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    Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique: Using Science to Improve Your Strokes
    Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique: Using Science to Improve Your Strokes
    Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique: Using Science to Improve Your Strokes
    Ebook261 pages2 hours

    Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique: Using Science to Improve Your Strokes

    By Duane Knudson

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    About this ebook

    The science of tennis technique is explained in this guide that practically applies the lessons learned from studying the forces and motions of tennis strokes. Through the implementation of six basic biomechanical principles players can make subtle adjustments to their strokes, creating stroke variations that not only improve their game but also reduce their risk of injury. Detailed line drawings; stroke analysis and sequence photos of top touring pros; action photographs and high-speed video images; and an exploration of the benefits of video replay provide players with a variety of useful techniques.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUsrsa
    Release dateApr 1, 2006
    ISBN9780983511182
    Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique: Using Science to Improve Your Strokes

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    Reviews for Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique

    3/5

    6 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Just a very good scientific and handy book for coaches and tennis players
    • 3/5
      Heavy, but concise, this is good background reading for engineer-types like me who want to understand the mechanics behind the stroke advice we hear in drill.

    Book preview

    Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique - Duane Knudson

    INDEX

    PREFACE

    The purpose of this book is to give tennis players knowledge of key concepts of biomechanics so they can make informed decisions about stroke techniques. Tennis players naturally want to maximize performance while minimizing the risk of injury. These are also the two primary goals of research in sport biomechanics.

    The book is not intended to replace your tennis pro. Most certified tennis professionals have some training in the application of biomechanics to tennis strokes. This book will help you interact with your pro/coach to make wise decisions about adjustments to your game. Tennis pros will likely help you integrate the information in this book with the strategic (match plan) and tactical (specific implementation of strategy) knowledge this book does not cover. This book will also help tennis pros and coaches update their knowledge on the mechanics of strokes. Reference citations are provided for key papers, sources, and as tips to readers interested in additional information. I encourage all readers to explore these excellent sources. I apologize to some of my peers whose work could also be cited to support many points, but all supporting data would be a distraction to most readers.

    Considerable research has been done on tennis strokes and other striking sports that allows for the creation of a few general principles of tennis mechanics. Tennis mechanics includes the biomechanics of stroke production and the mechanics of ball flight. This book is your introduction to these principles. On the way I will discuss examples of how you apply these principles in an injury prevention program and improving your strokes. There will also be integration boxes because biomechanical knowledge should not be applied separate from the context of the performer, task, or situation. Integration, Advantage, and Stroke Technique boxes provide links to how biomechanics can be integrated with other sport sciences or factors to improve our understanding of the game. Let’s get started!

    I would like to thank Crawford Lindsey and Kristine Thom of Racquet Tech Publishing and the United States Racquet Stringers Association for their valuable contributions to the book. Some of the application boxes and nice features of this book are due to their fine suggestions. There are also many tennis scientists, coaches, and physicians who have been very generous in sharing their data and expertise with me. Space does not allow me the opportunity to thank all of them individually, but they have my sincere gratitude.

    Chapter One

    BIOMECHANICAL PRINCIPLES OF TENNIS TECHNIQUE

    A common trait of recreational players is that they try to do things with their hands to make up for their lack of quickness and positioning with their feet as they hit the ball. - Arthur Ashe

    Any meaningful discussion of variations of tennis stroke technique requires knowledge of sport biomechanics. Biomechanics is the field of study that focuses on understanding the motion and causes of motion of living things. Sport biomechanics, naturally, focuses on how humans create a wide variety of movements in sports. Fortunately for the tennis player and coach, there is a large body of research on the biomechanics of tennis movements. From the footwork to move on the court, to the adjustments in the stroke to create topspin, biomechanics is an essential tool for understanding movement in tennis.

    This text will not revel in the details of this research and its limitations, but will be concerned with painting a picture of the consensus of this body of knowledge that can be applied to tennis. It is easy for biomechanical analyses to churn out hundreds of thousands of numbers representing the time varying values of a myriad of force and motion variables. What is more important, and more difficult, is the identification of key variables that are most influential and interpreting how they affect performance or injury risk. (See Advantage Box 1.1 for a brief discussion of the differences between the levels of scientific evidence and coaching opinion.) Often the biomechanical research supports the experiential wisdom of tennis coaches, but at times the research points to interesting and counterintuitive ideas. This is not surprising given the complex mechanical properties of biological tissues, the complexity of the musculoskeletal system, and the high-speeds of the game that make most aspects of the movements truly invisible to the naked eye.

    Advantage Box 1.1:Tennis Opinion and Science

    Much of tennis teaching on technique is based on the professional experience of coaches. Over time this coaching opinion often tends to converge on the truth, but it also can become stranded on incorrect theories or in controversy. Different coaches often have different opinions about stroke techniques and how to best teach tennis strokes.The major weaknesses of this professional craft knowledge are its lack of control of factors that are influential and the small, systematic sample of persons a professional interacts with. All coaches are not created equal. Coach A with one year of experience with primarily beginners likely has less complete knowledge than Coach B who has ten years of experience with a wide variety of players.

    Scientific research, including biomechanical studies, can provide more objective evidence. The controlled conditions of scientific research help ensure that the theories or mechanisms being examined are the only factors that are acting. All scientific knowledge, like experiential knowledge, is not created equal. Some kinds of studies or evidence are stronger than others in establishing a causal link between some technique and injury occurrance or performance enhancement.To give you an idea about the general rules or hierarchy of evidence used in medicine and science, consider the following tennis example.

    Suppose a tennis coach believes that young players should not be taught open stance forehands because he believes it could overload the players’ arms and shoulders.This legitimate position is based on logic (growing long bones and less muscular strength of young people combine for a smaller safety factor than adults) and a philosophy of player development. In looking at the scientific support for this opinion we will work backwards from the strongest evidence back down toward the professional opinion.

    The best kind of evidence would be a randomized, double-blind, long-term prospective study. Unfortunately, there are none of these studies on this topic and there will likely never be any. The practical demands of these studies make them prohibitive in tennis because they take many years, are very expensive, and would require players/coaches to select preferred stroke technique at random and not by their preference.There is also an ethical limitation that would not allow a study to run to expose players’ to a hypothesized higher injury risk if there were no major benefits that outweighed this risk.

    The next level of evidence could be a retrospective study of adult players. A study looking at injury rates and biomechanical variables of adults grouped by what forehand they primarily played with as youngsters would be quite interesting. The problem is that any differences between these could not be directly attributed to the stroke issue of interest, there could be other factors in our samples or their playing experiences that contributed to any differences in injury or technique observed.

    Most biomechanical studies would be at a third level of evidence where the muscle activation, forces, or motions used during the open and square stance forehands are compared. These studies are typically done in samples of adult players. Applying the results of these studies to children is a more indirect use of weak evidence. Even if adults were to use forces or motions near the maximum injury-producing values, it would not be known if young players had the same behavior. Specific studies on young players would be needed, and once this was done scientists would still weigh this evidence in light to some major limitations. First, is the sample of players generalizable to all young players? Second, is this evidence confirmed by similar studies? Third, because this is descriptive data, we do not know if this really does pose a greater risk of injury until prospective studies document injury rates in many players.

    In summary, it is common for the media and some people to claim that the latest study proves this or that. This is a misunderstanding of how science builds knowledge from the consensus of a large body of evidence that have various levels of quality and meaning. In complex areas of human performance such as tennis science, there will always be a gap between the working or coaching opinion and what can be supported by scientific evidence.

    Fortunately, much of the fascinating and complex nature of movement in tennis can be easily understood using general principles of biomechanics. Biomechanics scholars have proposed nine or ten generic principles of biomechanics in human movement (Knudson, 2003a). This book is based on six of these principles that are most relevant to tennis (Figure 1.1). These principles of tennis mechanics focus attention on key mechanisms of body movement (biomechanics) and ball trajectory in tennis. The trajectory principles may initially appear to be strictly mechanics (physics) with limited interaction with the biological properties of the tennis player. However, we will see that the biological factors (skill, strength, anatomical motion) do affect the range of speed, spin, and initial trajectories that tennis players can create.

    Knowing what body motions were used and how they were created and may be modified are powerful tools for improving performance and reducing the risk of injury in tennis. This chapter will provide a brief introduction to these principles. These principles will underlie much of the discussion on the biomechanics of tennis strokes and movements that are explored in the rest of this book.

    Knowing what body motions were used and how they were created and may be modified are powerful tools for improving performance and reducing the risk of injury in tennis.

    FORCE AND TIME

    The Force and Time Principle says that motion of any body can be modified by the application of force(s) over a period of time. Most tennis movements are characterized by large forces applied for a short time as opposed to smaller forces applied over a longer time. This principle may be the most important because it deals with the creation or modification of motion. For example, a tennis player rushing the net usually performs a split-step to create reaction and friction forces from the ground to redirect his body to intercept a passing shot. We will see later that the split step employs a coordination and transfer of energy strategy as well as the mechanical properties of muscles to redirect the body in the very short time available to react to the ball.

    Figure 1.1 The biomechanics of tennis will be examined using six principles—four related to body movement and two related to shot outcome.

    Most tennis movements are characterized by large forces applied for a short time as opposed to smaller forces applied over a longer time.

    To fully understand and apply this principle, the tennis player needs to understand several key concepts related to force and motion. Many readers will notice that this principle is the direct application of one of the most important laws of physics—Newton’s Second Law of Motion. This law is important because it shows the relationship between the forces that cause motion and the resulting motion. Newton originally defined this relationship using both force and time variables (impulse-momentum), but this equation can be rearranged to give the more famous formula (ΣF = ma) that shows the relationship for any instant in time. The formula—ΣF=ma—says that the acceleration a body experiences is equal to the sum of the forces in that direction and is inversely proportional to the mass of that body. Two ideas are necessary to fully understand this relationship. The first is that force (F) and acceleration (a) are vector quantities, meaning that they are described by both a magnitude and a direction. Second, the mass of an object is the measure of resistance to change

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