The old good tennis

This may seem like the most bizarre piece of information you’ve ever heard, but let’s just back things up a little bit.

Let’s think about what happens when you playing a game.

You get yourself into the point with a great return off a good wide serve by your opponent. You are moving (each other) all over the court building the point nicely when all of a sudden your opponent attacks by deciding to come to the net. You attempt a pass which they volley into the opposite corner and you head off to play a stunning running single-handed backhand pass down the line that a certain Mr Federer would be proud of.

Let’s think about what just happened there.

You may have hit the ball maybe 6 or 7 times but what did you do for the majority of the point?

MOVE!

You moved to all of your tennis shots and you moved to recover.

The fact remains that the time spent hitting shots, never mind the actual time the ball spends on the strings is only a tiny fraction of the time spent moving to and away from your shots.

If this is the case, why do people spend so little time working on their tennis footwork and movement if it is the one thing you spend the most time doing?

FACT! The ATP tour stats on unforced errors are that over 70% of them are down to poor footwork.

Which means……?

If you really want to improve your game, it’s very simple – you need to improve your movement and therefore your footwork.

And here is what you need to do!

When we look at footwork in tennis, the first thing you need to do is stop running so much on the court.

You should only run if you are a long way from the ball and it is the only way to get there quickly. Apart from that most of your movements around the court should be made using side shuffles and cross over steps (basically short step movements).

By having good footwork you get the flexibility of choice. You get to choose open or closed stance, cross court or down the line, backhand or inside out forehand, deep or short, passing shot or lob to name but a few. Without it you will have fewer choices available and the choices you do have may well suffer from poor execution.

You improve your agility, balance and co-ordination which are all vital components for high level play.

The type of footwork drills you should be using include cone drills like zig zags and drills that use ladders as a training aid.

My recommendation is that you start incorporating footwork drills into every one of your lesson/practice times. If your coach is not up to speed with all of this then do it on your own or find another coach!

You know that saying – what came first the chicken or the egg?

Well in the case of tennis it is without doubt the movement before the shot ‘ so try leaving your racket in the bag, work on your footwork and movement and discover how well you hit the ball when you finally do pull your racket out.

I have put together a special report on tennis footwork which goes into a bit more detail and includes 10 pages of drills to be used.

If you want to emulate the powerfully impressive style of play by world No.2 Rafael Nadal, try training on one leg.

Top tennis trainer Paul Gold explains

Who wouldn’t want to be like Rafael Nadal? His muscle-bound physique and awesome talent with a tennis racket means he looks the part and plays the part of a player ranked No.2 in the world.

It’s hardly surprising therefore that many players are hitting the gym in a quest to emulate their Spanish hero.

Modern tennis is, after all, all about power ‘ power of movement, power of shot and power of thought ‘ and Nadal is an undisputed world-class powerhouse in all of these departments.

It’s clear that the stronger you are the greater the intensity at which you can perform and the less risk you face of injury. But can you be too strong?

Could the new gym rats who want to look like and play like Nadal be doing themselves more harm than good?

There is no question that strength without skill or even good skill levels with low strength will produce less than optimum results. But is it really that important for a tennis player to be able to perform a traditional gym exercise like a squat using a 200+kg bar?

It could be argued that a squat of 100kg along with great stability, power, body control and skill is a far better combination.

This begs the question, “Why not have all these and a 200+kg squat?” Although this sounds like the ideal solution, discussion of this nature is totally misguided.

The main problem is that when it comes to weight training, players (and their coaches and fitness trainers) are often guilty of using old, non-sports-specific bodybuilding principles that focus on building size in isolated muscles through use of exercises that operate in only one plane of motion.

In tennis you need to be able to convert muscle strength into explosive power very quickly. Although traditional weight training will make you stronger, it won’t necessarily enable you to convert that strength into power quick enough for maximum tennis performance.

Let’s face it, in a multi-skilled sport like tennis, the objective is to improve sport performance and reduce injury potential, not build entrants for bodybuilding competitions!

You may possibly start to look a bit like the heavily muscled Nadal, but you still won’t be much nearer to producing his level of power ‘ that’s assuming you haven’t injured your back in along the way!

Let’s examine the example of the 200+ kg squat.

To work on the squat in the traditional way means at best the player loads up the bar to the point where they need a ’spotter’ (someone who provides support) for safety reasons. Alternatively, they use a cage that is safer but because the bar is fixed it does not allow them to work in a multi-plane environment ‘ which after all is how the game of tennis is played.

One of the biggest problems with both of these scenarios is that the excessive loading that occurs to the spine and joints on an ongoing basis impacts on the risk/safety ratio over time. The greater the loads, the greater are the chances of injury. Often players get to the point of ‘failure’ because of the physical and mental pressure of the bar on their backs rather than because of fatigue in the legs.

There is no doubt that for a player to improve strength they must train at intensities high enough to elicit a strength response (the principle of overload), but there is a better way to increase muscular loading AND nervous system loading ‘ thus improving core stability and balance in the process and lessening the strain on the spine and joints.

This can be achieved using single-leg exercises ‘ replicating the game of tennis that’s played predominantly on a single-leg basis anyway.

You can still do maximal lifts just as you would with traditional double-leg squatting, but without the excessive loads on the spine and joints.

Note – You can also use this type of training on the upper body with the use of dumbbells.

This kind of training means that unlike traditional weight training you are working more muscles ‘ the primary muscles (big muscle groups) as well as the smaller stabilisers.

Furthermore, this kind of strength training also provides an added skill component to your physical training that will reap rewards when transferred to the court.

As far as Nadal is concerned, he is clearly a very talented player who was born with great tennis skills, which he has honed over the years.

His physique and the physicality of his style of play only go to enhance his considerable racket skills, without which he would not be the same player.

Try incorporating some single-leg and single-arm exercises to help maximise your tennis performance while staying injury-free.

What Every Trivia Enthusiast Should Know About Tennis

Trivia has grown exponentially in popularity in the last decade. One of the most common types of trivia that is played between friends, family, and loved ones is sports trivia.

There are dozens of sports trivia games, online and physical, that are literally at your fingertips. If you haven’t yet explored them, now is a great time. But, like most of us, if you already are familiar with the subject of sports trivia, then you’re probably looking for trivia information that you can use.

This article is all about tennis. So, if you’re looking for trivia on the subject of tennis and its history, you are in the right place. Here we go.

•    On September 20th, 1973, at the Houston Astrodome, female tennis extraordinaire Billy Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in front of 30,000 spectators in the famous “Battle of the Sexes”.

•    Tennis was introduced as a bona fide Olympic sport in the year 1896. Afterwards, it was removed from Olympic competition following the 1924 games and wasn’t formally reinstated as an Olympic sport until 1988.

•    The sport of Tennis was created in England.

•    The first Tennis Masters Cup was won by Gustavo Kuerten of Brazil who defeated American Andre Agassi in straight sets in the year 2000.

•    The “open era” of the US Open began in the year 1968 and was won (men’s singles) by Arthur Ashe and (women’s singles) by Virginia Wade.

•    The French Open is also known as Tournoi de Roland-Garros and as Les Internationaux de France de Roland Garros.

•    The last men’s singles Wimbledon championship to be won by a British citizen was in 1936, when Fred Perry accomplished that feat.

•    The common tennis ball weighs just more than 2 ounces and just less than 2 and 1/16 ounces.

•    The first American woman to win the French Open was Helen Wills in 1928.

•    The longest recorded tennis match of the open era lasted an exhausting 6 hours and 33 minutes. This match was played at the 2004 French Open and was between Frenchmen Arnaud Clement and Fabrice Santoro. Santoro finally beat Clement 16-14 in the fifth set.

•    The term used to refer to “0” in tennis is “Love”.

•    Boris Becker was the first unseeded player to win the Wimbledon singles championship title. He did this in 1985 at the age of 17.

This is just a very brief overview of the vast amounts of tennis trivia that are available to you; however, the information that you have just received can definitely help you in your “trivial pursuits”. I hope that you have learned something valuable here and that you can use it and share it.

Ornaments like bracelets, wedding rings and gemstone rings have always fascinated the human mind. Of these, bracelets have existed for almost 7000 years now, and are chiefly manufactured from precious stones, metals and some commonly found substances like leather, clothes, wooden pieces, rocks, beads, shells etc. The purpose of wearing a bracelet could vary from decorating one’s body to providing somebody with medical assistance or an identification tool. The article’s past and present is full of glorious stories like any other jewelry item on earth. The word Bracelet is thought to have originated from the Latin term “brachile” meaning “of the arm”.

People in some Latin American countries think of bracelets named Azabache as a shield for the newborn babies against the evil eyes. Such bracelets are normally made either from gold or its alloys. Some gold necklaces, apart from the gold bracelet forms we spoke of, are also occasionally given the same name however, making the category a broader set of protective jewels like gold bracelets, gemstone rings, gold chains, gold necklaces etc. Similar protective ornaments are also found in many other countries, including those from South East Asia and Eastern Europe. A popular Bulgarian tradition named Martenitsa requires wearing of red and white strings around one’s wrist area to welcome the arrival of spring. Egyptian bracelets are traced back up to 5000 years BC in time. They were normally made from animal bones, wooden pieces and stones, and carried along some kind of religious and social significance. One of these bracelets, called Scarab, is often found pinned inside many discovered mummies.

Many localized forms of bracelet may be discovered if one traveled across the globe. Glass and metallic bangles worn by the Indian women, and the metallic ones worn chiefly by the North Indian Sikh males, also known as Kadas, are among those many. In the case of Kadas, the bracelets are mostly manufactured from a cheap alloy like stainless steel, but are assumed to carry a great deal of social significance. One might discover many traditional forms of bracelets on traveling across the tribal regions in India, specially the ones from northeastern states. These forms may usually come assembled with wooden and rock pieces, beads, shells, animal bones and some commonly found metal alloys. Of course, the more known type of bracelets, gold bracelets, may be found in use wherever you traveled across India.

Some very popular bracelets of the modern times are charm bracelets, friendship bracelets, sports bracelets and slap bracelets. Wearers of each of these carry some kind of fashion or social statement by making their use. There is a rich variety of bracelets available if you solely began looking out for the fashion part. Bracelets like the Designer Gold Bracelets, White Gold Bracelets, Figaro Bracelets, Diamond Bracelets and Titanium Bracelets are some of the most admired varieties of today’s times. All major fashion houses, apart from the known ornament companies, do also launch and promote their own bracelets from time to time.

Visiting ornament selling websites might give you an inside view of the rich options available in gold bracelets and other forms globally. They may start anywhere from $300 and rise up to $1.5k or even more as you looked forward to having a balance between the quantity and quality both. There are plenty of choices available in all individual categories. All you require doing is spending out some time and selecting your preferred Diamond, Figaro or Gold bracelet from a given bunch of so many options.

Everybody knows that the tennis serve is a very important shot but how many club players have a really good tennis serve?

Let’s be honest if the Roddick tennis serve wasn’t a very powerful tennis serve, his ranking would be a whole lot lower.

But what can you do to improve your tennis serve? Is there a way to the perfect tennis serve? Is there a way to get a faster tennis serve?

Well for the people still struggling with their delivery there is one main word that they should be looking to improve – THROW!

Yes that’s it, there is a direct relationship between someone’s throwing ability and their serving ability and that’s a fact – do not forget that.

The fact remains that far too many people miss this point and do all the wrong things when trying to improve and even learn the serve and that includes many coaches who do all the wrong things when it comes to tennis serve coaching

It has nothing to do with strength, gender and/or muscle size as tennis serve biomechanics are all about throwing technique to such an extent that I regularly have my under 9 squad out-throw many of my adult squads just to illustrate the point. It causes a few red faces but everybody leaves with a better understanding.

Also high standard female players can out-serve male amateurs most of whom are bigger so that just proves the tennis serve technique over muscle or even gender issue.

This is not some revelation in tennis training as people were throwing rackets across the net many years ago when most courts were grass and the chances of breaking your racket was minimal and even now the Williams sisters throw their old rackets about to practise their serves and they are 2 of the biggest servers in the Women’s game!

So how good is your throwing?

Can you throw a tennis ball from one baseline to the other or even better into the back fence opposite (with no run up)?

If you can’t then you need to be working on it because I have 8 year olds that can so it is possible!

Biggest mistakes/things to get right! The main error I see is where people try to throw a ball with their body facing the target, rather than sideways on and rotating their hips, trunk and shoulders in order to accelerate the ball. The second BIG mistake is when the elbow is lower than the shoulder as you bring the arm forward. You must get the elbow higher just like you were carrying a javelin NOT a shot putt! The third BIG mistake is when the wrist is behind the elbow at the release point. Look at any slow-mo of great servers or even pitchers (same basic action) and you will see that when they release the ball, their throwing arm is fully extended and straight from the shoulder to the wrist. If you don’t have these three “factors” in place you will end up with a pushing action rather than a chucking/throwing action and a very ineffective serve. So get those old tennis balls and get to work – remember you don’t have to be a girl to throw like a girl!