Visual Learning: The Quickest Way to Improve

The human body is an incredible machine. If you take the time to realize that every day tasks we do like walking, lifting a pencil, driving a car takes the coordinations of thousands of nerves and muscles synced perfectly with directions from your brain, it's really quite remarkable.

The question is, who taught us these things, how did we come to learn these innate skills. Did we read them in a book? Did someone tell us step by step how to walk, jump and skip rope

The short answer is no. The human mind is an incredible self-learning machine. In fact, most practical things we do everyday were learned from observing others. We see someone do something we like and we copy it. It's amazing how the body can mimic something it sees without step by step instruction from a manual or video.


Ok. How does this a apply tennis? The same way we learn simple tasks by observing, we can learn to improve our tennis strokes. How many times have you seen a great tennis match live and up close and then step out on the court and strike the ball amazingly. That's your mind absorbing the sound and speed of how the players are striking the ball and your mind and body trying to emulate it. Your body is learning from watching. Unfortunately, at most this usually only lasts a session or two before our body begins to forget what it saw and we fall back into that safe haven of our regular play. How can we make a more lasting impression in our heads and help our game out long term?

Visualize and emulate. Find a player you who you'd like to learn a particular stroke from and simply watch. I don't mean chase that little spec on the screen on your Tele during a broadcast but really take an effort to learn by watching. You have to make a concerted effort to gather all the footage and image sequences you can of that player and that stroke. Often you can find articles on the web from certain websites (like Tennisone.com, Hi-Techtennis.com) that break down the strokes of particles players along with slow mo video. Go grab this stuff. Sit there and watch those movies over and over. It may sound silly but sub-consciously your brain is sucking in that sequence into your brain. Everytime it sees it, it reinforces that posture and positions of that player, more and more in your memory. Watch it till you can visualize that sequence in your head.

Marat Safin's Backhand

Now here's the tricky part. Now that you can see the stroke in your head. Now close your eyes and image you and your body performing the same stroke. This will take a bit of time to visualize but in time you should be able to image your body (with your head attached to it) performing the same action exactly as you saw it in the video. Now the amazing thing is, your body now has an amazing reference point to perform the same action with the same posture and positions. Do this a few times in your head, see your self performing the same motions in your head. Now pick up your racquet and do a swing like you image seeing yourself doing in your head. You'd be surprise about how close you can actually mimic the stroke.
The best part is you really haven't told yourself anything really, you just told your body to copy something and it did all through the process of visualization and imagery.



Now just because you imagined yourself hitting a serve at 124mph like Pete Sampras doesn't mean your doing to do it. In fact the 1st time you do a live run of your visually learned stroke can be quite awkard. Timing and hitting the ball is another issue all together but don't get frustrated. Timing will come with practice and muscle memory with repetition. If you already have a solid foundation of strokes it may be just a tweak or two here and there to make it spot on. Always keep a strong image or yourself performing the action in your mind, it will help reinforce the learning process.

Last thing, be realistic. Ivo Karlovic is 6'10. Just because you can swing like Ivo doesn't mean your going hit a serve like him but there are always things about his serve that you can use to improve your shot.

Also this doesn't mean you can learn everything by yourself. A round or two with the head pro from time to time at your local tennis club can be a great help. There are subtle things about each tennis stroke and you may not pick up by just watching like grip tension, weight transfer and arm looseness. Even better, tell your pro your trying to develop a shot like so and so. He may be able to help you even more.

Remember, study, visualize, execute.