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TennisOne Lessons
Relaxed Hands Part II Daryl Fisher Playing tennis to your potential requires that you keep your hands relaxed. Tennis requires subtle muscular control, and excess tension impedes the ability to make fine adjustments. The capability for making fine adjustments is what makes playing with effortless and precisely controlled power possible. And not only does hand tension significantly affect your shots, but it also has an impact on the speed with which you can improve. Reminder
As a reminder from the previous article on this topic, to be relaxed means using only the tension that is required and no more. A lack of strain and effort is a good indicator of moving in a relaxed way. For example, to say that Gustavo Kuerten hits a relaxed backhand does not mean that he uses no muscular tension, but that he uses only the necessary tension and no more. To emphasize the importance of being relaxed in relation to tennis, pick any great shot and notice that its execution looks very relaxed and easy. It almost goes without saying anymore that Roger Federer plays in a relaxed, seemingly effortless, manner. What might get lost in that observation, however, is that his lack of tension is helpful, even crucial, to his success. In fact, Pete Sampras has praised Federer’s ease as one of his greatest assets. (It might also be worth noting that a major part of Sampras’s success is his relaxed and effortless-looking serve.) Relaxation and awareness Watching or tracking the ball is related to the relaxing of the hands for achieving one’s potential in tennis. Martial arts have incorporated relaxation and awareness training for centuries, and tracking the ball and relaxing the hands are the tennis equivalent. Again, Federer provides excellent evidence for the importance of these factors because he never looks like he is straining, and it is rare to see a photograph of him not looking at the ball. In fact, the only time that he seems not to be looking at the ball is when he is looking at the contact point where the ball just left his strings.
The feedback loop To understand why seeing the ball clearly and relaxing the hands are so important, imagine a person’s brain as the control center of a feedback loop. The information loop begins when a player sees an approaching ball. That is, information about the oncoming ball is sent to the brain through the eyes. The brain processes the information and generates instructions for the body as to how to meet the ball and return it, and these instructions materialize in the body as subtle muscle tension and release. This initial part of the feedback loop is significant in two ways. The first is that it is important for the brain to know where the ball is. For a human body to be able to coordinate just moving to and hitting a ball at all is truly amazing, but it is so much easier if the brain has better information as to where the ball is. Tracking the ball is the important step that provides information to the brain and the rest of the body as to how much or how little tension is required. In fact, it is common for a person’s success level to go up immediately as a result of tracking the point of contact a bit longer than usual.
The second significance of this initial part of the feedback loop is that not being able to flex and release muscles at the proper times results in a disruption of the subtle muscular control that is required. Relaxed muscles are ready for instructions from the brain, but tense muscles are not. Tense muscles are a dead end to the signal from the brain because muscles cannot flex and release at the proper times if they are already tense. As a brief digression that will receive more attention in a future article, excess tension in the muscles will also increase a player’s on-court physical stress. This stress can lead to faster fatigue and, even worse, to injuries, especially if combined with poor technique. Tennis elbow, for example, is almost non-existent on the pro tour, but it is an epidemic at the amateur level because the injury is caused by poor technique and excess tension. Improvement To complete the feedback loop, the brain also receives information after a shot has been hit. Following a shot, the brain receives and processes information from the body about the tension that was used while hitting a shot, and this information is combined with more information from the eyes about the success of that shot. This information will be stored in the brain and used to help determine how to best respond to future shots. In this way the brain improves through its feedback loop of information from before and after a shot is hit, and from inside and outside of the body. The brain learns and makes the best decisions about how to signal the body when it has the most accurate, complete, and precise information. Before the shot and from outside the body the best information is obtained from seeing the ball clearly. Again, the more carefully the ball is tracked, the better the instructions from the brain to the body can be. The best information after the shot and from inside the body comes from the hands being relaxed during the shot. For this portion of the feedback loop, if the hands are relaxed when the ball is struck, then the brain receives precise feedback with regard to how much tension was useful, and the precision speeds improvement. Excess tension, however, confuses the brain’s ability to sort out what works, and for this reason a tennis player’s general improvement is affected by tension in the hands. Feel It
In order to develop your ability to relax your hands, you will need to be able to distinguish between what is relaxed and what is not. Again, keep in mind that relaxed in the context of playing tennis simply means that there is no experience of strain or tension. To help you learn to distinguish between when you are experiencing tension and when you are not, try the following awareness drill. Simply hit normal strokes, and after each shot, rate how much tension you experienced in your hands on a scale of zero through three. A rating of three indicates that you were squeezing your racquet as hard as you can. A two rating indicates tension, but somewhere between the maximum and none. A rating of a one means that the hands stayed relaxed, but that there was a twitch in the muscles at contact. This is actually a good sign of keeping your hands relaxed in the sense that you were relaxed through the stroke, but that your contact was slightly off-center. Even with relaxed hands, muscles need to flex in order to keep the racquet stable on off-center hits. Of course, the desired rating is that of a zero. A zero indicates no tension throughout the stroke, not even the twitch to keep the racquet stable. This means that you started the stroke relaxed and that your contact was sufficiently close to the center of your racquet to allow you to strike the ball without adding tension throughout the stroke. This shot will undoubtedly feel very good. In fact, you will want to hit this type of shot not only for the results, but also for the feeling of it. With practice, to play with relaxed hands will help you to play to your potential, and you will also improve at the fastest rate of which you are capable. |
