How to know your opponents weak shots

I can hear the question, and as important as it is to know the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents, you need to know what to look for and how to look for it in order to see it. Once you know how to locate the weak strokes, you will start to see things that you as a tennis player have never seen before.

It is called congnitive recognition.

Watching your opponents body language is the single most important factor when learning which strokes are their strongest and weakest. Our brains have the ability to make instantaneous calculations while watching our opponents execute strokes. In the same way that we can within split seconds determine whether a persons face is balanced and has their facial features in propotion to each other, so we are able to determine our opponents stroke effeciencies and balace through the stroke in less than seconds.

Here are a few important actions and comments from an opponents body language to look for:

Confidence

Step into the ball

Full swing

Racquet head speed

What other actions can you think of that can give you a heads up to your opponents stronger or weaker strokes?

4 Keys to an effective stroke

We all enjoy the rush and thrill of seeing the tennis ball whizz past our opponent. I have all too often been way too excited in the anticipation of it that I end up with the ball in the net or back fence.

In order to hit the un-returnable stroke, the tennis ball needs to have as these characteristics:
1. Speed
2. Depth
3. Spin
4. Placement

Not listed in order of preference, the more characteristics that the ball has, the more effective the stroke is. A ball with all 4 characteristics is a guaranteed un-returnable ball, but you could still see a stroke where the ball only has one of these characteristics being un-returnable.

The characteristics act like a scale, for example a ball travelling at 150mph is very effective, however so is a ball only travelling at 10mph. It is when you find the ball in the middle zone that your ball loses effectiveness and becoming easier to take advantage of. In the same way, a ball landing on the baseline is very effective and too is the drop shot barely making it over the net. A ball bouncing in the middle of the court near the service line on the other hand is not effective in helping you win the points.

We will discuss these characteristics and how to obtain them over the next weeks.

Theory of Pi

From one of my favorite programs comes the definition of Pi, “A number that contains the number of everything that matters to each person.” Although I like that definition, here is the mathematical definition “Represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.”

What has this all to do with tennis and my swing? You will see below a diagram of the swing path for a right handers forehand or left handers backhand. The racquet tip travels along the bigger circle (2), creating a quarter circle from the position of taking the racquet back till contact.

Based on the mathematical equations, an object covering the distance on the line 2 would have to travel Pi or 3.14 times the speed of an object covering the distance on line 1.

If line 1 represented the movement of the players hand and line 2 the path of the racquets tip, in order for both to travel the distance of the quarter circles leaving and arriving at the same time would require that the racquet tip traveling on line 2 to travel Pi or 3.14 times the speed of the hand.

Therefore if the players hand was traveling at 10 mph, the racquets tip would need to travel 31.4 mph.