Do you speak tennis language?
Coach yourself...

I often find myself coaching players and telling them things that are very obvious – well at least for someone who understands the tennis language.

So what is it?

First, let's become clear on something – if you want to improve your technique or tennis tactics you have two options:

1. Someone tells you, you learn from videos or books and you try and move your body – legs and arms – in a way that is supposedly technically correct

2. You play the game and try to win the point – by hitting the ball inside the court and not in the net or out

The way I coach players is that I initially help them find roughly the correct technique and from then on I give them situations from which their technique improves by itself.

For example – the goal may be for you to hit a forehand from the baseline into the left corner of the service box – and hit the ball fast.

The only way you can achieve that is with topspin.

So I explain to the player what topspin is and just help him feel it first with easy feeding. And when the player has some basic feel and understanding of topspin, I give him the above mentioned drill and his topspin forehand technique will improve as a result of that task.

We're getting to the point of the tennis language so hang on…

When the player is then trying to hit the target, they may hit too long, too low, too left, too hard and so on. All these mistakes are clearly visible.

So what the player needs to do is to see the result and get the message. For example, if they hit the net (result), they need to understand the tennis language in which the message – the feedback is hidden. And the message is – HIT HIGHER.

Here is the simplest dictionary for you to translate tennis language into English (which you must eventually translate into images – what you want to happen):

Tennis Event	English --> image
Hitting into the net	Hit higher, hit with less spin
Too long	Hit shorter, make the ball dip sooner, OR hit with less speed, hit with less power, hit with more topspin
Too much to the left	Aim more to the right
Too much to the right	Aim more to the left
Hitting with the frame of the racquet	Watch the ball, stay focused on the hitting not on the target or opponent
Hitting the ball too late	Meet the ball in front – go towards the ball, don't wait (be more aggressive)

As you can see many of these translations are logical and easy and YET the players either just don't do them or complicate things too much.

They may get into technical details about how the angle of the racquet and the path were not correct and how they need to move with their elbow first and so on. This may be all true but as soon as you start thinking about these things you lose tracking of the ball. This results in a bad hit or a mistake and you think that you didn't try hard enough.

So you focus even more, use a death grip on the racquet and try again. Your chances of successfully hitting that ball are now even slimmer.

Instead, just do the simple translation from tennis events to English or any other language that you speak and imagine whatever the words tell you.

Soon you'll be a fluent speaker of the tennis language and you won't be lost anymore in the tennis land.

Enjoy your game!

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