Is Copying Professional Tennis Players A Good Idea?
Most tennis fans and players love to watch their favourite professional tennis players on TV and then try to go out and copy their technique.
This can be motivating and sometimes lead to good results but oftentimes people try to copy exactly the wrong parts of a stroke and end up worse than before! The fundamental issue here is that at the pro level the balls come with a very different speed and spin and it requires different technical skills to deal with those kinds of balls.
In general we can say that the Pros have to deal with more high-bouncing topspin than recreational players.
So let's look at the pros and cons of copying your favorite players: Pros: - The Pros usually have the key fundamentals right - Watching the Pros and trying to copy them can be very motivating and fun Cons: - The Pros are dealing with different kind of balls than you and that requires different techniques to solve those problems.
- Watching the Pros on TV can be very misleading.
You need to see things in super slow motion to actually see what's going on! So ideally people would go out and simply copy the core fundamentals of good tennis technique from their favourite Professional Tennis Players.
Unfortunately though people tend to copy exactly the wrong elements, which are usually the fancy elements, of top players strokes.
Let's have a look at an example with the modern tennis forehand! When you watch Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and most of the other guys on TV you will see forehands that are hit at incredible speeds.
There is lots of body rotation and the racket travels at an incredible speed.
As a result of this racket-head speed it often appears like those guys are pulling their rackets over to their left side as they are hitting (for right-handers of course).
Only when you watch it in super slow motion can you see that around the all-important contact point the racket is actually travelling forward and upward and not to the left side.
Most tennis fans don't see that aspect though and therefore try to go out and pull the racket over to the left when they play.
Learning Tennis is a step-by-step process and you need to master the fundamentals before moving on to the fancy stuff! As far as I know this holds true for most sports.
Nobody would come up with the idea in Basketball to teach beginners and young kids the fade-away three point shot first.
In Tennis this is often what happens though when players try to start by copying the forehand from Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer! So next time you go out and practice think about this and try to copy the fundamentals and not all the fancy stuff and you might end up improving your game!
This can be motivating and sometimes lead to good results but oftentimes people try to copy exactly the wrong parts of a stroke and end up worse than before! The fundamental issue here is that at the pro level the balls come with a very different speed and spin and it requires different technical skills to deal with those kinds of balls.
In general we can say that the Pros have to deal with more high-bouncing topspin than recreational players.
So let's look at the pros and cons of copying your favorite players: Pros: - The Pros usually have the key fundamentals right - Watching the Pros and trying to copy them can be very motivating and fun Cons: - The Pros are dealing with different kind of balls than you and that requires different techniques to solve those problems.
- Watching the Pros on TV can be very misleading.
You need to see things in super slow motion to actually see what's going on! So ideally people would go out and simply copy the core fundamentals of good tennis technique from their favourite Professional Tennis Players.
Unfortunately though people tend to copy exactly the wrong elements, which are usually the fancy elements, of top players strokes.
Let's have a look at an example with the modern tennis forehand! When you watch Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and most of the other guys on TV you will see forehands that are hit at incredible speeds.
There is lots of body rotation and the racket travels at an incredible speed.
As a result of this racket-head speed it often appears like those guys are pulling their rackets over to their left side as they are hitting (for right-handers of course).
Only when you watch it in super slow motion can you see that around the all-important contact point the racket is actually travelling forward and upward and not to the left side.
Most tennis fans don't see that aspect though and therefore try to go out and pull the racket over to the left when they play.
Learning Tennis is a step-by-step process and you need to master the fundamentals before moving on to the fancy stuff! As far as I know this holds true for most sports.
Nobody would come up with the idea in Basketball to teach beginners and young kids the fade-away three point shot first.
In Tennis this is often what happens though when players try to start by copying the forehand from Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer! So next time you go out and practice think about this and try to copy the fundamentals and not all the fancy stuff and you might end up improving your game!