WEAPONS

If you want to really be a player, then you need weapons.
Yes, you can just run all over the court and not miss, but even as a rabbit you need weapons. After all, rabbits have great speed, agility, determination and usually annoyingly good passing shots and concentration.
But a more obvious way of developing a weapon is to have a big shot. When I was a kid, it was all about the forehand. Agassi, Courier, Lendl etc were showing that stepping around and whacking the first ball with your forehand was the baseliner's equivalent of hitting the wide serve and volleying to the open court. My favourite exponent of this was Agassi.
And this just wasn't because of the fake mullet, jean shorts, bandana and colour configuration that made him look like a human peacock ... but that certainly didn't hurt his case either. And yes, you better believe I had some Agassi gear in my wardrobe as a kid.
I just loved Andre's forehand. For me, it's still the best forehand ever. Apart from hitting the ball in front, finishing the stroke, hitting from an open stance etc, the thing that always stood out for me about Agassi's forehand was his awesome turn at the start of the stroke.

On this video, look at his left arm at around the 12-19 second mark. It stays on the throat of the racket until the bounce allowing him to track the ball perfectly and then extends to the side of his body and holds there for a prolonged length of time. Andre is loading the gun big time. He's storing energy in his body like someone would store canned food in anticipation of a war breaking out.
And then boom!
I've always had a good forehand and I know that one of the reasons for this was watching Agassi for hours and hours when I was a kid and copying him as much as I could. Maybe I was lucky that I somehow noticed this great unit turn of his and decided I should probably do this too. Maybe I was lucky ... definitely lucky more like it.
Nobody told me about this, it was just something I discovered on my own. I guess what I'm saying is that you really need to work on developing a big shot like Andre's forehand and if this is something you are able to achieve in a natural way like I did, then that's just as good and in my opinion better, than developing it via formal coaching.
Watch the best and learn from the best.

Being a great competitor

If you want to be a great tennis player then you absolutely have to be a great competitor.
Lleyton Hewitt; Jimmy Connors; David Ferrer; Rafa Nadal ... all supreme competitors. With this in mind, here are my buddy Werner's 8 rules for being a great competitor:

1. Don't be perfect - winning or losing a point doesn't make you more or less.
2. Line-up - after mistakes you need to be ready for the next point. The two things you need to manage are your attitude and intentions.
3. Don't fix yourself, manage yourself.
4. No Bulls%$§ - nothing stops you from competing ... not even a bomb going off on the next court.
5. Stay external - keep the focus away from yourself and focus on how to make the opponent suffer ... tactics anyone?
6. Clarity - know what's happening tactically and why momentum is a certain way.
7. Controllable - focus only on what you can control ... attitude, intensity, effort level on each point.
8. Fight feelings - base what you do on tactics and targets and not feelings and emotions.

That's some pretty sound advice.

Keeping it simple

If it's good enough for Tipsarevic to keep it simple then it's good enough for everyone else. After all, the simple way is always the easy way and the right way.
When it comes to simplicity, I am always reminded by what Bruce Lee said:

" ... One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity."

http://blogs.tennis.com/tennisworld/2012/03/by-pete-bodo-miami-not-long-ago-i-came-across-a-video-in-which-janko-tisparevic-then-still-miles-from-his-current-top.html

Words or no words?

I am from New Zealand and am a native English speaker. Yet I live in Austria, speak passable but pretty poor German and have been more successful teaching tennis here than in all the English speaking countries I used to work in combined.
I will say that some of the talent I work with here is a little higher but it's not a tremendous difference. For me, the biggest difference is that my lack of verbal skills in my students language has improved my coaching. There isn't the chance for them to get confused by my words. And as we know, the body doesn't remember words or store words, what the body stores is feel.
And this is what I have focused on - feel.
I can tell you to have a more of a turn at the start of your forehand or a looser arm on your serve, but it is much more powerful for the student if you can experience this feeling through an exercise. You feel it, your body remembers it. Of course you still need a lot of repetition, but your body will remember it.
And when you are playing a match and it's 4-4 in the third, you definitely don't want to be operating by the way of, "do this and then that before I do ... what the heck was I supposed to do again". No, you want to be operating on an instinctive level.
I firmly believe in not trying to sound too clever as a coach and that just giving my students simple exercises to do that helps them feel various things they need to improve has helped their games tremendously.
How do I know this?
Well not once has a player come to me after a tournament match and said they were confused about this shot or that shot or thinking about this or that.
I'm hoping this is the start of getting them to play in the zone.

Gonzo memories

Former Australian Open finalist Fernando Gonzalez retired this week. I could run through some of Gonzo's stats but I'm more a memories kinda guy so I'm sorry to disappoint any trainspotters out there.
As a junior, I played a lot of competitive tennis in Gonzo's backyard of South America. The first year I was in South America was 1994 and a few months after this I was competing in Europe. Whilst in South America I became good friends with a lot of the South America kids which included guys like former top 50 player Luis Horna. All the kids played the first tournament of the European circuit in Holland at a tournament called the Windmill Cup (a week before the tournament, a disgruntled local burnt down the windmill outside the club. I swear, I'm not making this up).
Now during my first trip to South America, Gonzo wasn't there but during that week in Holland, the legend of Gonzo was beginning to grow. The South Americans talked about him like they were talking about Keyser Soze on 'The Usual Suspects'.
"This one time, I saw him do this and this and that. I think I did, no?"
All I heard from these knuckleheads was, wait until you see Fernando play. Wait until you see him hit a forehand. The man was already a legend and he was all of 14-years-old.
The next week we played at a club in Belgium that was called 'The Happy Club'. (First the Windmill Cup with a burnt down Windmill and then the Happy Club. This wasn't even the end of it. The last tournament was played in Brühl in Germany and we all stayed in an Army Barracks that was manned by psychotic looking German Army dudes walking around with bowie knifes, machine guns and german shepherds that I think they used to underfeed on purpose to make them look even nastier than they even were. Before the trip I had also just learnt about the years of 'Nazi Germany'. Safe to say, my Nazi wisecracks were on hold for that week.)
Gonzo arrives at the club for his first match from god knows where. He's there for like 20 minutes before he's about to play. He plays some poor bastard on one of the main courts which has this huge balcony overlooking it and people couldn't have been more fascinated if Sampras and Agassi had shown up to play mixed doubles against Madonna and a Persian Tiger.
Gonzo put on a show and made me think for the first time that there were people who were good tennis players with talent - me - and there were also those people who were just 6789 levels better. He was the first guy who made me literally think, "oh my god, that is what I'm gonna be up against".
You would think Gonzo would have strolled through the tournament but he ended up playing an awesomely casual South American style match in the semi's and lost to some kid from France who another young freak, Xavier Malisse (he was even more impressive than Gonzo) beat in the final.
Gonzo was a cool dude as a junior as he obviously knew he had this extraordinary gift but as we say in New Zealand, he was never a dickhead about it.
And that's why I always cheered for him as a pro.

Reward Effort

Last weekend, a 12-year-old boy I coach lost a heartbreaking match in the final of a big junior tournament. Leading by a set and 5-4, he had three match points. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to take his chances and eventually lost the set in a tie-break.
Now, if you've been around junior tennis or tennis for as long as I have, invariably, after something like this happens the script usually goes as follows:
Player X who blew their chance generally goes beserk; occasionally breaks a racket; starts crying and completely tanks the third. Heah, their kids and they're just learning. This stuff happens.
What is rare, is to see a junior player lose a set in this manner, forget about it and start competing their tail off on the first point of the third set. But this is exactly what this boy did. He didn't win the match, but he didn't lose the third set 0-6 in a screaming fit of rage either. He held his own and played gritty tennis until 3-3 but ran out of gas at the end losing 3-6.
The most positive thing to come out of this match was the maturity of his attitude in the third set. In tennis you have to have a short memory and also fight, claw and scratch for every point. It's tough to train this attitude but one way to try and ingrain it is to always focus on effort during practice sessions. We miss shots all the time and we can't control the fact our opponent might hit a blazing forehand winner on the dead run.
But what we can control is the effort we give on each point. So, run for every ball and fight for every point and good things will happen. And if you're ever in doubt, just think WWDFD?
What would David Ferrer do?

Putting it on the line

As a coach, there is no greater feeling than watching one of your players compete.
I don't just mean go out there and play a match in a tournament, I mean really compete. Last Sunday, a young girl who I have been coaching since 2010 competed her butt off. To me, tennis is boxing with rackets. The opponent is trying to knock you on your back and you have to stand up to them, go toe to toe and not back down. Playing a girl she had lost badly to a few weeks before, my girl played a great first set and a half before getting the wobbles. The last half of the second set wasn't pretty but this is when she showed everyone watching what a competitor she is. It's easy to play when you're out there walking on water. At 4-4, 5-5 and 6-6, she was as far away from walking on water as possible. She was going on guts and determination.
She played a great tie-break and at the end of it she was the Tirolian Masters champion for her age-group.
Tennis is a great measure of one's character. She was out for 6 months at the end of 2011 with shoulder and ankle injuries. She has worked her tail off and has now gotten some reward for it.
For me, seeing her go out there in a pressure situation, stay composed and not back down ... well, it was one of my proudest moments as a coach.
Congrats Andrea O on a truly gutsy performance.
Time for your Petko dance!!!

Austrian kids Masters

Congrats Ayana and Stefan.

http://www.tennistirol.at/1053,1563,,2.html

Golden Tennis Rule

Never get into stupid arguments with people on the internet.
There are 435,865 - of course, all numbers approximate - trainspotters out there sitting around in dressing gowns with nothing better to do than sit around having arguments over tennis technique via a computer. Avoid these people at all costs. Often, the best part of their day is to hear a little 'ding' on their computer which lets them know someone has posted something new on their internet thread. More often than not, it's more pleasureable if the new post disagrees with their theory. This then allows faceless robe wearing trouble maker to rant on about theory Y v theory X for 456 words. Let these people have their fun but, if you never want to feel like hanging yourself or see the inside of a jail cell as a result of beating internet troublemaker to death with a rock hammer, avoid this nonsense. 

At gunpoint

If Omar from 'The Wire' was holding a gun to my head and demanding I tell him the best drill for improving your tennis, before I peed myself and asked him if he wanted any Honey Nut Cheerios, I'd have to go with the following:

Go out on the court and rhythm hit with one tennis ball.

That's it.

Play from the baseline from the net; have one volleying and one hitting groundies but you can only use one ball. If you shank it over the fence into the parking lot, go get the ball. You lose the ball in the bushes, go over the fence and find it.

You'll pretty soon figure out what speed you can comfortably keep the ball in play at as well as move your opponent around the court at. You'll learn the importance of what I call, 'your low game'. Tennis is a game of mistakes. The less you make, the more successful you are. The faster you can play and not miss while making your opponent move, the better player you are. If you have a great low game like Rafa, even when you're not playing your best, you can still go into survival mode and have confidence your opponent will have to work like crazy to beat you.

If you have 19 balls to practise with and miss one, it's not such a big deal. But in a match, if you miss you lose the point. If you do this drill I guarantee it'll drive you nuts for the first 10 or so minutes. You'll play too fast and too low over the net and will be going and fetching the ball time and time again. But the more you do it, the better your concentration becomes and the better you'll understand the value of Bjorn Borg's timeless advice, "just hit the ball over the net one more time than the other guy".

As a tennis player, if you only did one drill for the rest of your life, I'd dedicate 30 minutes each week to this one.

Competing and chilling out

One of the biggest problems I see with kids when they play matches is trying to start off going full gas. Winners will be mixed in with way too many errors and after a few games they still feel like they have no rhythm and feel. This is no doubt also caused by the anxiety and stress that comes along with competition. One method I have used with players with great success is to bribe them for the first 4-5 games of the match. Once you have good feel and rhythm, it's very hard to lose it so what I try and get my players to do is for the first few games, get involved in a lot of long rallies. Establish your rhythm, feel comfortable with the conditions and once you have accomplished this, then put your foot on your opponents throat. So, back to my system of bribery which is especially useful if you have a kid who over-hits. For the first four games of the match, tell your player that each time they play a rally with more than 10 shots, they get 50 cents or $1 depending on how flush you're feeling. This also gets kids minds of panicking about their opponent and really gets them to calm down. Plus, they love playing long points and then looking over at the coach and saying things like, "that's $5 you now owe me."

Greatest Tip Ever « Oscar Wegner

Greatest Tip Ever « Oscar Wegner

The CNS and athletic development

What does the Central Nervous System have to do with you becoming a better athlete?

... Glad you asked.

The CNS consists of the brain and the spinal chord - two mildly important elements - and not only controls muscles but also recieves information from the body. This information - which we get from doing things provides us with information which we can regulate. Over the course of our lives we collect, store and learn to use this information.

Now, when it comes to athletics, having great genetics helps, but our individual genetic plan alone, isn't sufficent to create movement. Our CNS develops as a result of two things:

1. Activity Dependant Development and ...

2. Spontaneous CNS Development

Since I've never been one for techno gibberish, activity dependant development is basically new connections we make as a result of activity. Here, the quality of the activity is crucial. Spontaneous development is just stuff that happens anyway. It's basically what you got from nature - your genetics.

As I said, your genes are important but they are not enough. To really stimulate the development of your nervous system you absolutely need to focus on good quality activities. If what you are doing in training is poor quality activity - not movement based and you spend your time sitting on some stupid weight machine for example - then your nervous system will not fully develop.

Lets take Rafael Nadal as an example. Rafa had great sporting genes as his uncle was a top soccer player in Spain. This would have been enough to take young Rafa to a certain level but it's highly unlikely young Rafa would have turned into the monster Rafa of today without sage like Uncle Toni steering him in the right direction - guidance is critical - activity wise.

So, to fully develop as an athlete and even as a functional adult, focus on quality activities. Things such as inchworms, spiderman climbs and crab walks might not be what your friends or competitiors are doing exercise wise, but kiddies, it's the kind of stuff you need to be doing.

(References: IYCA YFS1)

Indian Wells - The Men

New Zealand's Marina Erakovic may have already lost in the women's event, but that doesn't mean I still can't take an interest in the first masters series event of the year.
Alright, my arm has been twisted and I'm all in on the men's event and the bottom half of the draw in particular. Now there is no point previewing interesting fourth round and quarter final clashes because this means I'd be relying on guys such as Dolgopolov to maintain a certain degree of focus for a minimum of two matches. Yes it can be done and he has done it, but I'm still not laying cash on him being there to face Rafa in the last 16. If on the other hand he was David Ferrer, then I'd go find myself a loan shark and take my chances.
Dolgopolov v Rambo would be interesting but so would Federer v Milos Raonic. They've never met and a slow hardcourt doesn't seem like Raonic's cup of tea but still, he's potentially Del Potro's tag team partner in the 'we serve big and hit even bigger off the ground and scare the s*%t out of you even more' wrestling team for the next five or so years if both can stay healthy so me and everyone else would like to see him face one of the big big boys.
Delusional comment of the week goes to Andy Roddick. The former world number one is seeded 30th in Indian Wells and said something along the lines of, if I was a young kid with this ranking then everyone would be talking about me as an up and comer. I don't know why everyone wants to get rid of me but why should that really bother me because my wife is named Brooklyn Decker and I once got to see her make out with Jennifer Aniston. You figure out what parts of that are true but Andy, c'mon, you're not a young kid and your ranking has been on the slide ever since the 2009 Wimbledon final. You haven't added anything new to your game since then and the vultures are rightly circling your, 'I'm still a threat in the big events' carcass.
Whatever happens, I'm just hoping the weather gets hot enough so that it forces Andy Murray to adopt Ivan Lendl's legionairre cap look.

Improving your volley without a ball?

Something I really believe in is that you don't always need a ball, a court and a partner to improve your tennis. It's vital you get your arms working the right way and a great way to do this to start with is to get rid of the ball.
When it comes to your volleys, it's crucial you get the feel for bringing your hand into your body on the forehand volley and feeling like you are elbowing someone out of the way on your backhand volley. Two other ways to look at it is you want your strings facing the opponents side of the net after contact and you want to hit across the ball for spin and feel.
I was watching the ATP event from Dubai last week and it was awesome to see the Fed attacking the net like he was a lion chasing a zebra. The court was quick and it allowed the great man to utilise all of his skills without having to worry about some clay rat running down a ball while being 7 feet behind the baseline and hitting some insane angle. Fed was knifing volleys left right and centre all week and it reminded me of the contrasting styles I loved so much when I was a kid. Edberg and Becker v Agassi and Courier. The guys all over the net v the guys running for their lives.
Anyway, to get the Fed feel for the volley while hanging out in your own living room, go and stand about 1 arms length away from a wall - you want to be facing the wall. To start with you can use just your hand or a racket and then practise hitting fake volleys where you come across the ball and miss the wall. You will see how your racket angle stays the same and how your hand comes in on the forehand volley and butt cap advances across to the side on the backhand volley.
A good idea is also to alternate between forehand and backhand volleys. Just make sure to point the butt cap of the racket at the wall before hitting your imaginary Fed like backhand volley.

Indian Wells Doubles and volleying

So, Djokovic, Nadal and Andy Murray are all going to play doubles in Indian Wells over the next 10 days. Djokovic partners fellow Serb Victor Troicki; Murray his bro Jamie and Nadal with his pal Marc Lopez. My favourite doubles team in recent times was Bunk and McNulty on 'The Wire' but since that no longer runs, I'm all in on watching the world's best singles players play some dubs.
Volleying is to doubles what eggs are to bacon, so hopefully these guys will venture forward and not just play singles crosscourt. Speaking of volleying and improving your volleys, my favourite intermediate to advanced volleying exercise is to hit volleys with the ptwinsock pro trainer. For those of you that don't know, the winsock is a light weight that you can slide on to your racket and hit all shots with except the serve.
From my point of view you get an awesome feel of stopping the hand at contact on the volley and I also love hitting slice backhands with it. If you stop the hand at contact you're going to hit knife like volleys and just sliding something on your racket and getting the feel for it takes the thought process away. So with the winsock you really slay two dragons (how to do something as well as thinking) in one go.
And in case you were wondering, if there was ever a 'Wire' singles tournament then Omar and his sawed-off shotgun are at the top of the draw with Freamon - the wily vet - seeded second and McNulty destined to play some inspired tennis for the first few rounds before self destructing in a mountain of unforced errors and brainfarts in the quarters.
But heah, it's all in the game.

Not your average warm-up

Most people's stroke warm-up on a tennis court consists of a few minutes of half baked mini-tennis. This is then followed by moving back to the baseline ASAP and flailing away at groundies with reckless abandon. After five or so minutes of this you have even less rhythm and 10 times more frustration than when you began.
At MMT my players are constantly working on improving and ingraining their fundamentals. Even if we are about to embark on a situational training session, more often than not I insist on the younger players in particular running through an organized structured warm-up. Because for me, it's not about quantity of reps, it's about the quality. And if you only have a one hour session then you better make sure the quality is high.
As a result, after warming up physically, here is one sample groundstroke warm-up I get my players to do. Depending on the amount of players on court, either the coach will feed the balls or players will split up into groups and take turns feeding each other.
1. From the service line hit10 forehands and 10 two-handed backhands starting in the looking through the strings position. This emphasizes waiting for and tracking the ball. You look through the strings until the ball bounces and then play your shot.
2. Starting from 3/4 court, hit 10 forehands and 10 backhands counting '1' when your partner tosses you the ball and not hitting your stroke until you get to '5'. This reinforces timing and observing how the ball slows down. More advanced players can do this while moving back to hit the first shot and forwards to hit the next ball.
3. Starting from the baseline, hit 10 forehands and 10 backhands where you have to hold your finish until the ball bounces on the other side of the court. This reinforces finishing the stroke. My favourite version of this is to have players move a few steps to the right or left and hit from an open stance before moving back towards the centre with the racket still in the finish position.
This is just one example of the stroke warm-ups my players do. This is a great way to reinforce key fundamentals of your groundies at the beginning of a training session. The better and more ingrained your fundamentals, the better you'll play so never think you are too good to not concentrate on the basics.

(Note: I learnt these exercises from Oscar Wegner's DVD's. For more great material visit www.tennisteacher.org)