Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to episode number 351 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we'll be talking about three critical tennis improvement tools. And this is going to follow along with a story of my recent experience coaching in Costa Rica. We had six students there for a whole week.
We were living there with our students walking a block away to the tennis courts every day. Incredible experience, really helping six players very closely and intimately showing them what they need to focus on, how to make breakthroughs in their games. And every afternoon, one of my favorite parts of this trip is we get to spend a 30 minute kind of lightning round with each of our six students. We have a three hour afternoon session.
During that afternoon session, every student gets private time for half an hour. And we encourage them to kind of pick the technical part of their game that they think needs the most help or attention. And so during that period of time, that 30 minutes, two coaches work with one student and one coach is kind of the facilitator and helper. They are feeding, they are helping with the iPad.
They are just kind of helping support the other coach while they lead the player through the analysis, through changing, through drills. And our goal during that 30 minutes is to make a significant change or breakthrough in the technique understanding and also execution with the student. And this is a big contrast relative to what we normally do with our private students where it's three coaches will spend two days in a row with a player and be on the court for 12 hours.
And we might spend two or three hours on a single stroke because we're picking a very fundamental technical flaw and saying, okay, this is what we need to change. This is how we're going to change it. And we'll move through a big series of progressions and drills. And over the course of several hours, make a really big change. Our goal here during our Costa Rica trip and also when we travel to Hawaii is to make that same kind of contrast, but in 30 minutes.
And so like I said, lightning round is just the best way to describe it. It's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like player and then player and then player and the player focusing on oftentimes really different strokes, really different flaws, really different fixes. And so for the coach who's leading the afternoon session on the analysis course, it's a really kind of exciting and really fast paced afternoon.
And a great deal of what we're doing during those 30 minutes with each of our students is teaching players how to learn. And I believe this is a big part of the value that we bring to our, all of our students that work with us because there's a low level of understanding of what it actually takes to change a habit. Most of the players we work with are adults, passionate amateur athletes and many of them have been playing tennis for years or even decades.
And they have deep grooved in habits and movement patterns that are making success very difficult for them. And so our job as a coach is to help develop that technique, change it and rewrite those old habits. And if we can't do that for them while they're with us on the court, then when they go home, then they're going to feel stuck.
If we can't show them how to evaluate, how to progress through a learning process that really works and actually has a chance of rewriting their old habit, then when they go home and they walk out into the court, they're going to feel totally lost because we're not standing there with the iPad, giving them instant feedback anymore.
And so our goal is to teach our players, maybe you've heard the illustration or not illustration, but the kind of proverb of, let's see if I can remember off top of my head, give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach a man how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. I think that's it.
That wasn't in my notes, but same kind of principle where we don't want to give players some kind of quick fix and send them home and then have that be the end of their development, we want players to improve for months or years when they go home.
And so a big part of what we focus on is showing players how to actually learn effectively so that once they understand those principles, they can go home and apply them not just to the deep element, like the fundamental flaw that we picked out on their forehand, their backhand, their serve and continue to develop better habits around those strokes, but we want players to be able to take those principles and apply them to other new strokes as well.
Or what happens when they master that new forehand that we showed them how to improve and it's time to move on to the next element of hitting the ball at a higher level than what we showed them. So a big goal of ours is to show players how to move through that learning process effectively so that they can actually make breakthroughs for the rest of their tennis career. And many players and coaches are stuck in an attempt for instant gratification.
So the way we go about it is a big contrast from what people are typically used to. Usually there's some kind of explanation, maybe a demonstration of, okay, here's what you're doing now on your forehand, here's what you should be doing. And maybe the coach guides the student through what the correct movement is or maybe he or she will demonstrate what the correct movement is. Maybe they'll show them a video, what the correct movement is.
And then after that takes place, then the expectation is, okay, great, let's practice. Let's go do it. And it's like explanation and then doing or demonstration and then doing. Or these days in the 21st century, players are going to YouTube or going to podcasts or going to blog articles, self learning, taking in information on their own, and then just going out to the court and saying, oh, I learned this great new technique for my serve to hit with more topspin.
And they're just going and trying to bolt it on their preexisting habits and then just trying to run with it. And what's missing there is the process. And that's where the three critical tennis improvement tools come into play. These are the principles that we work hard to teach our students. No matter what, no matter which environment we're in, whether we're talking about strategy, whether we're talking about technique, whether we're talking about the mental game, it involves changing habits.
And so without these tools, without these improvement process elements, it's very difficult to actually make changes that stick and don't just revert right back to the old habit. So here's the three things. Number one, managing the level of challenge and stress. There's three different zones of comfort or stress. And our goal is to keep players very squarely in one of those zones. The first zone is a comfort zone. That's just what you're used to right now.
And if you never really do anything different, if you never make that grip change, if you never make that swing path change, then you just remain in your comfort zone. And you'll basically be the same player that you've always been forever. If you stay in your comfort zone and not rock the boat and don't change anything. And then right outside the comfort zone is the learning zone.
That's where you're stretching your comfort zone and you're kind of treading that line kind of right on the border of what you're comfortable with, but also making a positive, impactful change. And that's uncomfortable. It's on the outer edges or sometimes really uncomfortable at first before it starts to feel familiar to the player. That's the learning zone. And then outside of the learning zone, the outer edges of the learning zone is the panic zone.
That's where there's so much challenge, so much stress that the player has no ability at all to do whatever the new thing is because they're just in survival mode. And so the player is just going to revert immediately back to what their normal habit is. In other words, they won't ever improve. And so a lot of players hang out on either extreme. They either don't really want any challenge at all. And so they stay in their comfort zone and they might say they want to get better.
And maybe they like try to hit the ball harder or they try to run faster, but they don't ever actually change their habits. And so the wiring that makes up who they are as a player never changes. Or they'll be like, okay, this is the year I'm going to fix my serve. And they change everything all at once and go right into a match and go directly into the panic zone where there's so much stress and so much challenge that nothing changes. And so it's the same result.
The player just goes back to their old habit, but on opposite ends of the spectrum. So critical learning process tool number one is managing the level of challenge and stress. And it takes constantly adjusting because as somebody learns and feels more comfortable, you have to increase the level of challenge to move somebody down the path of learning that new movement. And that leads us directly to learning tool number two. And that is progressions.
And so the key to slowly stretching the ability to execute something new. And so when we analyze and we assess the problem with a student and we explain to them what it is we're going to be focusing on and maybe we'll demonstrate what the new thing is supposed to look like. We're first starting with our student with the most basic, the most controlled, the most aware and slow expression of what that changes. And so that means almost always there's no ball involved.
Almost always they're going very slowly. And that's progression number one. And then progression number two might be a little faster but no ball. Progression three might be a ball but they don't hit it. There's just a bounce and they swing and they're just using the ball for timing. Progression three might be dropping the ball in a stationary place right in their strike zone so they don't have to move. They don't have to time it. It's just sitting right there.
Progression four might be a toss from the other side of the net. Now there's timing but they don't have to move. I did a podcast episode called I think it was 23 progressions for tennis success or something like that. I'm sorry I should have looked it up ahead of time. But I went through 23 I believe was the number. Different progressions. And I just off top of my head just stated a few of the beginning like starting ones.
The progressions goal or their purpose is to keep a player in the learning zone. If you progress from explanation right on to all right now go do it in a match then there is certainly going to be panic. The player was certainly not actually stick with the new thing.
Or if you start with slow shadow swings with no ball and you don't progress from there then the chances of you bridging the gap between those slow shadow swings and a match play situation are really low because there's a gigantic chasm between those two different levels of stress and challenge.
And so a good coach or a player who's guiding their own improvement really effectively is going to use a lot of stepping stones to get from very very early execution of something new all the way to being able to master that new movement. And so that's critical learning improvement tool number two is progressions. And the third one and all three of these work very closely hand in hand. The third one is check in on execution.
A.K.A. use video to objectively be able to judge what the quality of execution is. There's two things that happen a lot in a tennis learning environment. One is educated guessing and here I'm talking about coaches who do a great job assessing. They do a great job educating. They do a great job demonstrating. They might even do a great job with the process of the progressions and the learning zone.
But they never check in on video and they're only way of judging the quality of how well their student is progressing is by viewing them from the naked eye from 40, 50, 60, 70 feet away on the other side of the court while they're feeding or rallying with them and managing the actual drilling environment.
Instead of using a ball machine or somebody else to feed and standing right next to their student where they can see much more accurately what's actually happening and then also having the ability to hold an iPhone or an iPad and record video and periodically pause and play it back in slow motion and say you know what you're really close but we're just a little bit off here with this part of the technique your time is just a little off so we just need to tweak that.
Those types of elements like a timing element and real time even if you're standing right next to your student are really difficult to tell much less from the other side of the court feeding from the other side of the court almost impossible to tell. And so educated guessing is there's coaches with tremendous experience tremendous instinct like those coaches who have amazing ability to guide students very effectively without video.
It's possible to show a student how to improve without video it's been done for decades and decades because after all video analysis wasn't really feasible until maybe 20 years ago or so. And so tennis coaches had great results before video was very accessible but these days to not use video is just leaving so much information and data and improvement on the table.
And when a coach doesn't use video he or she is missing out on details they are missing out on knowledge about how well exactly their student is doing. And so we don't teach without video period we just don't do it because we know we can't provide the same level of quality of feedback and same level of quality of improvement and breakthrough without using video. And the other part of it that video erases is the reliance on feel and this is for you players out there that are self guiding.
If you go based on feel and you have you've done a great job educating yourself you've done a great job learning about what it is exactly that you need to improve and why and how and you use progressions you keep yourself in the learning zone you do everything
else well but you never check on video then you are relying completely on what it feels like and that's a scary thing for me personally because I know based on experience not just working with students but my own personal experience that what something feels like and what's really happening are usually two different things and sometimes they're completely different things and sometimes they're opposite.
I have a huge list of examples of students who thought they did one thing when they actually did the opposite thing and so for me if you're listening to my voice right now and you're working hard to improve your game and you're going it alone in self guiding for whatever
reason and you're relying on feel whether or not you're doing that new technique correctly you're flying blind and you might be in the ballpark just like the coaches you don't use video you might have a really well educated guess and you might be very close but just like
the coach who doesn't use video you are leaving information on the table and you are slowing down your potential for progress and your potential for how high of a level you can progress to because without a clear picture of what's really happening you're going to miss out on opportunities to improve more quickly and more accurately and more precisely than what you could have done if you knew exactly what was happening by using video.
So again the three critical tennis improvement tools are managing the level of challenge and stress aka starting it staying in the learning zone number two slowly stretching your ability to execute that's using progressions and number three checking in on quality of
execution that's using video by using all three of those tools I can show a student significant progress in the right direction in just 30 minutes from assessment like going in totally cold like not having never seen them hit a forehand before to assessing the problem using
video to educating them about what they should be doing instead of what they are doing using those slow motion clips guiding them through the improvement process using progressions and using the learning zone and using video to show them how they're doing and at the
end of 30 minutes I can show them aside by side video clip of where they started and where they finished with a big dramatic contrast a big change moving in the right direction and for me as a coach that's the best that's the most exciting most gratifying thing to
see there be a huge difference and see like the like the shock and amazement on my students face when they're like wow it's like very clearly a big step in the right direction I'm looking so much better after just 30 minutes but what's even better is as we move through
that process I'm giving them the tools they need to go home and do it themselves I'm even if they're not really aware of it I'm showing them here's the steps you take this is how you change a habit here's how you make a big step in the right direction in just
30 minutes and so my goal for them is for them to keep pursuing the ability to learn more effectively as a student so they can go home and self-guide or in a traditional learning sense in a lesson be able to take advantage of that environment much more readily and improve
that much faster if you'd like to experience that environment with us myself and Megan and Kevin we'd love to work with you we've got lots of different coaching opportunities here I'm actually not here in Milwaukee I'm in California right now it's one of the places
where we coach yearly our home bases in Milwaukee we take yearly trips to Costa Rica and to Hawaii for information on all those you can go to essential tennis comm click on coaching and see what we have available thank you so much for listening listening today I hope
this really serves you gives you some perspective some guidance on how you can improve faster more effectively and enjoy the game of tennis even more for more free game improving instruction be sure to check out essential tennis comm where you'll find hundreds of video audio and
written lessons also be sure to subscribe to essential tennis on iTunes and YouTube where we are the number one resource in the world providing passionate instruction for passionate tennis players thank you so much for listening today take care and good luck with your tennis.