TennisOne Lessons

How to Improve Your Tennis Strokes by Simplifying

Daryl Fisher

What if you are making too much motion for your tennis strokes, and that by eliminating the extra motion you would in fact improve? What if doing less really could help you accomplish more? Most beginner players follow the model of improvement in tennis by learning what they need to add to their games, but many players become stuck in their improvement when there is no more to add. In many of these cases, it is only by then simplifying or eliminating any extra motion that they can improve.

So, how can you improve at tennis by simplifying?  Generally speaking, when it comes to tennis strokes, simplification means fewer motions to coordinate, and this in turn means fewer things that can go wrong.  The reliability or likelihood of successful timing is thereby improved. 

Simplification is underrated as a method of improvement.  While all of us have improved by learning new things to add into our games, we must be careful about becoming stuck in the mentality of just adding.  Cutting the extraneous often causes surprising leaps in improvement.  What is more, nearly every tennis player makes unnecessary motions  (including some professionals!), so it is in fact likely that you could improve through simplification.  

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First, by borrowing a bit from engineering, it may be useful to make clear how much simplification can help you. Imagine that every tennis stroke is like a machine made up of a number of moving parts. Also imagine that if one of the working parts of the machine fails, the machine fails as a whole in its task for that use.

Let us say that the stroke we are considering has 4 moving parts and each part has a success rate of 95% per use. Offhand, this machine might sound fairly reliable. If we examine the reliability more closely, however, remember the machine as a whole relies on each of the parts for its successful use. What would you suppose, then, that the failure rate of the machine is per use? If you think that it is just 5% (or one in 20 uses), the failure rate of each part, you are underestimating considerably. In fact the failure rate for the machine as a whole is almost 20% of uses, or failure in almost 1 in 5 uses.

This failure rate may seem strangely high given that each of the parts operates without flaw 95% of the time. The success rate is due to the fact that the parts are linked so that the rates are multiplied by each other.

Success rate = .95 x .95 x .95 x .95 = .81, or 81%
Failure rate = 1 – success rate = 1 - .81 = .19, or 19%

Improvement

While many people recognize the truth of the statement that simpler machines break down less, few people give attention to the idea of simplifying their tennis strokes. To simplify a machine means to reduce or eliminate some aspect of the machine. Believe it or not, both reduction and elimination are likely options for almost every player at every level.

From a purely mathematical perspective, to reduce the number of parts from 4 to 2 would mean a significant improvement in the success rate. With only 2 parts, the success rate is 95% times 95%, which equals about 90%.

Success rate = .95 x .95 = .90, or 90%
Failure rate = 1 – success rate = 1 - .90 = .10, or 10%

If we talk in terms of errors in tennis, by eliminating two of the parts from our theoretical stroke we can cut our errors in about half.

Challenge Number One

While simplification can make for some immediate and amazing improvements, simplification will likely first require gaining a new perspective. Just to re-imagine what is possible using less motion is crucial. All of us started playing tennis with the wrong image of what is required to hit a ball successfully, and a part of that was imagining that we needed to do more than we did.

As a personal example, for many years I imagined that my serve required more motion than it actually does for the level of pace that I wanted. Ironically, by believing that I needed so much motion, I was holding myself back from the desired results. I was getting sufficient pace, but my extra motion made timing difficult. My last statement reminds me of a sentence from a David Foster Wallace essay: “Any normal adult male can hit a tennis ball with a pro pace; the trick is being able to hit the ball both hard and accurately.”

Ideas to Try It Yourself

Some high quality individual tennis instruction may be required in order to address your specific challenges. The best instructors are aware of the idea of not just adding something to your game but of the possibility of taking something out. If you are committed to taking extra motion out of your swing yourself, however, I have several ideas for you to try:

1. Try to hit as smoothly as you can. To explain this option extensively would require another article, but in short there is often a relationship between smoothness and a reduction of extra motion. To help you understand this relationship, you might like to refer to my article, "Relaxed Hands and Good Technique."

2. Play when you are a bit tired. While the bulk of this article has been about the success rate of a stroke, it is also true that extra motion also often requires additional effort and is thereby more tiring. If you have less energy, you will have less energy for your extra motions, and to play a bit tired might force your body to find ways to become more efficient and simplify.

3. As an advanced drill, with a fed ball or a ball machine, hit as hard as you can and look for the place in your motion where your timing breaks down. Note: for this drill, the level of physical self-awareness is very difficult and will likely only work for you if you are already an advanced player, and perhaps even then your motions are too ingrained for you to become aware of them in the same way that many of us are not aware of our own habits.

Challenge Number Two

What would be most helpful to you at this stage in this article would be for me to specifically describe how you can simplify your motion. The challenge of talking about extra motion is particularly difficult because there are an infinite number of ways to make extraneous motion. To address all of them would obviously be beyond the scope of this article.

What is more, even to make clear some of the most common ways of making extraneous motion would require separate articles (or a book). What can be said briefly and generally is that beginning players can often be identified by their use of way too much arm and not enough of the rest of the body. In particular, excessive wrist/forearm use make timing for beginning players particularly difficult (and generally much worse than a 95% success rate).

Intermediate players can be identified by their use of generally correct but still more than necessary motions. It would be typical for an intermediate player to have gotten the wrist/forearm somewhat under control by eliminating or simplifying the movement in that area, but some unnecessary motion typically remains. Advanced players generally move the most efficiently, using the least amount of motion to achieve the greatest effect.

The good news with regard to this second challenge is that while you might not know exactly how to simplify yet, at least you are now aware that it is possible to achieve more by doing less. "Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." — Antoine de Saint Exupéry