the way I oriented my wrist. It's taken maybe 10 months to begin to train myself not to close my racquet face and to know which orientation my wrist should be at.

Ultimately, that became the reason I abandoned the Federer forehand. Federer closes his racquet face, then points it to the right. Since I couldn't tell whether I was closing my racquet face or not (despite thinking I was pointing it to the right, often numerous times), I felt trying to imitate Federer that closely was going to confuse me.

At that point, I looked to a different model, which was probably the end of 2008, maybe around October or November. I had been trying the Federer forehand since probably March, or before I even started to video myself in May of 2008.

2008 turned out to be a big year for several players: Gilles Simon was ranked around 20 and moved to around 6 or 7 (but has slipped some since a big move to the top 10), Juan Martin del Potro's ascendancy has been more impressive, getting into the top 10 as well, and finally Andy Murray who started the year around 6, and moved up to a solid number 4, threatening to go to 3.

If you were to ask the experts looking at Murray's game what his best stroke was, well, they'd probably not point to his forehand. Indeed, his backhand is considered his stronger side. Still, that's just a relative comparison. That is, it treats his forehand and backhand separately. If you were to rank the top forehands, Murray's would be behind Federer, Djokovic, Verdasco, Gonzalez, probably Blake. It depends on what you think is important in a forehand. If you were to rank backhands, Murray might be 3 behind Nadal and Djokovic. Even so, most pros, have better forehands than backhands. One might argue this is true even for a player with as impressive a one-handed backhand as Richard Gasquet. Few people rip winners regularly from their backhands.



This is probably the best slow motion video of Andy Murray's forehand, despite the rather low quality of the video itself. It's about the only one that is shown from Andy's right, which you almost never see. Most videos are taken from the front, which is fine, but not to illustrate what I want to show.

In particular, since this video is from Andy's right, then when his racquet face points right, then it points to the camera. Pay attention to the entire swing path.

Starting at 0:12 to 0:17, the racquet face points right (i.e. to the camera, i.e., to you, the viewer) which is pretty much the start of his motion to just the instant before contact where he then, out of necessity (like every pro), points the racquet face to the ball.

Nowhere in that stroke does Murray point his racquet face down, which, if you recall from the earlier on, was my problem. I would close my face until just before impact.

Despite knowing this, it took a long time to understand several things. First, I had a tendency to point the racquet face behind me, a la Djokovic. I also had a huge looping motion behind me. I noticed most pros don't loop that big. They have a much milder motion that, in particular, doesn't get behind them.

I should say most male pros. Women pros, by and large, do get their racquet behind them, and hit it like some folks hit a one-handed backhand. There's only one male pro I know of that hits like that, which is Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy.



Watch at 2:16 (it's sad how bad Youtube video quality is--you can't watch tennis at all unless it's at least high quality, which is why it's nice that Youtube finally allowed better quality video to be uploaded). Chardy takes his racquet so that it is behind him (racquet face points to back fence), but unlike Djokovic, who has the racquet tip pointed up, Chardy's racquet tip points to the left. Most women pros (Safina, Sharapova, Ivanovic, etc) do this, but most male pros don't.

Think of your chest as a large infinite plane, much like the ones they teach in you in geometry. A plane divides 3-space into "half", which can be loosely termed as the half-space in front of you, and the half-space behind you. Now imagine your chest points to the right fence, thus you are sideways, relative to the net. This is the position you'd be in setting up for a righty forehand.

Most male pros keep their racquet head in the front half. Women pros, on the other hand, let the racquet head get behind them. This is so they can get a longer swing path. It mimics a one-handed backhand where the racquet face also gets behind you, but applies the same idea to the forehand. Men, perhaps needing less time to hit because they are physically stronger, don't do this.

In particular, if you watch the wrist and arm, it tends to go roughly straight back and drop and then the whole body rotates counter-clockwise. This would be much easier to illustrate if I had a video, but I don't.

To illustrate, imagine you are doing jumping jacks. Focus on your right arm. Jumping jacks have you swing your right arm at the plane of your torso. Basically, your racquet goes from being in front of you as you prepare to hit, to being maybe 45 degress pointing up in a jumping jack motion, to dropping your arm so it is maybe waist height (this is the part of the jumping jack motion where the arm descends down).

Notice the arm stays in that plane. My tendency was to pull my arm behind this plane and make my wrist move behind this plane in a loop motion.

OK, I'm being highly technical here. Clearly, women hit something like that, so why don't I?

Several reasons. One is silly. I'm a guy, I want to hit like other guy pros. Two, male pros have shorter strokes and so I think that's important so I don't get caught too late. Male pros already set up much quicker than I do, so they can afford to have longish stroke paths. Women pros are also quicker than me.

Three, I want to make my body do what my mind is telling it to do. And that's really the biggest reason. The change I'm making may not improve my forehand much, but the process by which I get there will help me think about how I do things, how I get my body to make a certain motion. I didn't expect it to take me a year to master. It's still a work in progress, but I am slowly getting closer to what I want to do.

One key is that I can shadow-stroke the way I want to hit. Shadow-stroking is where you hit the ball without the ball. You would think that motion is enough. If I can shadow stroke, I can hit the ball that same way.

Untrue.

When I shadow-stroke, there's no ball. I don't react to a ball, so I can focus entirely on the swing. But once there's a ball, I have to react so I can hit the ball, and then muscle memory kicks in to try to adjust the swing to hit the ball, and that's where my problems come in. You just have to swing over and over to train the body not to do what it's been doing for a long time.

Now, a year is a pretty long time to obsess over hitting a forehand, especially since the motion isn't coming to me that quickly. But I enjoy the process of getting there. If it came easily, I would have missed too many other things, in particular, a better awareness of what my body is doing. That's been a weirdly valuable lesson.

Weird, only because it's not that critical for me to know what my body is doing when it hits a tennis ball, but valuable because I realize what I thought I was doing and what I do are different things, and that's an interesting lesson, that might apply to less physical activities.

Right now, the motion is kinda there, but I still take my racquet back too much, so I am trying to reduce that motion. If I were to have done this motion 6 months ago, I would have told you I am not even pointing my racquet behind me, but it's off to my right. I would have been wrong. That goes to show you how off my perception was.

So I still need to practice. I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that a month more and I'll have it close to where I want it, but then I've been trying this for many months already, so if it's longer, I won't be surprised.

Tennis Aha

I was looking at some slow motion video of Andy Murray, world number 4 ranked player.

Slow motion video has to be the biggest aid to analyzing the way the pros hit. It's really changed how I look at strokes. Without slowmo, you can't see what's going on. It's too fast.

In tennis, there are two main theories of hitting a forehand. One is called the straight arm forehand. Federer and Nadal use this as does Fernando Verdasco. The idea is you hit the ball with a straight arm. To get the correct angle, however, your arm sticks out significantly to the right and in front of you.

The alternative is the double-bend forehand. Basically, your elbow is closer to your body, and there is a 120 degree bend between the upper arm and the forearm. This allows the forearm to be mostly parallel to the ground. To get a similar effect with the straight arm, you need to have your arm way, way out.

Here's the insight. It's much easier to get the racquet face to point right if the arm is parallel to the ground as opposed to being nearly perpendicular. The double bend facilitates this. The forearm is nearly parallel to the ground, and keeping the racquet face pointed correct is not so bad.

Now all I have to do is try this out on the court.

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.

Clash of the Titans

The Australian Open is a funny event. Held in January where folks in the US and Europe are in the middle of winter, the Australian Open is held in Melbourne in the blazing sun. More than any of the other Grand Slam events of tennis (the French, Wimbledon, the US Open), the Australian Open (AO, for short) has surprise finalists.

Last year, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga came out of nowhere to reach the final beating Rafael Nadal en route, then the world number 2. The year before, Fernando Gonzalez of Chile made the finals. Players like Rainer Schuettler, Arnaud Clement, Thomas Johannson (who won), Marcos Baghdatis have reached the finals in recent years. If these names don't exactly roll of your tongue, no worries, mate, it's typical of the AO.

Men's tennis is usually a game of the young. The best players often blossom by 18 or 19 if not younger. Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17. Mats Wilander won the French at 17 too. Pete Sampras won the US Open at 19. Rarely does a player who has been toiling on the tour blossom at 25. The exceptions are maybe someone like James Blake who, at 28, plays as well as he ever has. He's had a slow rise to top 10 and it's more a testament to his physical prowess than anything else.

So how did Fernando Verdasco suddenly play so well at 25? How did he push world number 1 Rafael Nadal, a guy who he had never beaten to 5 scintillating sets?

Although Nadal and Federer are known to be some of the best hitters in the game, it's rarely pointed out how mentally tough they are. Nadal, in particular, rarely has bad patches where he gets impatient and just lashes out. He's a disciplined player. What helps is just how tenacious he is. He continues to fight, to hit great shots, to run down balls that you don't think he will. As Verdasco said in the interview afterwards, Nadal makes you win the point several times.

Both players, however, are mentally tough and it explains why they are numbers 1 and 2 in the world. They rarely have bad lapses, which means they are always competitive.

There are players that hit a ton. Players like Tomas Berdych, who pushed Federer to 5 sets, or Ernests Gulbis, or even Fernando Verdasco. These players often lack in the mental toughness department. They get frustrated or nervous when they get down. They can't sustain a level of excellence it takes to win at the very top.

In principle, that's good for players like Verdasco. Verdasco suffered from several things that prevented him from moving to the top. First, his serve wasn't so good, especially his second serve. Part of that was nerves. He played an awful Davis Cup match that he won. Good that he won. Awful in that he was so nervous, he made lots of bad shots. He was only saved by his opponent playing just as bad.

Second was fitness. Verdasco's generally pretty fit, but to play at the best levels in tennis, you must be able to run all day. It means that today's players are less likely to have the longevity of players from the past where running shots down was not as important to the game as it is today. Almost every top player works very hard on speed and agility drills and fitness to run hours, especially in a tournament as hot as the Australian Open.

Most people felt, for a variety of reasons, that Nadal would win over Verdasco. The reasons were simple. Nadal had never lost to Verdasco. Nadal had had easy wins up to this point. Some felt Verdasco was just a weaker version of Nadal and Nadal simply did everything better.

I, however, did not think that. First, Verdasco's serve looked good against Murray and Tsonga, his two previous opponents prior to playing Nadal. The serve is key. With it, you win cheap points. Nadal returns well, but you can never underestimate getting a few free points off serve.

Second, Verdasco hits pretty hard. He ran both Murray and Tsonga ragged with his power hitting. Indeed, once he played Nadal, he hit nearly 100 winners in the match. That power works, even against Nadal. I felt his pace would help out.

Third, he beat Tsonga. It's one thing to upset a top player like Andy Murray. The great Roger Federer beat Pete Sampras in an early round at Wimbledon only to lose to Tim Henman in the next round. Time and again, a top player is upset by a lower ranked player and that lower ranked player bows out meekly to his next opponent.

This didn't happen to Verdasco. If anything, he looked more impressive against Tsonga, who was laboring in the heat and humidity to keep up with Verdasco.

It turned out to be more than correct. Verdasco opened up with a first set win in a tiebreak where he took an early lead. Basically, neither player had a whiff of a break point.

In the second set, Nadal had one break to win 6-4, and people felt, well, Nadal's going to roll. Indeed, Nadal broke Verdasco. But Verdasco broke back at love. Then Nadal broke again. And here's the surprise. Verdasco broke back again. They stayed even til the tiebreak where Verdasco made a few errors and Nadal took the tiebreak.

With a two sets to one lead, conventional wisdom says the better player would then take over and win the fourth set, often easily. The weaker player generally concedes he's given the best he's got, so that is that. The better player gains confidence, begins to hit more freely.

Except things didn't go as planned. The fourth set, which I saw none of, went to a tiebreak and Verdasco took that set rather unexpectedly.

In the fifth set, Nadal served first. Normally, this is an advantage. It means, once you get close to the end of the set, that a break by the player serving first automatically wins the set. A break by the trailing player means the leading player still has a chance to break back and tie.

Verdasco struggled to hold serve to 4-all. After ekeing out that win, he reached 0-30 on Nadal's serve and even got a look at a second serve which he promptly dumped into the net. 3 points later and Nadal had held serve and it was 5-4.

At this point, Verdasco serves and gets to 0-40 after some errors and a double fault. He then plays two aggressive points at net to get to 30-40. He misses the first serve, then, the second serve, well, it goes short. People said he choked. He served four double faults the entire match, two in the final game, and one at match point.

Will Verdasco take this victory as a stepping stone to a better future? Only time will tell. His game and mental resolve seem much better and if he can continue to play like this, he can be a solid top ten player.

Not bad for a guy of 25.

The Pendulum Theory

I was at the tennis wall today trying to hit my backhand and finding, wow, couldn't seem to do it. A tennis wall, for those who are curious, is merely a wall that is very tall (one hopes) and has a line painted for the net (one hopes). It is used in place of hitting with another person or a ball machine. There aren't many good walls around, but I live near one. Hitting against the wall has many problems, but the one advantage it has is it's not a person. Therefore, you don't have to worry about irritating the person as you practice a shot yet again. You have time to sit, reflect, contemplate.

My purpose for being at the wall today was to work on my backhand. Although it may not be that obvious, there's more than one way to hold a tennis racquet. If you were to grab a racquet as it lies flat down, palm first, you would be holding it in a semi-Western grip (most likely). If the racquet were sideways so it was sitting on the edge and you put your palm on top of the racquet, then that would be an Eastern backhand grip.

I had been using a grip called the Continental grip, not so much because I wanted to use that grip on my backhand but because I was already using it for sliced backhands (this is where you hit a ball with underspin) and volleys (balls hit without bouncing, very close to the net).

I looked at a video Saturday night and either misunderstood it (very possible) or disagreed with the way they suggested I hold the racquet which might be described as a Western backhand grip. This grip is so rarely used for the backhand (sometimes it's called an extreme Eastern grip) that the name Western backhand is not that enlightening.

The Western backhand grip is actually a Eastern forehand grip flipped over to be used as a backhand grip. I realized I was holding it roughly in this style, and it felt awkward.

Once I figured out how to hold an Eastern backhand grip, I began fiddling with how my thumb should be placed. A racquet grip is usually just small enough that the thumb and index finger jockey for the same space. There are several ways to deal with it, and eventually I figured out how it is (roughly) done by players like Federer and Gasquet.

Anyway, the point is, I had changed my backhand grip and I wanted to try it out on court. The problem was that it felt awkward. Worse still, I was gripping it way too tight. Tennis is about staying relaxed, so I knew I had to loosen the grip some more. But I couldn't swing the racquet properly in a mini-tennis drill against the wall. It just felt wrong and I had no consistency.

Mini-tennis is when you hit tennis between the service line. The court has several lines. The two far lines parallel to the net are called the baselines. Halfway between the net and the baseline is the service line. If you play between the service lines, that's mini tennis.

Mini-tennis is meant to teach you to hit very softly while still practicing good technique. The idea is if you can hit the ball this softly with good technique then you should be able to hit faster balls with good technique.

I knew one problem was that I wasn't taking my racquet back enough. So I recalled some lesson that suggested that, and it helped a little. Now today was a sunny day, and on sunny days, I can see my shadow on the ground, which is a poor man's mirror. The shadow lets me see what I am doing in enough detail that it provides useful feedback.

So I began swinging the racquet a bit like a pendumlum. Back, forth, flipping my wrist at the nadir of the pendulum swing, so that when the racquet was reached the apex on my left side, the back of the racquet (where I'd hit my backhand) was facing forward (away from me), and when the reached the apex on my right side, the other face of the racquet (where I would hit a forehand with) was facing forward (away from me).

I figured this rhythm of going back and forth in this manner would help my mini-tennis drill. I would swing forward to the wall as part of the pendulum, then as the ball went to the wall, I would start to swing the racquet back the other direction. That's the pendulum in the other direction.

I had just watched a presentation at TED, an organization that invites smart, engaging speakers to talk about interesting topics to other smart, engaged audience members. In this talk, Steven Strogatz talks about how, despite the increase in entropy (i.e., disorder), there is also a strong tendency towards order or synchronization.

To demonstrate this idea, he took two tiny metronomes, two bottles, a pamphlet, and placed the two metronomes on top. Although they were out of sync to begin with, the motion of the metronomes were synchronized by the surface. Here's an example with five metronomes getting synced up.

Anyway, that thought was in the back of my mind. The body wants to synchronize against something, and this pendulum idea would create that synchronization.

To be fair, I do have some idea how to hit a backhand. I don't know if this idea would work out that well for someone completely new to tennis who hasn't built up a lot of the muscle memory of hitting a backhand.

I decided to apply this to the forehand. However, with my forehand, I wanted to work my body more into the shot.

Too often, beginners in tennis think of tennis as a shot that is hit by the arm. They don't know how to get the body involved more. The reason you want the body to be involved more is momentum, and that of a physics variety. Momentum is mass times velocity. When you swing the arm, you may have great velocity, but you don't have great mass since the arm isn't very massive.

Now I've tried to figure out ways to get the body more into the shot, and it's been partly successful, though awkward too. My shots look very stiff, and tennis is, as I've mentioned before, about staying relaxed.

One way to stay relaxed is to do twists. To get an idea of this, put your feet about shoulder width apart. Put your hands on your hips. Rotate your shoulders and hips so that you face to the left. To do this comfortably, when you face left, you should lift your right heel up so that only the point of the right toe is touching the ground. The right foot should have rotate some so that the shoelaces point left.

Then, twist so you shoulders and hips cause you to face to your right. Your right foot goes from being on tip to being flat. Your left foot comes up on tip. Just go back and forth several times. That provides the pendumlum action.

Now add the racquet to this. As you rotate right (for a right hander) get the racquet to point straight back. As you rotate left, hit a windshield wiper motion. The whole body is involved in this motion. The shoulders, the hips, the feet, and the racquet. By practicing this pendulum motion, you are incorporating your body into the shot and it's done at a nice relaxed, repeatable fashion.

And that's my pendulum theory of tennis.

Backhand Thoughts

What's the difference between a blog and a webcam? Both are products of an Internet age, an age where privacy has given way to openness and sharing. Information, such as it is, is disseminated to those who care enough to pay attention.

The difference is a blog is a diary (at best). It is (or should be) an introspective perspective. It is a person talking about themselves, so you gain insight into how they think, how they feel, what's most important to them right at that moment. It is, by its nature, biased to the person presenting the information. Certain facts may be left out either by choice or lack of omniscient knowledge.

The webcam, were it situated in the same person's room, is a piece of technology that allows a viewer to see someone's life. Without sound, the day to day movements are broadcast and chronicled by those who choose to observe. Intention is lost. Thought process is lost. What seems like a person lying in repose on his bed may be someone wallowing in the depths of depression or deep in philosophic thought. The webcam reveals all and yet reveals nothing.

So it can be said of learning tennis. The tools that present itself is the equivalent of the webcam. It is the video recording of tennis professionals. It offers insight into how they do what they do. You can observe, and inspect, and scrutinize. But is it enough? Do you see enough? You can't feel what the players feel. How much information are you getting?

Lately, I've been thinking about the backhand again, and in particular, the one-handed backhand. This stroke seems sufficiently different from the two hander that the thought process doesn't seem the same.

It's very easy to perceive the one-hander has a motion that is initiated by the arm. The arm is the centerpiece in the action. For the casual observer, this feels very true. The arm is the most active part of the stroke.

And yet this hides the fact that it's better to think of the stroke from the shoulders and from the chest. Let it initiate the action. Let it be the source of the movement. By focusing on that part of your body, you involve the torso, so often called, the core, into the shot and let the arm do less work and therefore get less tired. The core, once involved, can assist the shot by providing mass.

Tennis is a game of momentum, but not the kind sportscasters talk about. It's not which team is playing well at the moment and capitalizing on play after play. It is momentum of the physics variety. Mass times velocity. The more you can incorporate the core, a difficult task because the human body isn't rigid, and even if it were rigid, it wouldn't help because the other component, velocity would be lost, the more mass comes to bear.

It is a delicate dance your body must go through, at once optimizing speed by letting your body be limber enough not to slow you down, and yet also working as a whole, so that mass is your friend.

If you understand how to initiate the action with the core, then you can decrease the amount of arm you need. This is a mistake many players make because they choose to re-invent the wheel. But what choice do they have? The information is not readily available. When you learn tennis, you often start from scratch, and despite the ubiquity of the Web and access to information, there's no easy way to find a definitive answer.

It's taken me a while to fully appreciate this, and only because I read it in a forum where someone whose life has mostly been devoted to teaching tennis made the point clear. The torso initiates the one-handed backhand and for much of the hitting, the arm is just along for the ride. It does, of course, play an increasingly important role the closer you get to actually hitting the ball, but again, that interplay between torso and arm, when does one end, and the other begin?

I use words when a visual would be helpful, something that, in effect combines the blog and the webcam. The two together offering not only insight, but a visual illustration.

Given the time challenges of making a video, I will now use words, as paltry a substitute as this may be, like Velveeta for Brie, a travesty, but the best we can do under the circumstances.

Stand in the ready position, and form a U with your upper arm making one side of the U, the forearm the bottom part of the U, and the racquet pointing up, the other side of the U. Turn your body to the left, enough so that eventually your back begins to point to the net.

Using your left arm, lift the racquet so your forearm eventually gets to shoulder height. Use your left hand to lower the racquet behind you, until the racquet head points to the right side of the court (were you facing the fence, it would be to your left). The racquet is nearly completely behind you from the perspective of your opponent.

Rotate your body so the racquet travels 180 degrees around and strike the ball, then lift your arm up as if you are holding a torch for the Olympics way up high.

There are other factors to consider. How high is the ball? If it's low, you bend your knee more and stay down more. If it's high, you lift up your leg and get on your tiptoes. Different situations demand different setup.

This is what makes tennis challenging. There are many situations to take care of under the name "backhand". This is why hitting thousands of balls is needed, so the body learns how to cope with such variety. But behind all of that is the basis for the shot, the skeletal framework by which all variation sprouts from. And this is what you often need in sage advice so you make the move that the pros do, not the one that is easy to see from the eye, but the one that is felt from within.

Musings on Tennis

I look at India and find their fanatical devotion to cricket a contrast to the devotion of Americans to sports. Americans love their sports, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of passionate watchers who spend their weekends perched on sofas to watch groan men dressed in modern day gladiatorial armor, run as fast as they can to hit someone as hard as they can. And fans can be mesmerized at this, reeling off stats, exclaiming how sick a particular play was, lamenting the bone-headed play.

Still, it feels like the love of cricket is pervasive throughout India, especially among men, though women certainly enjoy it, perhaps as support of their men, much like the wives that make the trek with their husbands to a weekend college football game, even as they can hardly explain the rules of the game. They know enough to see a big play or a touchdown, and can celebrate those moments.

This pervasive love of cricket seems to stem from the lack of what I call the jock mentality. The jock culture in the US is where the athletes are heroes and make fun, that is deride those that lack athletic skills. Such kids often seek solace in geekier pleasures, whether it be computers or anime. Perhaps the love of Japanese culture is an indirect indictment of the culture of America. Anime lovers envision a world that is different from the one they grew up in and reject traditional American culture.

Indeed, such kids, having grown up with jocks have an antipathy to sports. They don't care about it, they don't watch it. Perhaps, at a minimum, they might do something that's not quite sports, like ballroom dancing, or something that doesn't involve team, such as running or hiking or biking. These pursuits are at least healthy and still reject sports as whole.

Indians don't seem to have this issue. Maybe kids are magnanimous when it comes to cricket. No matter how poorly you play, you'll be allowed to play and enjoy it. The key is having fun, and not making fun of those who play badly. You just need a few people who are willing to defend those that aren't skilled.

Or maybe it's how the whole country shuts down when an important cricket match is on, so playing cricket equates to getting out of work, so even if you don't care about cricket deeply, you like the idea that it means a respite from the daily grind.

I can't say, while I grew up, that I recognized the jock culture in our school. Perhaps it was there, but because of the way our school segregated the smart folks from the more academically challenged, I didn't encounter those folks every day.

Tennis had its heyday in the US during the 1970s. Not only did Americans dominate the 1970s with players like Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, and John McEnroe, but there were rivalries with players from other countries, like Martina Navratilova (who became naturalized) and Bjorn Borg.

Tennis was driven in popularity during the height of the modern women's lib movement, a movement that has been squelched by a brilliant if evil counterreply by Republicans who equate feminism with lesbianism, an accusation that seems to work just as well on women, if not more so, than men. During the time, Bobby Riggs, in his 50s, and once a top player in men's tennis, challenged then, number 1, Margaret Court to a match. With his dazzling array of spins and slices, and his trash talking, poor Margaret Court got completely rattled and lost easily.

Billie Jean King, then a leader for women's tennis, knew she had no choice but to play Riggs. She played him smart, and didn't allow Riggs tactics to rattle her, and it gave such a lift to women's sports that its repercussions are felt to this day.

And it boosted the popularity of tennis like no event since Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan got whacked on the knee by hooligans hired by rival Tonya Harding in a soap opera that was too weird to be true, and yet was true.

Tennis managed a resurgence of sorts as McEnroe and Connors were finishing up their last hurrahs in the early 90s, to be replaced by the greatest group of Americans to play in quite a while. This group was lead by Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras but included Todd Martin, Michael Chang, and Jim Courier.

During this whole period, I'd go out and play tennis occasionally. The height of my tennis playing was from 1989 to maybe the mid 1990s. In those days, the best you could do to learn to play tennis better, short of taking lessons, was simply to play more. There was no Internet. The books that were out there were simplistic.

Even when the web came out, there was no YouTube. YouTube and its brethren have become a kind of second web revolution. Sure YouTube contributes a ton of crap to the general viewer, and occasionally, viral videos spread like wildfire in a dry California summer, with no apparent rhyme or reason. From the deeply baritone singing of Chocolate Rain, to the desperate pleadings to "leave Britney alone", to Charlie, the laughing baby that bites the finger of his older brother.

In all of that, you can find pretty much lessons on anything. Want to learn how to parallel park? Watch YouTube. Want to cook? Do the same? For anything you could possibly want to learn, there's some chance someone put videos up on YouTube. The quality may not be good, but it's often there.

This has lead to a minor revolution of tennis. Perhaps it's affected other sports, but I can't say for sure because I simply don't care enough about those sports to comment.

In particular, YouTube, and various pay sites have been the source of many slow motion videos of professional players giving tools to the net-savvy tennis player to inspect how the best hit tennis balls.

Although I've seen some videos dozens of times now, there are always small details that I'm missing. And there are details that are not readily visible to the eye such as a waist rotation.

I contrast playing tennis with racquetball. Racquetball is played indoors in a large room. The goal is to eventually have the ball hit the front wall. Once it does that, the opponent must also hit the front wall before the ball bounces twice. Now, you don't have to hit directly to the front wall. It can hit the side wall or ceiling or back wall first, but it must eventually make it to the front wall without hitting the ground.

Since the front wall is huge, and swinging hard or high will typically get you to the front wall, then you can play the sport with bad technique. Nearly anything you do is good enough. That moves the sport away from technique and more to strategy with the goal of trying to hit the ball so your opponent can't run it down. Because the penalty of bad technique is low, there's little incentive to improve.

Ah, but what is technique? Technique, at least as it applies to hitting sports, is how you hit. What are the mechanics of what you do to swing a racquet to hit the ball. The better your technique, the more power you get, the more accuracy, with less effort.

The key to tennis is understanding some physics. Not a lot, mind you, but a little. In physics, momentum is mass times velocity. Physics also says momentum is conserved. Though it's simplistic, this says that the momentum of one mass can be transferred to the momentum of another mass. Thus, the mass times velocity of a player hitting a ball is translated to the mass times velocity of the ball being struck.

There are two basic ways to make a ball go faster. Hit faster or hit with more mass. Now you might imagine there's no way to hit with more mass. The racquet weighs what it does. However, if you merely swing with your arm, something that seems obvious in tennis, then you will only have the mass of your arm plus the racquet behind the ball.

If you can involve your body more, that is use your torso and your legs, you can increase the mass. However, that requires timing your body movements just right so you can bring that mass to bear. This is why diminutive Chinese women can hit harder than a muscle bound guy. It's not purely about muscle, it's about using the rest of your body to bring additional mass to the momentum equation.

Not to say swinging fast isn't also important, because it is. However, the faster you swing, the more likely that you are to swing incorrectly. It can take a great deal of time before you gain enough coordination to swing fast and swing accurately so you can take advantage of the other part of the momentum equation.

Much of this is simplistic explanation because the body, the racquet are all complex masses. They aren't simple balls of steel whose behavior can be explained simply in physics. As a player, you need to think about how your body moves until muscle memory ingrains it properly.

My strokes, now that I've seen them on video, are more rigid than most. This has lead to an awkwardness in my technique, so I've spent time observing the pros trying to find someone that I can emulate.

At first, this someone was Novak Djokovic. Ah, but his motion was a bit complex. So I sought a simpler model. Roger Federer. But as it turns out, although his motion was simpler, it still had a hitch (which I won't go into). Finally, I settled on Andy Murray, world number 4, who has a simple motion I like and have been trying in the last month or so to imitate.

They say the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the proof is in the video camera. With that, I can see what I am doing and see how close I am to achieving what I want to do. If I had full time to devote to this, I might be able to get there much quicker, but alas, I have to make money to make it possible for me to pursue this lark.

As I've watched the pros and read more, I see more and more. It just takes a while to translate that to my own game.

I don't know that there is quite the equivalent of this in the intellectual world. You can't see someone thinking so much, but you can observe how someone hits a ball. And while this makes the task of imitation easier than imitating a mental genius, it is still, by no means, easy.

These days, I've been working on the beginning part of hitting a ball. This is called the takeback, or at least, I call it that.

You can break down hitting the forehand into about four parts. First is the ready position. This is a stance you take as you wait for the ball. Usually you hold the racquet grip with the right hand, the throat of the racquet with the left. As soon as you identify that it is coming to your forehand, you rotate your body to the right and eventually drop the racquet so it points to the back fence. This is called the takeback.

The takeback I am imitating requires that I lift my elbow up to shoulder height, have my upper arm and forearm at 90 degrees, causing my racquet to point up to the sky. The racquet face is pointing to the right. Then, I drop my forearm so my arm is more or less straight, all the while the racquet face points to the right.

The motion from the racquet being fully back to the moment the racquet hits the ball is called the swing-forward. Or at leas, that's what I call it. During this phase, I rotate my body to the left, hit the ball. My shoulders should be square on, that is parallel to the net or a little left.

The rest is follow-through. It is from the point of contact until the racquet is wrapped over on my left side. I continue to rotate left, arc my right arm from right to left, bend at the elbow, and let the racquet go to the left of my body.

Although the ball has long since gone, the racquet head speed being propelled by a loosely relaxed arm is so quick that the arm must continue to move before it can properly decelerate. A long follow-through means your arm doesn't slow down and cause the ball to likewise slow down. It provides a minimum speed.

When I focus on my tennis, I invariably pay the most attention to the takeback, mostly because that starts the motion up. I have spent 6 months working on that part, and it's been a long journey.

So why do I do it? I don't have a good answer for that. I believe it's a challenge between my mind and my body. I feel I can make my body do a certain thing if I work at it long enough. It's strange to think of the mind and body as adversaries. Certainly without the body going on its merry way and doing what it does without interference from the mind, we wouldn't live. And yet, the mind feels, to some extent, that it can make the body do what it wants.

That's what I feel too. I know it takes a while for the body to listen, so I try to be patient.

Perhaps it's like Buddhist monks who learn to slow their heart rates or chop bricks. If your mind really wants to do it, it can. Many people use their mind for mental pursuits such as solving equations. But it can also be used for physical pursuits.

The funny thing is the mind initially dictates what is to be done, but to get good, eventually the body must react without mental interference. The body simply knows what to do. It has ingrained its responses, and the mind directs it minimally. It is like the parent to the child.

So that's where things stand. An ongoing journey to tennis enlightenment.

More Links

Some more random links:

• Hot Spicy Fish Soup recipe (Korean)
  
• Croatians taunt English team with doughnuts
  
• Nerdy Transformer Fan
  
• White Chicken Chili recipe
  
• Learn to hit the Federer Forehand
  
• Flip4Mac ScreenFlow (screen capture software)
  
• Federer hits forehand
  
• Mysterious DNA survives eons
  
• Tennis courts in Greenbelt
  
• Photoshop basics
  
• Tire Gauge Solution
  
• Learn Ruby on Rails from Scratch
  
• Judo guy
  
• Demand NAS
  
• Scott Blanksteen's photos
  
• Rails on the Mac
  
• Stanford Movie Theatre Guide
  
• Flylady (staying neat)
  
• Interesting Billfolds
  
• Many ways to tie shoelaces
  
• Hancock Pic
  

Learning Tennis

Oh so impatient are you!

You look at the title of this blog and your eyes avert away! Why is that? Was there some incident in your youth where you gazed at some dumb jock (and boy were they dumb!) who only cared about football or basketball but lacked the intellect to calculate the roots of a quadratic equation, that lacked the intellect to understand the causes of the Civil War, that laughably dreamed of a pro career where they would make money, a dream so improbable that perhaps ignorance of math was the only thing that sustained such folly, a folly as silly as Seward's? (You betcha!)

Tennis is one of the sports that you can, if you want, try to learn on your own. You can read books, you can have friends teach you, you can visit the courts frequently, or hit against the wall, you can admire the pros.

Even if you have a powerful intellect, one that reasons, one that thinks, until recently, until the Web, you really lacked the information you needed to play tennis well. You could, I suppose, record stuff on a VCR, if anyone has those gadgets any more, and play and replay and hit slowmo and hope to glean the mysteries of how to hit a forehand or a backhand, how to hit with spin.

Even with the Web as your ally, powerful search engines to narrow your inquiries, how do you interpret what you see. You want to run what is the equivalent of a physical diff.

What is a diff? In computer world, you often want to see the changes made to a text file, typically a computer program you wrote, but it could be a story you wrote in a creative writing course. A diff is a way to represent what was and what is. It looks a touch technical, and to the casual eye it is. The main lesson to draw is it summarizes what changed before to make it what it is now.

A physical diff then is the difference, in some general way, between the way your body does something and the way someone who does it "right" (as there are more definitions of right than we care about) does it. Because there are many definitions of right, we want to abstract one level up to point out what are the basic differences.

A diff of two text files, two programs, or two variations of the same story you've been writing is very exact. It's easy to tell the exact changes made. The kind of diff I'm talking about is much more akin to the difference between you and Hemingway, you and Shakespeare, indeed, you and any good writer. That level of abstraction is hard to capture in writing, but somewhat, though not wholly, easier in sports.

We can look at the general structure of how someone hits. They move their arm this way. Their wrist is this way. Their shoulders are that way. This is the sequence of things that happen.

We can learn by watching and imitating. But you may fail to see! You may not see all that there is to see. I didn't look at their legs! Was that important? Was that hop necessary? Why did they make this motion here, but not there? I don't get it!

The nice thing about tennis is that there are a handful of things to master, but you have to spend a lot of time getting the body acclimated to those motions.

But when it comes to learning something else, something useful, something like programming, there's far less to tell the would be programmer. Why is that? Admittedly, tennis has been with us for over a century. The knowledge we've gain about tennis has proceeded by leaps and bounds and is now accessible in a way never seen before until very recently. There are ways to look at our own game and analyze it.

But programming? Much younger. Still immature. And while people seem to know how to program just as people seem to know how to play video games, we don't yet know why. We don't have a good theory as to why. It doesn't make sense to us.

In the things we find most important, the learning of "real stuff", we are at an impasse. How is it that we don't even know how to program, that each of us finds our own way their and that perseverance, more than anything seems the key to guide us to a nebulous solution to the problem at hand?

In that respect, tennis seems more reassuring. There are answers, even if we must sometimes pay for such answers. These answers may change. The answers today may not be the answers tomorrow. The game evolves. The solutions evolve. Programming too may evolve perhaps far more dramatically than anything that happens in tennis.

I suggest that even as I learn tennis because I find satisfaction in learning tennis, that you think about how you learn something--anything. How does that happen, and why is that so hard to convey to the next person?

Less is More

Try harder. Give it your all. Bring your "A" game.

In sports, more effort is supposed to yield better results. That, or desire. You have to want it more than your opponent. If you win, then you "wanted" it more. Occasionally, you hear "maybe I wanted it too much" in a loss, a statement uttered by Arthur Ashe in a loss to Ilie Nastase. Both were tennis players, by the way.

When people think effort, they think muscular power, strength. Whether I realized it or not, I would tense up when I hit shots. I would clench my muscles. This happened without me fully realizing it.

Recently, I hurt my wrist. It was shortly after I was frustrated the way I was playing and started to hit harder. But due to bad technique or something, I ended up hurting my wrist, and it's hurt for a few months. So about a month ago, I decided to go to a doctor and he recommended I see a physical therapist, which I did.

The physical therapy has helped with the pain in the wrist and shoulder some, but more importantly, it's helped me become more aware various muscles that are tight, and just how tight they were. It was easy enough to tell. I just put my hand on my muscles, and they would feel hard as rock. And I was told they shouldn't feel that way.

I took a tennis lesson recently, and the recent observation harped on an early observation. Relax! But what does relax mean? Now that I'd done some physical therapy and begun to realize how I was tensing up, I had some idea of what I needed to do to relax.

I felt I wasn't getting my arm in a proper position, that it felt kinda rubbery and unformed. However, I was hitting at least as hard as I was when I was tensed up trying to hit hard, and that was more energy and looked like more effort. Certainly, it felt
like more effort.

I wanted to go back to the tennis wall and try it again today.

Except today wasn't yesterday. Yesterday was warm enough that the weather was heading north of 70 which is unseasonably warm. Today snapped back to brisk chilly weather in the 40s. It was windy. But at least it was sunny.

It's weather like this that tests the resolve of sports nuts, those who venture outside because they have a desire to hit against the ball, and can't wait until the weather is simply warm enough. There's sun. There's an opportunity!

So I went up to the wall, probably a little over a day after I had last been there. Yesterday it had been nice and warm, but I had five or ten minutes before it was getting ready to sprinkle and managed a few more minutes after that before conceding, heading back to the car, and the rains coming down again.

Today, no rain, but wind, blustery wind. I put on a jacket on top of my rugby shirt. It would provide marginally better protection.

My first few shots lacked power. I would frame the ball. Framing the ball is when you hit the ball on the frame instead of the strings. This is generally ineffective.

As time passed, I sensed myself getting tense again, and then not hitting with power.

Relax. Do less. Do less.

Finally, I was getting some of the rhythm I had yesterday. Don't tense the muscle. Keep it relaxed. The pace was starting to flow. I was getting pace again, and I was pleased I hadn't forgotten what to do.

Although it was still cold, and I was beginning to feel it in my face, I still wanted to pick up balls, and strike them again, remembering the lack of tension.

After what was maybe 20 minutes, I decided I had enough. The cold was winning, the light waning, as sunset would soon dim the skies, the sun dropping, dropping, dropping below the horizon.

It's strange that people have discovered this rather contrary idea, that being more relaxed, not trying as hard, will allow the body to relax, and in relaxing, allow it to move faster, hit harder, with less effort. It sounds preposterous, like a diet that allows you to eat all the food you want, and still lose weight.

Still, it seems to work.

I continue to think Zen thoughts. Peaceful, relaxed thoughts.

So I can smack a fuzzy yellow ball.

Whack!

The Shadow Knows

I remember reading about an old time radio show called The Shadow. Old time radio shows, at least American ones, were influenced, I believe, by old time stage acting, which wasn't particularly good. People spoke a certain way that didn't feel at all natural. Acting was wooden, the characters boring. The Shadow fit this mold. The catch phrase was The Shadow Knows!.

If memory serves, it was a show about some guy who was trained in Asia, who could hide in shadows and track down bad guys. He used hypnotism to cloud men's minds.

Anyway, this is really an article about tennis. One big complaint I have about learning tennis is the lack of immediate feedback. I can't see how I hit right away. I have a camcorder to record my shots, but there's a delay as I rewind and watch it again.

I usually hit against a wall when I practice. My ideal setup would be a large (very large) television screen that sits about 10 feet above the ground, protected with some plexiglass like they have in racquetball courts. There would be a camera pointed at me, and so as I swing, I can watch myself as it happens. Another variation would be hitting against a mirror with a plexiglass protection. The problem with a mirror is that I would be rather far away so I'd find it hard to see details, but since I know what I'm looking for, it would be good enough.

Yesterday or so, I wanted to add one thing to my forehand that I've not been paying attention to lately. My non-dominant hand. Bad tennis players, which is nearly everyone you see playing (well, at least half), primarily use their dominant hand/arm to hit the ball. For a right hander, it is their right hand/arm. For now, let's assume I'm talking about righties.

If you watch a bad player, you generally see several problems with their game. First, they use their arm too much, and don't rotate their torso. One way to see this easily is to pay attention to their shoulders. The less it moves when hitting, the worse a player they are. I have this problem, so I end up using more arm than I should.

Second, they don't use any spin or if they do, it's underspin on both forehands and backhands. It's especially considered a weakness on the forehand to hit only slice forehands, although some crafty guys hit it to good effect.

Third, they have little follow-through. The follow-through is the part of the tennis stroke after the ball is hit. If you ever watch football, you'll see someone trying to tackle (knock down) the quarterback. Many times, the quarterback takes one or two steps and the defensive guy runs right past him. Why? Because that guy is so intent on running so fast and hard so he can really hit the quarterback hard. Pain is a part of football, and defensive guys are taught to inflict pain. The defensive guy can't stop himself because he has so much momentum built up.

Same thing with the follow through. When you are hitting the follow through, your arm should literally wrap around your waist or neck. That's how fast your swing should be. It's not intuitive because most players don't think about hitting the shot that hard that it would require the arm to be wrapped around themselves. But it's needed to provide pace.

The fourth mistake, and this is usually the one you see the most often, is failure to use the left hand. All pros and good players use their left hand. It's used to assist taking back the racquet, to help rotate the shoulders properly. The problem? It's really hard to use the left hand on the forehand.



Watch former number 1, Roger Federer's left hand. It's in front of his body. Typically players will do this, and then as they rotate their bodies, their left arm will pull into their body, as if they were doing a bicep curl with their left arm (but more lazy). The only major player to not do this is John McEnroe who had to have the laziest looking strokes ever. He just leaves his left arm hanging down and never does anything with it on his forehand. Otherwise, unless the player is rushed, they use their left hand to set up both their forehand, and if they hit a one-handed backhand or a slice.

The left hand is used primarily to get the racquet back quickly, but also as a way to change grips although most pros can change grips by simply flipping their racquet. This is why you see players with the nervous habit of spinning their racquets with one hand. They've learned to spin it and "catch" it with the right grip.

I've always found it difficult to use my left hand on my forehand. First, you end up moving your left hand about parallel to the baseline, basically pointing to the left, much like the picture with Federer above. This is, plainly put, awkward. Then, as the ball comes close, you are supposed to point to the ball with your left hand.

At this point, you are rotating your body very fast to the left, and like a figure skater spinning, you pull your left arm close to the body, typically left hand near your left nipple (there, I said it!) while the right arm and body twists fully around.

It's a complex motion, more complex than the backhand. You can see why so few recreational players learn to use their left hand.

However, even if you can't do all those things with your left hand, there is one thing most players can manage to do.



As you lift your racquet, you can hold it with the left hand as Federer does in the picture above. This makes it easier to control the racquet as you take it back.

I decided to add that part to my game today, after watching a Federer slow motion video. Here's such a video:



In particular, pay attention to his left hand. He keeps it on his racquet a long time before letting it go. He uses it to rotate the racquet and help rotate his shoulders (really, he rotates his shoulders to his right, which causes the arm and racquet to rotate right too).

Finally, due to watching some videos, I noticed I would take my racquet back so it pointed to the back fence. To be honest, this is not a real problem. So many players do this, including world number 3, Novak Djokovic, that I shouldn't worry if I do it.


But I don't want to do it!

I mean, Federer doesn't do it, so I'm trying not to do it. It's this d**n muscle memory. I have no problem shadow stroking the shot I want to hit (shadow stroking is when you swing without hitting a ball). But when it comes time to hit the ball, the muscles react a certain way, and voila, I find myself taking the racquet back a la Djokovic.

That's when I discovered something.

Oh yes.

Today was partly cloudy, but at an opportune moment, the sun peeked its head out. This cast a shadow of me on the court. I could then see myself hit by watching the shadow on the ground. I do this from time to time. Since I can't easily see myself hit the stroke (it goes too fast, the angle is not right to see it), seeing the shadow is a decent substitute.

What I realized was I need to swing forward as the racquet barely drops. I tend to drop the racquet a bit, and it goes behind me. By abbreviating the stroke, and moving the racquet forward as it drops, I find I can hit harder, and closer to the way I want to hit. Not perfect, but at least in the right vicinity.

That was good, because the last 2-3 weeks, I had lost some of the power I had hitting the ball. Much of this loss of power came from trying to fix the way I was setting up on my takeback. I had been trying to hit it like Roger Federer (again). But I recently found a video of Scot, Andy Murray. I used to want to hit the way he hits although at the time, I had no idea Murray hit like this. It was pure happenstance that I was looking at his video recently, mostly due to his recent success.



While watching this video, pay attention to the racquet face. As he takes it back, you can see it point to you. If Murray were holding a large hand mirror with the racquet face being the mirror, you could see your face nearly the whole time. Many players, including Federer, end up pointing the racquet face down when the racquet goes back as far as it will go. Murray doesn't do that, and it keeps his racquet motion simple on setup.

At first, I was planning to emulate more of Federer, because I felt Federer deliberately gets his racquet face down, before lifting it up, but that was more quirky to hit than I expected. So although I do that even when I don't intend to, I just think I'm hitting like Murray does, and it simplifies how I think of my forehand.

The other thing I started to do, to gain back power was to rotate my body. Basically, to get power in a tennis stroke, you think of yourself like a baseball player. A baseball player does a great deal of body rotation to generate power. Indeed, they user their whole body, legs, body rotation, etc. It's not simply swinging the bat with the arms. This allows a baseball player to generate a lot of power.

Similarly, you can think of golfers. Golfers also learn to rotate their entire torso. They turn their body away, then rotate into the shot. This is what you want to do in tennis too. Let the torso initiate the body rotation. Without this torso rotation (also called the core), it's hard to get power. Finally, you have to be pretty loose.

One part of my forehand that's turned out reasonably well is the follow through. I used to follow through in front of my body. When I learned to hit a windshield wiper motion, I'd think of it like a windshield wiper, that is occuring on the plane of the windshield.

However, the windshield wiper really requires rotating the arm so the elbow sticks out more, and you finish the wiper to the left of your body, not in front of you. I had been working on the follow through a great deal, and while I did that, I completely forgot about the technique on the setup of my forehand. If I were to break up the forehand, I'd say it's the takeback (the part of the strokes from seeing the ball, to getting the racquet back roughly pointing to the fence), then the swing forward, then the follow-through. The swing forward is the swing from the furthest back point up to hitting the ball. The follow through is the swing after hitting the ball.

There are several things I want to work on. First, I want to use my left hand more in setup. I have an idea how to do this, watching Federer. Second, I want to get the Andy Murray motion down a bit smoother. Third, I need to keep reminding myself to accelerate the racquet forward sooner than I expect, and not to take back the racquet as far back as I think I should. Basically, as the racquet begins to drop, I need to start accelerating forward. Ironically, all that abbreviated motion seems to create more power than my longer strokes.

The other thing I need to do is hit that same stroke much slower. I find the exercise of hitting hard, then slowing it down helps me to smooth out the stroke. If I just power the shot, I get too tense and too tired as a result.

Indeed, I've noticed, as a result of my physical therapy, that I clench my shoulder too much when I swing. I'll need to consciously remind myself to relax that shoulder. One thing good about physical therapy is that it's made me more body aware. I wish I knew about this earlier and that it didn't take an injury to make me learn about my body from a tennis point of view. I've been told I'm too tensed up when I play, but without enough body awareness, I didn't know how to relax properly. I'm still not there yet, but at least I'm more in tune with my body tensing up.

All in all, given that I thought my stroke was completely awful this morning, I ended up the day feeling a lot better about the motion. Now it's a matter of repetition and making sure I don't fall into bad habits.

That's mostly what writing this blog entry is about.

Here's a summary:

• Don't take the racquet back as far as you think
  
• Use the left hand to set up the racquet on takeback
  
• Think of a windshield wiper motion in the takeback to emulate a Murray setup. Try to maintain the correct grip.
  
• As the racquet drops down, begin to accelerate forward.
  
• Rotate the body quickly as the racquet drops. This initiates the forehand.
  
• End up with the elbow in front and the racquet off to the side and behind
  
• Pull the left arm as you rotate
  
• Don't tense the right shoulder on racquet acceleration in the swing forward stage.
  

Forehand to the Fore

I'm basically in the field of software engineering. Perhaps unlike many people in the field I find it vaguely dissatisfying. I've always felt that programming trafficked in the arbitrary. I'll give a recent example.

I was trying to run some script in a Linux/Unix environment. For some reason, it wouldn't do anything. The explanation for the problem? In Windows, if you hit the return key while typing a document, it inserts two characters in the file: a carriage return and a linefeed. This is just the way Windows does things.

But in Linux, they've decided two characters is silly, and they use the single newline (the linefeed is really a newline). Linux itself is stupid. When it sees the carriage return, rather than ignore it, it panics and does nothing. I'm anthropomorphizing, of course, but that's the gist of what's going on. So, rather than Windows finally doing what Unix/Linux does, there's this mismatch that makes everyone aware of what a mess the two systems are.

Programming is full of arbitrary rules like this. People say Ruby is a language that follows POLS, that is, the principle of least surprise. Most programming environments are simply surprise after surprise with people following their own standards and thus creating a myriad of mess. Let's face it, I'm guilty of this too. Given my druthers, I'm unlikely to research what others have done, and make my own way, thus contributing to the mess. Sometimes I think software needs to go through an approval process and if it fails, you have to go back and fix it. And this approval process is external to the company. Given how secretive most companies are, we're doomed to mediocre, poorly written, idiosyncratic software.

This is perhaps why I like sports. The goals are often very simple, and yet the achievement very difficult because there is no one right answer, and yet, what's going on is fairly transparent.

In particular, my latest obsession has been the forehand in tennis.

If you've never played tennis, let me briefly tell you a little about it. First, I hope you know what a tennis court looks like and what a racquet look like. I want you to visualize yourself standing at the baseline. That's the line parallel to the net that the players stand at. It's probably 30 feet from the net. Your shoulders are parallel to the net which means you are facing the net.

Now put your hands straight down, your palms gripping the outside of your legs. Then, pull your palms away until it's maybe 2 feet from your body (on your side), where your hand is about waist height, your arms straight. Essentially your arms form an upside down V. Let you hands point basically down, your palm facing the net.

For sake of simplicity, let's assume you are right handed. Suppose someone tosses the ball to your right hand. You bat the ball with the palm so that it faces the net. That would be the forehand.

Now imagine someone tosses the ball to your left hand. Take your right hand and move it to where your left hand is as if you are clapping. This would likely mean you turning your shoulders left to make this clapping motion. When the ball is heading to your left hand, which is now covered by your right hand (as if you stopped at the motion of clapping), bat the ball with the back of your right hand toward the net. That's the backhand.

Most people find the forehand more natural, even though the backhand is simpler and mostly involves pushing away, while the forehand involves a more complex pulling motion.

In modern tennis, the forehand is king. If you're likely to hit a hard, powerful shot, it's going to be the forehand. There are many great forehands, very few great backhands. These days, many people hit their backhands with two hands, using their left hand and right hand in concert.

This style, almost unseen prior to the 1970s, has become the prevalent way to hit the backhand, a result of many youths learning to play when they are young, and that a two-handed shot can deal with more difficult shots (the high backhand) and be more accurate down-the-line. The one-handed backhand means you must learn at least two shots, the slice for when you lack the time to set up, and the topspin, which is the power shot.

To me, the backhand is a simpler shot, having less mechanics. I could be wrong.

Instead, I've obsessed over the forehand.

You think this is a trivial pursuit. The goal is indeed trivial, but the pursuit challenging. How do you hit a hard forehand? The thoughts have changed over the years.

Throughout the 1960s, tennis players had simplified the hitting motion as much as they could. They didn't believe in much spin, now a key component to the modern forehand. They didn't believe in a loop motion, where modern players carve out a C motion to increase racquet head speed.

Instead, the racquet was taken straight back so it pointed to the back fence and then, in a fairly straight motion, the racquet was brought forward until eventually the racquet pointed to the net about shoulder height, while the weight was transferred from the right foot to the left foot in a stepping motion. This weight transfer was the secret to power in the classic game.

The modern game has players typically standing with both feet side by side about shoulder width apart, parallel to the baseline. The player rotates at the waist to the right, then create angular momentum by twisting the waist so the torso moves from facing the right to facing the left. The body plays a role, but the way it gets involved is a twisting motion.

Most weekend players don't realize how much the body plays a role in power. People say momentum is mass times velocity. If you swing mostly with the arm, then you are using less mass. If you can coordinate your body so that your torso twists at the same time your arm moves, indeed, so your arm acts like a catapult where your body is the spring, then you will add more mass behind the shot, and thus create a more powerful shot.

Still, there are other factors involved. They involve the arm itself, how far away from the body to hit, whether the arm should be straight or have a bend, how the wrist is oriented, how you hold the racquet, what angle it forms.

If I were to show you a video of a top player, say Roger Federer, in slow motion, I could point out any of a number of things that he is doing. If you were to imitate Roger Federer, and believe me, it would only be an imitation, you would become increasingly aware of the most minute details.

How much of a role each of his idiosyncrasies plays in his overall power is unclear. To be sure, each professional has their own quirks, some of which may simply be comfort, an extraneous motion that has been added after years of hitting hundreds of thousands or millions of tennis balls.

Despite the variation, there are common aspects that great modern tennis players use, including how smooth the racquet moves, how the follow-through is achieved, how the racquet face is oriented as the racquet accelerates to the ball, how the weight is transferred. There is a core basic structure to the modern forehand, which doesn't resemble the forehand hit, say, by players in the 1930s, like Big Bill Tilden or Rene Lacoste, who had a different conception of how the forehand should be hit.

I realize, watching video, that I didn't know this core structure, and it took watching a lot of pro players, then watching myself on video, to realize how herky-jerky my motion was. Also, I needed someone to point out how stiff my body was, how tense it was.

Tennis, like many sports, is not without a sense of irony. While players like to think of the sport like bodybuilders think of lifting weights, with aggression, with muscle, the fact is that muscling the ball tends to slow down your shot, and that the secret is being relaxed and moving your body quickly, in concert, while being relaxed. The relaxation allows the muscles to move more quickly, not impeded by stiffness.

I picked Roger Federer mostly because he was number 1, and compared to current number 1, Rafael Nadal, his forehand motion is very simple. His motion isn't as simple as, say, Agassi, who was known for his compact setup, and serves as role model to many a player. The modern player has added a lengthier setup, including Federer and Murray, and often have a very large torso rotation starting the motion with the chest facing the right fence and ending up with the chest facing the left fence, thus a full 180 degree of rotation. Such drastic torso motion was uncommon in the 1950s, but has contributed to the modern forehand.

You would think a guy my age (40) would not care to learn a new forehand after having played the game this long, and yet I've always tinkered with my forehand over the years, trying to imitate this pro or that. Only recently have I realized I lacked the proper tools and the proper way to watch pros to make anything close to a realistic imitation.

With YouTube and dedicated fans, you can now get access to a whole host of videos of pros hitting in slow motion. That combined with your own camcorder has created a way for a player to analyze pro strokes and compare it to their own. Realize that we lack the fine motor control of a top professional and thus we can't even begin to approach the accuracy or the raw speed that they can generate.

Even so, you can get the basics right and that can help out your shot tremendously.

I find that I am fighting muscle memory. I want to hit the forehand a certain way, and the body wants to do something else, and I have to figure out how to trick the body to make it do what I want. It's not easy, indeed, I've spent months trying to get the motion right.

It requires constant re-checking. What is Roger Federer really doing? What am I really doing? Does a certain motion that he does really work for me or not? I have to give myself a chance to learn how to hit, and this involves hours spent at a tennis wall. The tennis wall isn't ideal as it doesn't replicate what a player does. It's a poor man's substitute, but it doesn't get impatient, and it is free. So it serves its purpose (a tennis wall is a wall that has a line painted so simulate a net).

Ultimately, the proof is the quality of ball hit, but I also feel that part of it is the swing path. Not only do I want to hit an effective forehand, but I believe an effective forehand comes about due to a nice pretty stroke. Thus, I want both. So I keep laboring, analyzing, tinkering, and hoping to achieve a goal of a nice forehand which I can eventually just ingrain and not think about much.

Always a work in progress.