What We Must Do to
Revitalize the Sport of Tennis

By  Ray and Becky Brown

Recently the WTA year-end tournament was played in Los Angeles and the stands were nearly empty. This is symptomatic of where professional and amateur tennis is today.

There are two related facts that stand out as possible explanations: The gap between the professional and amateur player has widened significantly over the past twenty years, making it very difficult for the amateur to relate to the professional. Second, the methods by which tennis is taught have not kept up with the advancements in science and technology, making it very difficult to elevate amateur play to where the amateur can relate to the professional.

One approach to solving these problems is to address the way tennis is taught at the grass roots level. This will require a partnership for improvement between the teaching community and the tennis industry.

While efforts in this direction have begun, none that we have seen are focused on the fundamental obstacles to improving teaching at the amateur level. We divide these obstacles into two areas: One is understanding how humans learn because this is where teaching really begins. Two is understanding how to carry out a systems analysis of high speed video to pinpoint the students' impediments to progress. These two problem areas must be taken together to obtain the best results. By a systems analysis approach to high speed video we are able to identify, classify, and formulate solutions to problems in a framework of facts rather than rules. By understanding how people learn, we are able to convey these findings to the student in a form that the student can readily assimilate and utilize to improve. 

In a follow-up article we will show, by example, how carryout a systems analysis of high speed video to put and formulate a framework for teaching the forehand that will close the gap between amateur and professional technique in a reasonable time frame (in some cases about one year). By closing this gap, without requiring the average player to incur great expense or devote long periods of time to training, we believe the general public will regain an interest in tennis fueled by what they are able to do on the court.   

Eyewitnesses to crimes are notoriously unreliable. The same is true when players and coaches try to describe tennis strokes. There are at least two sources of this unreliability: One is related to the ‘speed’ with which we see, which is about 30 frames per second. The second is that there are two types of vision, peripheral and focal. Peripheral vision, the form most commonly used, is not sufficiently precise to hit a tennis ball cleanly.

Without high-speed video, teaching pros, are not able to see the most important part of a stroke due to its speed.

Normal visual processing of about 30 frames per second is too slow to observe what is happening in any tennis stroke (about 200 frames per second would be much better). Further, there is no stop action in our visual processing, so even at 30 frames per second, we are unable to recall any specific frame. Hence, teaching pros, while instructing a student, are not able to see the most important part of a stroke due to its speed. 

The 30 frames per second visual limitation explains why traditional tennis teaching methods have divided the stroke into three parts: The preparation (taking the racquet back), the swing, and the follow-through. We can see the preparation, the follow-through, and the swing, but not the details of the swing. Unfortunately, it is during this high speed "unobservable" portion of the stroke that most of the student's problems can be found. 

In place of explaining the details of the swing, traditionally oriented teaching pros have focused on the preparation and the follow-through. There arose a mistaken belief that if the preparation and the follow-through were right, then the swing would be right. Nothing could be farther from the truth as high speed video has revealed.

The consequence of the visual limitation problem is that you can't correct an error that you cannot see. For this reason, high speed video developed by Advanced Tennis, and also found on TennisONE, will play an increasingly important role in tennis instruction in the future.

The second limitation is that as we move around, we primarily depend on our peripheral vision. This is of great importance to tennis. Our brains do not process this form of vision very accurately since we require only rough information about our environment to move about successfully. To perform precise tasks we use an entirely different form of vision, called focal vision, which is processed very accurately.

The issue of peripheral versus focal vision is that to hit a tennis ball accurately, one must use focal vision to practice rather than peripheral vision. But most of the time we are practicing we are using peripheral vision. It is the natural thing to do. Once in a while we will get into a state where we are using focal vision during practice and will have the best practice of our lives. However, for many players, as soon as we begin a match, peripheral vision takes over and we begin hitting off center or worse. This can be confusing and discouraging if you do not know what is happening.

The significance of this is that if you say "watch the ball" when a student hits the frame, you may be giving confusing advice. In many cases, the student is likely watching the ball, but with peripheral vision. The student may think he/she is watching the ball, so your advice may only make matters worse. Using high speed video, you will be able to identify this problem. If the student is watching the ball but hitting off center, then a better approach may be to first discuss the two forms of vision so that the student will not be confused. And second, develop techniques for getting the student to use focal vision. 

The Ambiguity of Human Language: 
If it has two meanings, half of your students may miss the point

Another challenge to tennis instruction is the ambiguity of human language. The role of language in teaching a skill is that it makes it possible convey to the student the insights of those who have mastered the skill, reducing the students learning time. However, if in the course of teaching, the instructor uses ambiguous language, the learning time may actually be increased rather than reduced.

To teach high precision skills in the shortest possible time, one must use a high precision language. Today, there is no formal language being used to teach tennis. What we do have is a set of ambiguous metaphors, templates, and rules that are used in place of a formal language.

For example, the phrase “hit through the ball” has numerous interpretations, only one of which is useful for hitting a tennis ball. A student may spend many hours trying different ways of "hitting through the ball" and never get it right. Another example is "lean on the ball". Hit the ball harder, step into the ball, or lean forward while hitting the ball are all possibilities. But who knows what it really means.

Modern technology provides the opportunity to replace the ambiguity of metaphors, templates, and rules with facts. Doing this will greatly accelerate the learning process. This requires the instructor to examine more closely what they say and find precise ways of saying it.

The Problem of Associative Learning: 
If it has no meaning, it is easily forgotten

Humans learn most quickly through relevance. If an action has a result that can be associated to a value or an observable outcome, it is learned more quickly than a meaningless action. For example, suppose by following a specific tennis tip, a player produces a well hit ball during a lesson. Unless the tip has a rational meaning, the student will find it difficult to create a meaningful association. As a result, when the player leaves the lesson, the they are unable to repeat their performance.

A very common example is provided by pros who insist on a student developing a “follow through”. They are imposing a (well intentioned) rule for which there is no associated value or meaning. This is because you can have a great follow through without having good ball control, or even good ball contact.  

What is needed is to determine what is useful (as is being done) but most importantly why. It is in understanding the WHY that the student will be able to make significant reductions in the time it takes to develop professional level strokes. 

The Problem of "On-demand" Recall of Reflexive Memory: 
We seldom know how we did it 

We have all had the experience of hitting a perfect shot only to realize we have no clue as to how we did it. This is because the human brain has very little ability to recall the details of a reflexive action on demand. This fact makes it almost impossible for Pete Sampras (or any expert) to tell a student what she or he does to hit a tennis ball. One well-known result of this fact is that great players are not necessarily great teachers.

This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that most people firmly believe that they can recall, on demand, the details of a reflexive action. However, high-speed photography provides a different story. In countless situations high speed video has demonstrated that players do not have a declarative knowledge (a knowledge that can be accurately conveyed in words) of what they are doing to hit their shots.

Using high-speed photography, it is now possible to develop a detailed factual record of the strokes of a large body of the best practitioners. Although this work is still in it’s early stages it already shows the potential to help pros everywhere overcome many of the inherent limitations of human perception.

The Problem of Intentional Action: 
We have less control than we think. 

How often have you heard “hit the ball out front”? This (ambiguous) rule is repeated every day and still many students have trouble with the execution, even if they interpret it correctly. Accurately carrying out an intended action, requiring precision, is inherently difficult.

Even if one had prefect recall, and the teacher conveyed their actions perfectly, a human's ability to carryout an action intentionally as prescribed is initially quite limited.

One source of the difficulty of intentional action is the absence of good visual feedback loop in our brains. This could be used to correct an action while it is being carried out. Instead we must rely on developing an internal “somatosensory” memory—better known as a feeling to tell when an action is proceeding correctly. 

However, even here there are limitations. Even if the feeling for a movement were to be developed perfectly, the speed of action on a tennis court greatly exceeds the speed of the fastest somatosensory feedback loop in the human brain. Even perfect somatosensory feedback would arrive too late in most cases to be useful in correcting an error in a stroke during execution. 

In tennis, players have to rely instead on an “after the fact” sensation to tell if what they did was correct. How all of this after the fact feedback works to improve performance is a current and very active area of research. The speed with which this research proceeds may depend heavily on pros conducting controlled experiments in this area and accurately recording the outcomes of these experiments.

The Problem of Neuronal Disassembly and Neuronal Encroachment: 
Learning is a battle ground

Have you ever gotten you serve down pat on a Saturday and then find it impossible to hit a decent serve two days later? This is likely a result of the curious feature of the human brain has of partially disassembling, over night, the knowledge of an action learned the previous day. Since brains learn the basic components of a procedure and a method of assembling these components to execute the procedure, it has no need to store (remember) the procedure as a complete unit.

High-speed video, reveals top players like Agassi and Sampras have mastered important stroke features to the highest degree.

If you learn your serve as a complete unit or template, you are going to easily forget it. However, if you learn your serve or any other stroke as a set of elementary relevant components, it will be easily reassembled each day you go out to play. But it will require time to reassemble, and you must allow for this, without getting frustrated. In fact, frustration can significantly delay reassembly of a stroke just as would be the case when reassembling a rifle. 

The natural disassembly process is a nuisance that must be respected if we are to learn a procedure as quickly as possible. But there is another dynamic of the human brain that is just as annoying. Every action or thought requires an assembly of neurons to carry it out. However, neurons assembled and devoted to one task may be co-opted by neurons developed for an entirely different task, depending on your priorities in life. A good example is when a person who has lost his hands learns to use his feet to perform many of the same tasks. 

If the original learning event was based on insufficient information, ambiguities, or purely reflexive conditioning, it can be easily forgotten and any attempt to reproduce it by referring to the imprecise information is usually futile. 

The solution of this problem is to teach stroke components. This will be illustrated in the next article. But it is worth while for each pro to use high speed video to break down the "swing" stage of  their stroke into meaningful components just to develop some insight into why tennis is so hard to teach.

Stress Breaks Down Reflexive Knowledge:
If you learn something by “conditioning” you may easily forget it under the pressure of a match.

Have you ever come off the court after a particularly stressful match and said, “I forgot how to hit a forehand”? If so, you probably learned your forehand by rote repetition or conditioning. It is a fact that procedures learned by rote and reflexive conditioning are easily forgotten under stress. What is poorly understood is that during a tennis match the levels of mental and physical stress can reach crisis proportions.

The significance of this that rote conditioning will not necessarily carry you through a tough match. About the only solution known today to quickly remedy the breakdown of a stroke is to have a verbal knowledge of the individual components of a stroke that can be used to restart your reflexive processing. If you have time on your side, then some form of mental relaxation may eventually restore your stroke, however, this can take as long as 20 minutes, and so the match may be over before you recover.

In short, tennis instruction must move away from templates and rules to purpose and reason. We must put more responsibility for learning in the hands of the student by providing more facts, encourage experimentation, exploration, and individual initiative. The learning process should be a exploratory journey of teacher and student if the student is to excel at their highest level.

The Problem of Layered Learning: 
The faster you try to go, the slower you may learn.

No one can tell you exactly how to hit a tennis ball. What they can do is convey some idea through words and examples of how it might be done. This is because language is imprecise at best, we have a limited ability to convey our actions in words, and humans learn in a series of successive approximations. We have addressed two of these challenges above so we will address the third here. 

Learning is somewhat like climbing a series of hills where the next hill can only be seen after one reaches the top of the one before it. The first approximation of a stroke will usually be crude and inefficient. But because you have a first approximation, you have a basis for an improvement that would not be possible without it. It is not possible to jump from never having hit a tennis ball to hitting a tennis ball efficiently. It must proceed in stages. 

The challenge to tennis teaching community is to formulate the best possible set of stages of learning. This must start with the best (by present standards) set of components that can be approximated and conveyed in words and actions. The components must be simple and relevant if the student is to learn quickly. It must be possible for the student to practice these components, like learning musical scales, on their own on a backboard for example, without supervision.

The most important point about layered learning is this: If the learning process is rushed, and if the student is not given ample time for exploration and experimentation, the layers will be easily broken down under pressure, or will be broken down by the natural disassembly process we spoke of earlier. 

Another important implication of this fact is that the teacher should not think that they can impose a rigid template regime on the student from the start and presume that this will promote learning. The first approximation will not be perfect. It might even violate all of the traditional rules. If so, it should not be discouraged!  If the students initial attempts to hit are crude and uncertain, it is most likely due to uncertain information, not a lack of ability. How people find their way to a correct concept is mysterious and varied and this must be respected, not rejected. 

We find that most problems clear up without our attention if we focus on the facts and what is relevant.  For example, we find that students learn correct footwork without our ever mentioning it. Footwork is not the cause of a problem, it is a symptom. Get the right layers in place with clear explanations and examples, and the initial approximations of a stroke evolve into good approximations. 

The Problem of Component Based Learning: 
We don’t learn entire templates efficiently.

In early childhood development there are no templates, metaphors, or rules to guide the development of physical or mental skills. A child learns by exploration and experimentation. In this experimental trial-and-error process, the child develops many “action components” which do not necessarily constitute a purposeful act, but which become useful later when their environment begins to enlarge and change. This might be described as component based learning. It is the natural learning process and ensures the ability to adapt to new environments and circumstances before they are encountered. If, for example, walking templates and rules were imposed on a child during their early developmental years, the results would be disastrous.

The fact is that our brains do not operate effectively from templates and rules precisely because they restrict our ability to adapt. The same is true for tennis. If we make templates and rules the basis of teaching, the learning process will be retarded accordingly. This fact does not only apply to tennis, but to education generally. The challenge to tennis professionals is to define the right components from which to start the teaching process. This requires us to systematically replace every template, metaphor, and rule with relevant and meaningful components, facts, and data. 

Many professionals have been nudging the tennis profession in this direction for years. Notably in this regard are: Vic Braden, John Yandell, Dennis van der Meer, Jim Loehr, Jack Groppel, and others as well. However, what has not been done is to organize the experimental findings and insights of these researchers around the mechanics of human learning that have been discovered by such eminent researchers as Professor Walter Freeman at Berkeley, Professor Ellen Langer at Harvard, Professor Anders Ericsson at Florida State University, or many other scientist who have contributed to our understanding of the human brain.

What this means is that the scientific research must be translated into specific procedures that are clearly supportable by science and thus not just a matter of personal opinion, as is the case with much of teaching today. The procedures must be as simple as possible, unambiguous, reproducible, transferable, and must allow the student freedom to explore and experiment independently of the instructor. We must replace metaphors with facts, templates with components, and rules with reason.

The Bottom Line: 
Teaching anything is hard.

The nature of human learning is a significant challenge to teaching even when scientific facts and precise language are available. The problem is not with the student; we are what we are due to years of evolution. Our challenge is to reinvent professional teaching to fit the human learning process. If we do this, children and adults alike will develop the skills to play tennis in less than half the time now needed. 

Your comments are welcome. Let us know what you think about Ray and Becky Brown's article by emailing us here at TennisONE.  

Ray and Becky Brown are the founders of EASI Tennis^TM. The EASI Tennis^TM System is a new and revolutionary method of teaching stroke technique that can dramatically reduce the time needed to learn to play master, or any level, of tennis. To learn more about the EASI Tennis^TM System, click here.

Ray Brown, Ph.D.
Over the past ten years Ray Brown has been working in the area of neuroscience and brain dynamics. During this time, he has conducted extensive experiments in conjunction with his wife to determine whether neuroscience can be applied to dramatically accelerate tennis training. Dr. Brown received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in the area of nonlinear dynamics and has over 30 years of experience in the analysis of nonlinear systems. He has published over 20 articles on tennis coaching and player development and over 35 scientific papers on complexity, chaos, and nonlinear processes.

Becky Brown, M.S.
Using the new training methods developed in research with her husband, Becky Brown went from a USTA NTRP tennis rating of 3.5 to a professional world ranking of 1,069 in less than four years. Prior to the inception of this neuroscience research, Becky Brown had no previous high school, college or professional experience in tennis. Ms Brown received her M.S. in applied mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and has over eighteen years experience in the development of high technology defense systems. With her husband she has co-authored numerous articles on tennis training and coaching.

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