Hip the ball for Successful Tennis with Paul Prior

The rotation of the hips is important to allow the power to continue flowing up through our bodies and into the racquet and ball. The hips are the link in the Bio-Kinetic chain that cause the most breakages. This exercise assists in developing not only the movement but timing too of when to rotate the hips!

Theory of watching the tennis ball

It is pretty simple, you can not hit something that you can not see. If you were in a totally dark room, even with your eyes open, the chance of you hitting an object that is stationery is pretty much slim to none.

The most important object in a tennis match is the ball!

I often watch the professional players play a match and am reminded that the best players in the world focus and do the basics better than everyone else, with the most basic part of tennis being to hit the ball in the middle of the racquet head.

It took me almost 25 years of playing tennis to shout “Eureka”! I still recall the time and practice session that I was having so vividly. I said to myself, “Wow, I can see the ball”, but it also got me thinking. In all the years of tennis and tennis lessons and coaches that I worked with, why did none of them ever teach me how to watch the ball. I was doing what I think most players do, I was tracking the ball with my eyes and head. Just before contact I would quickly move my eys to the contact point of the stroke. The problem is that in those milliseconds of time, I would lose the ball and not be able to refocus fast enough on the ball to see it just before contact.

I think that this principle is applicable to all sports where the player is hitting a moving ball similar to baseball, cricket or lacrosse.

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?