New Directions in Professional Tennis Instruction
By Ray and Becky Brown
Tennis is one of the most complex activities ever devised by humans.
But the simple fact is that tennis teaching does not follow the basic principles
of human learning.
This article discusses the challenges of teaching from the point of
view of 8 features of the human learning process that must be considered
when formulating any teaching regime. In subsequent articles, we will present
specific ways to develop an instructional program that addresses these
challenges.
There have been considerable advances in understanding learning within
the past ten years. Understanding these factors and developing teaching
techniques that surmount the barriers they pose has the potential to accelerate
the process of learning to play tennis in a dramatic way.
| Click photo to view video. |
8 Components in the Learning Process
Limitations of Human Visual Processing:
We don’t always see the world as well as we think
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.
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.
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 nature of human vision is critical in understanding and teaching
the game. First, teaching pros, while instructing a student, are not able
to see the most important part of a stroke due to its speed. Unfortunately,
it is during this high-speed "unobservable" portion of the stroke that
most of the student’s problems can be found. We call this the problem of
observability.
The consequence of this problem is that the corrections suggested by
pros may not be related to the actual errors a student is making. 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 relevant point is that to hit a tennis ball accurately, one
must use focal vision rather than peripheral vision. But most of the time
we are playing we are using peripheral vision. It is the natural thing
to do.
Because of this, it is possible to be looking right at the ball with
peripheral vision and hit the ball on the frame of the racquet. It is not
uncommon for a student to be looking at the ball with peripheral vision,
shank the ball, and have their teaching pro say “watch the ball”. This
can be confusing to the student, and may even be demoralizing, because
they are watching the ball, but in a manner that does not provide sufficient
information to make optimal contact with the ball.
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 student’s 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,
and hence is insufficient to convey the intended meaning.
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, by following a specific
tennis tip, a player produces a well hit ball. But the nature of teaching
can make it difficult to create this association. A player can follow a
rule and never get the desired outcome or “value”.
For example, when pros 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.
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These pros have great follow throughs - a well intentioned rule but teaching
it may be meaningless because by itself, it has no associated value.
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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, modern technology has provided a means of examining how the strokes
of the best players in the world are executed: high-speed photography.
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.
Accurately carrying out an intended action, like hitting the ball
out front, is inherently more difficult than it may seem.
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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.
Teaching the development of somatosensory feedback (feeling) control
is in its infancy and there is much more research needed before it can
be successfully taught. However, 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 feedback would arrive too late in most cases to be
useful in correcting the motion during the execution of stroke. In tennis,
players have to rely instead on an “after the fact” sensation to tell if
what they did was correct.
It is our belief that developing the ability to carry out a complex
action on demand in tennis requires more than just developing the after
the fact feeling.
In some endeavors, high precision skills can be recalled on demand by
learning the action as a verbal procedure first, such as done in ballet
with great precision. As no high precision action can be completely conveyed
in words, a series of good verbal approximations must be developed to provide
a starting point for learning.
For tennis, what is needed is to decompose the unobservable, high-speed
portion of each tennis stroke into reproducible and meaningful components
that can be communicated verbally. The challenge here is to get the right
components, and the right number of components. Components such as the
follow through are easily conveyed in words, but lack direct relevance,
because the follow through takes place after the ball has been struck.
Nor can the follow through be tied to the efficiency with which the racquet
strikes the ball.
Each stroke component must serve one of three purposes. It must provide
stability so that the stroke is carried out with minimal variation and
without direct feedback. It must produce racquet head speed to be imparted
to the ball. Or it must provide a means of accurately directing the racquet
to the ball. Professional tennis strokes provide all three of these features
to varying degrees. From an examination of high-speed film from the Advanced
Tennis Research Project it can be seen that among top players that Agassi
and Sampras stand out as individuals who have mastered these three stroke
features to the highest degree.
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.
| Click photo to view video. |
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.
Stress breaks down reflexive recall: If you learn something by “conditioning”
you nay 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.
The short story is 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 will
eventually restore your stroke, however, this can take as long as 20 minutes.
If your strokes are based on templates, then there is little chance
of restoring them under the pressures of a match. Instead, a clear understanding
of relevant components will be your best hope.
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.
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.
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 Brown's article by emailing us
here at TennisONE.
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