Recently I was playing a guy that I normally handle pretty easily. But this time it seemed that every ground stroke I hit was landing barely beyond the service line, allowing him to dictate play. I tried to place the ball deeper in the court but something about the way I was striking it that day kept it short and prevented me from getting any penetration from the baseline. After a few games of playing nothing but defense, I decided to try and hit the ball a yard past the baseline on purpose. And just like magic, my groundies suddenly began to fall about a yard inside the baseline and I took charge of the match. What I did was something tennis instructors call exaggerating the correction, and it’s a self-coaching technique you can use—especially in practice but occasionally in matches—to remedy your shots when they go off.
The principle is simple: if you’re doing something undesirable—hitting short, long, wide, too high, too low, with too little spin or too much—you can often correct the problem by doing the opposite but in an extreme way.
Let’s say your lobs are so short that your opponents have no trouble smashing overheads for easy winners whenever you put one up. The next time you practice try to send the ball as high as you possibly can and see where it lands. This will teach you to not be tentative with your lobs and follow-through fully just as you would with your ground strokes. Or imagine that your volleys tend to go beyond the baseline too often. In that case, whenever you work on your net game, make a habit of occasionally hitting your volleys intentionally short so that you can get the feel for depth control in the forecourt.
But most importantly, exaggerating the correction gives your brain vital information that enables you to narrow your range down to where you want it to be. And at the same time, it opens you up to all the possibilities available to you with each of your strokes.
No comments:
Post a Comment