Watch Out

The road to improvement in tennis is riddled with potholes! 

The internet has given birth to a myriad of well-meaning instructors and coaches that sometimes provide well thought out videos, shot at good angles with thoughtful and concise narration. 

Other times the angle of the camera doesn't best illuminate the skill being demonstrated or the accompanying verbiage is full of jargon that complicates the digestion of the information being provided. 

The videos of world-class players that can be dialed up at a moment's notice provide normal players with wonderful examples of very advanced skills being executed by EXTREMELY GIFTED ATHLETES. 

These are fun to watch, but VIEWER BEWARE: the techniques are generally not appropriate for human consumption. 

The grip that high-level players use may be a few degrees different from your grip; their muscular development from many thousands of hours of practice and their flexibility earned by properly executed stretching routines over years of training is most certainly different than yours. 

So, although visual learning is a very powerful tool, it is prone to misinterpretation and consequently incorrect execution. 

No two players swing the same way even though they are striving for the same result. 

I'd venture to guess that once a week I have to provide a course correction to a player that has veered off their road by having misapplied some visual input from a well-meaning video.