Podtcast #171: Better Fitness for Better Tennis!

If you’re really serious about being a better tennis player then training your body for peak performance is definitely something you should be doing! In today’s episode of the podcast I have a special guest join me who is not only passionate about tennis but is a certified personal trainer as well. We talk about topics such as warming up correctly, whether or not a “cool down” is necessary for tennis players, and also how to best fit your workout into a busy schedule. Also, keep an eye out for some new videos coming out soon featuring Steve and his fitness tips!

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Welcome to the Essential Tennis podcast. If you love tennis and want to improve your game, this podcast is for you. Whether it’s technique, strategy, equipment, or the mental game, tennis professional Ian Westermann is here to make you a better player. And now, here’s Ian.

Ian Westermann: Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis podcast, your place for free expert’s tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Today’s episode of the podcast is brought to you by Tennis Express.

Thanks very much for joining me on today’s episode, and before we begin, what we’re going to be doing today is an interview here in studio with a certified personal trainer. He’s been on the show before, but this is going to be a little bit different conversation. So I’m looking forward to it.

I just want to quickly give a brief shout out to everybody who is new inside of Essential Tennis Platinum. That was open to new members over the last about week and a half or so. Bunch of new members in there, and I just want to say thank you to all of you that signed up. I’m enjoying going through your videos and your questions already. So looking forward to continuing with all of you. With that, let’s go ahead and get to today’s episode. Sit back, relax, and get ready for some great tennis instruction.

Alright. Let’s get started with today’s episode. I’m really excited to have a special guest sitting right next to me in the studio. We’ll be passing the mic back and forth so hopefully that works out well and doesn’t result in too much noise on your guys end. But my guest today is Steve Beck. He’s a certified personal trainer. He writes the fitness blog at EssentialTennis.com, and he also spends a lot of time on the forums inside of the fitness and nutrition section of the forums at Essential Tennis.com. So, Steve, thanks very much for spending so much on the website and with me, and it’s great to have you here on the podcast as well.

Thanks Ian. Always a pleasure to be a guest with you. So we’re going to be answering some questions from fans on Facebook of Essential Tennis. I just last night Steve and I decided hey let’s do a podcast episode together, so I asked for questions and topics from those of you that are on Facebook and follow Essential Tennis. So I appreciate the quick feedback from all of you. Before we get to that, I just have two quick questions for you Steve.

First of all, I know that fitness and training, being in better shape has been a passion of yours for a long time, but just recently you became certified. You’re now a certified personal trainer, which is awesome. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that process that you went through and what that means for you as somebody who loves fitness and loves helping people get more fit themselves.

Steve Beck: Sure Ian. Thanks. Yeah, like you said, fitness has been a huge passion for me, as well as playing tennis, for the past 15, 18 years or so. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing. It’s something that I’m really passionate about. Love being in the gym. Love lifting weights. I’ve recently decided that I needed to take that in a professional level, kind of like yourself. I’m sure before you were a tennis pro it was something that you were really excited about and just decided to make a career path of yours.

So that’s something that I took on the end of last year and decided to actually go ahead and get certified. So I studied and got my certification through the American College of Sports Medicine, which is one of the better certifications out there that you can get. It’s not a weekend or a seminar class that you go and take and pay money, and they give you a rubber stamp.  It’s actually a real certification, and it’s one of the more highly regarded ones in the industry. So I’m excited to do that.

And really my intent behind that was just to make my passion for fitness and everything fitness related, and to be able to do it on a professional level. By nature I’m a teacher and someone who enjoys sharing knowledge. So it’s something that I was really excited to be able to do at a professional level. And got some clients that I train on the side right now, and I’m hopeful to leverage my relationship with our tennis facility back home in North Carolina and hopefully to really provide some tennis specific fitness information to people and help players that are passionate about the game improve their own court performance.

Ian Westermann: Great. That’s actually kind of why Steve is in town and visiting me. He and I are working on a project together that is going to involve showing all of you exactly how to become better tennis players specifically through fitness and through training, and that kind of combines Steve’s two big passions, which are tennis and physical training. So it’s a good combination I think, and Steve and I are going to be working on that project this week.

We’re also going to be putting out some free videos on EssentialTennis.com and on YouTube. So watch for those. We’re going to be showing you guys some great ways to improve your fitness to make yourselves better tennis players. Speaking of that, there’s a second quick question that I wanted to ask you Steve was about that specifically. Can you talk about training our bodies to be in better shape, to be stronger, to be in better condition, and specifically how can that improve us as tennis players. Is that possible and to what extent? And what areas of tennis can we specifically improve ourselves and through fitness?

Steve Beck: There’s three specific areas that I think we as tennis players need to be really cognizant of, and that’s flexibility and mobility, and strength and power production, and the last one is obviously, which  is important to all of us, is injury prevention because we all want to be able to play tennis a lot and not be injured and not be sidelined with injuries.

So those are the three main areas, and this is something that you and I kind of talked about the last couple of days is we’re seeing more and more things in the recreational game that are carry overs from the program. And I think that we would both agree that recreational players today are able to hit the ball with more power and more spin by nature of seeing what the pros are doing on TV. It’s kind of like with any professional sport. The things at the higher level filter down into the recreational level.

And so with the increased amount of physicality of the recreational game, we’re seeing lots more sports specific injuries. We’re seeing people with deficits in movement as well as flexibility and mobility. And so being more fit and by strengthening your body and working through the specific ranges of motion and dynamic mobility modes that are present in tennis, those are things that we can definitely improve our on court performance in.

Ian Westermann: Great. I really look forward to learning more about this with you during this week as are shooting a lot of video and working on specific areas of tennis together and how we can get better at it, and I look forward to releasing some videos in the near future on the website as well.

So with that, let’s go ahead and get to our questions today from Facebook fans. Once again, we’ve got three different ones here that talk about different parts of tennis fitness and making yourself a better player through use of correct fitness practices and exercises.

Let’s start off first with a question from Chris who wrote, dynamic warmup drills are what the pro athletes in football and basketball use. Our academy question is what kind of dynamic stretching drills should we use and how long for a good warmup for our elite team?

So it sounds like Chris is helping run an academy, and he’s got some kind of higher level athletes. Steve why don’t you talk about this in that frame of reference, but also to those maybe average level recreational players that are listening as well as far as dynamic warmup is concerned.

Steve Beck: Sure. When we make a distinction between high level athletes and recreational athletes, there’s lots of things that can carry over and apply to both realms. And so when we’re talking about warming up or doing anything with a high level athlete, it’s certainly applicable to anyone that plays a sport. I mean if you’re going out and playing tennis twice a week or once a week, tennis is a high mobility dynamic sport. And so those kinds of things will definitely carry over and help you in all areas.

So when Chris is asking about dynamic warmup drills, let’s kind of first address the myth that probably everyone has heard that you never want to stretch a cold muscle right. This is something that you and I talked about as well. I don’t know about you, but my muscles aren’t really cold. My body temperature is close to 100 degrees, and there’s nutrient rich blood flowing through muscles 24/7. My heart is pumping, and so I have a high body temperature. So my muscles aren’t technically what you would call “cold,” but the important part is working those muscles through a full range of motion and enabling them and getting them prepared and ready to do the work that we’re going to demand of them. Whether that’s on the tennis court or basketball court or lifting in the gym, it’s kind of an even level playing field when you start off.

So there’s two main areas that I like to address before I do any kind of work in the gym or on the tennis court. That’s two areas. One is muscle quality and soft tissue work and mobility work, and I’ve written a couple of blogs about this and some articles in the past about, we’ll start off with the soft tissue quality. We do something that’s called self myofascial release. That sounds really complicated, but I’ll break it down. If you think of chicken breast wrapped in saran wrap. The chicken breast will obviously represent our muscle and our muscle fibers, and the saran wrap is going to represent the connective tissue that surrounds each and every muscle fiber as well as every muscle group. That’s what attaches our muscles to the bone through tendons. Muscle fiber on the outside is connective tissue, and it attaches our muscles to the bone and enables us to basically do work.

So over time that connective tissue around the muscle can get bunched up and can get bound up, and we need to work that out. So that’s one of the first things that I do with my clients is I have them do some foam rolling or some specific tissue work using a tennis ball and things like that, and there’s tons of resources out there on YouTube that you can go to and find out about self myofascial release and foam rolling.

Ian Westermann: Can you please give us an example, maybe two three quick examples of either foam rolling, which not everybody might be familiar with listening. But can you talk about many one maybe two foam roller exercises that you like and maybe one or two exercises that listeners could just use a tennis ball for, which obviously everybody listening has one of those.

Steve Beck: Absolutely. When we use the foam roller, we hit the large muscles. We use that on the quads, on the iliotibial band, which is a strap of connective tissue that runs on the outside of your lower upper leg there. And we use it on the upper bag and pretty much all major areas of the body. Now you can use a tennis ball, and like you said everybody should have a bunch of those laying around at home. So what you can do is just take that and put it down on the ground and put your leg on top of it and work out your hamstring. You can use that and work out your calf and just really get it digging in there into the muscles and finding those hot spots and those areas where you’re really sore and just working them out.

It’s basically like getting a deep tissue massage, if you’ve ever had sports massage before. It’s the same concept. You can put that under the rhomboid muscles on your back and just lay on that and move around and articulate the shoulder and work out those areas. And those are two specific areas for us as tennis players that really get tight and really get bound up. We can see a whole lot of benefit from just some simple tissue release work.

Ian Westermann: I think that should probably be one of the videos that we do this week to put out on YouTube. Would be a warmup video/ myofascial release video to show people how to loosen up those muscles in those parts of our body. Alright, with that let’s go to our second question, and that comes to us from Jacob.

Jacob wrote and said, assuming that they’re necessary what are good cooldowns to do after a match. Is jogging any good? And at the moment, that’s what I do to cool down. I jog home. What do you think Steve?

Steve Beck: When I was doing my certification work, they placed — what I think is a higher degree of import on the cool down itself than I think is probably necessary. And it sounds to me like if you’re cognizant of, and the reason being that the ACSM states is they want to prevent blood from pooling in the muscles. And so that’s kind of assuming that you do a really hard workout and you’re raising your VO2 max, your oxygen consumption level really higher, and working out your muscles on a high level, and just basically stepping off a treadmill or stepping of a piece of equipment and sitting down.

So it’s kind of different for us tennis players because we’re not going maybe 100% all the time. Tennis is a very stop and go sport. It’s a very dynamic sport where we’ll go very hard for a few seconds and then kind of dial back the intensity for a while. So my take is that the cooldown is not tremendously important, but it’s certainly something that will help you out if you are doing some jogging. That’s a great way to cool down.  You can just light walk around, do a couple laps around the court. You can do some static stretching at that point and kind of lengthen the muscles, which is going to help with long-term any kind of muscle soreness and stability long-term. Those are just a couple things.

Again, it’s not something that I’m tremendously concerned about just by the very nature of the sport that we play, but it sounds like you’re aware of it, and I think that’s good. There’s certainly not going to be any detriment. There’s nothing that’s going to take away from your physicality, from your fitness, just by doing the warmup. So if you’ll want to include it, that’s great. And I think you’re doing the right thing by doing the jogging.

Ian Westermann: So if I’m hearing you right, are you saying that there’s not any big risk? Just to take kind of an extreme example and say that we a play a three set match. Let’s say the match goes the distance and it’s like 2 hours long, so if I choose to come off the court and just sit down and just drink and just relax and allow my body to just cool down naturally, am I at any greater risk as far as injury or letting my muscles get tighter, anything like that? Or is that kind of a myth?

Steve Beck: I wouldn’t necessarily call it a myth, Ian. I’d just say that’s probably being — people err on the side of the caution. If you think about the pro players. Let’s take it to that extreme and what they do after a game or a serious hard match. If you think about the Australian Open a couple years ago where we had some really great five setters with Verdasco and Nadal and Federer. Those guys worked really, really hard off the court, and they probably came off the court. They probably got a good massage, worked on their tissue quality, and they probably went took a contrast, some sort of a contrast bath. An ice bath followed by a hot shower and something like that.

You can take it to that extreme, but again it’s not a high risk factor. You’re not really risking damaging your muscle tissue or damaging your joints by not doing anything. If you want to be on the safe side, take a walk around the court for a couple laps, jog in place for a few minutes, and you’ll be totally fine.

Ian Westermann: Okay. And then one follow up question. You used the phrase static stretching, and I just wanted to jump back to Chris’s question about the warmup quickly. That’s kind of the old school way of warming up I guess would be maybe doing a box run or some kind of jogging or jumping jacks or something to get your heart rate up a little bit. Maybe break a small sweat, and then do static stretching. Is that something is necessary number one, and number two if not what should be done in its place, or should anything be done in its place as far as loosening up muscles and like the shoulder and legs, etc.?

Steve Beck: That’s a great question Ian, and that’s something that we specifically address in the training field. When we talk about static stretching, obviously everyone thinks of sitting and doing a runners lunge or sitting on the court with our legs splayed out in front of us and holding a stretch for 15 or 30 seconds. And those things have actually been proven to decrease sports performance in recent years. So I’m not a fan at all of doing any static stretching pre-match. There’s certainly a time and a place for static stretching. I don’t think we as athletes could probably stretch too much, but there’s a time and a place for it. I would recommend it after stretching or after our fitness time in the gym or something like that, or while we’re at home.

But when we get back to talking about what a good warmup should look like, a good warmup should be a muscle activation. We want to prepare our muscles to move and to meet the demands that we’re going to place on them, either in the tennis court or in the gym, and we want to mobilize ourselves. And so I prefer and I recommend a dynamic warmup. If I’m going to work out in the gym and have a really hard workout, I’ll do my soft tissue work first. This is what I’ll do for my clients as well. And then we’ll do some mobility exercises that are specific to the movements that we’re about to perform.

It’s the same thing on the tennis court. Now you don’t have to take a foam roller with you and do the soft tissue element. If you want to that would be great, but I would instead of the static stretching I much, much prefer a dynamic stretch. That can look like a forward lunge without the hold at the bottom. You just do a forward lunge and go down to the bottom for one second and come right back up, and do that on both sides. You can combine that. Do a forward and then go back to a reverse lunge.

And then for tennis specific obviously we’re talking about a lot of lateral side to side movement. You could do a lateral lunge with a reach to try to incorporate some shoulder flexibility and upper back flexibility with that as well. We do one that is where we place our hands on the net and one foot comes up, and we’ll swing our leg back and forth to kind of open up the hips. So things like that are going to be a lot better and a lot more specific for the movement.

Again, the myth of stretching the cold muscle. Our muscles aren’t cold. Our muscles are pretty much ready to go. Now you could come out of the car and jump right on the tennis court and have a low incidence of injury, but again I wouldn’t recommend it because we haven’t told our muscles, basically warm them up and told them what we’re going to do and prepare them for the action. So you’re a lot better off doing a dynamic mobility work without the static stretching element.

Ian Westermann: Okay. Great. Thanks for explaining that. With that we’ll go ahead and go to our third question again from Facebook. This comes to us from John. John wrote and said, ask the fitness expert what’s the best to incorporate weight training into a busy tennis schedule. Hit the gym before tennis, after tennis, on off days, or some combination of all? So I think John is hitting on something that’s really, really prevalent and really on the minds of probably everybody listening. People listening and saying I understand that training my body could make me a better tennis player. I understand that doing these types of exercises can benefit my body, but I work full-time. I’ve got a family. I’ve got kids. I want to play tennis on top of that. Now you’re telling me I need to train. How much time is really necessary, and in your opinion when is the best time to try to squeeze it in for everybody listening that’s got a busy schedule already?

Steve Beck: That’s a great question John. I don’t know if that’s little John or John in California that we’re talking about, but that’s a great question John. That’s something that’s very prevalent, and something I hear all the time is I want to get in better shape but I don’t have the time to do it. I’ll take a two fold approach to this. One will be the hard answer, and that’s just an excuse that you don’t have time. You could calculate how much time you spend watching TV or on the internet every week, and I’m sure that we could find — the ACSM recommends a minimum of 150 minutes a week. That’s 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week if you want to break it down for some cardiovascular activity. I would bet money that each one of us spend at least 30 minutes a day either on the computer or on the internet or fiddling around when we could be dedicating some time to our fitness.

Ian Westermann: So you say that they recommend 30 minutes a day 5 days a week for what? What is that supposed to accomplish? Is that just to have a healthy life? Or to be a well-prepared athlete? What’s the end for that?

Steve Beck: That recommendation is the bare minimum, so that would be the absolute least that you would want to do to negate some risk factors and some morbidity factors, to stabilize a fasting blood glucose which has to do with long-term onset of type 2 diabetes, which is getting very prevalent. It’s the minimum recommendation to control weight and caloric expenditure and to basically keep you at the bare minimum functioning element.

Now if we’re talking about improving performance, we need to above and beyond that. It’s not just 30 minutes of walking around and doing something really efficient like jogging on a treadmill, but we’re talking about increasing that to whatever levels of intense exercise that we’re going to do. And I know John a little bit, and so I know that John has gotten pretty dedicated to his fitness lately. And I know he’s wanting to incorporate more weight training into his schedule.

So part two of my answer, part one was time is just an excuse. Part two is my second kind of response to that is it’s a valid question. It’s something that I think is valid for each one of us. We want to balance out our lifestyle, and we want to make sure that we’re spending time with our family and giving the best effort that we can to our work so we can have free time and leisure time and afford to play tennis and buy new rackets and clothes and all that good stuff. So that’s an important thing as well. So we want to kind of find a balance there.

I think it comes down to personal preference more than anything, and I think it comes down to when you can best fit incorporating fitness into your lifestyle that’s going to make it stick. I always tell people the best program that you can be on is the one that you’re going to stick to and do consistently. It may not be my ideal one that I design for you as your trainer, but if I design a program for you and you don’t do, then you’re not going to get any benefit out of it at all, right?

So the best time that you can incorporate it into your day is when you’re going to do it consistently, whether that be first thing in the morning. I prefer to go to the gym at lunch because my gym is 5 minutes away and I can get in an hour workout, and I do it four times a week, five times a week, and that’s my routine. So I built that into my routine.

Whether you do it before dinner or after dinner, depending on what your activity level is outside of the gym, that’s going to be a contributing factor too. I know that John is maybe a couple years older than me, maybe about the same age as me. I’m 38, and I’m finding that as I get older if I go to the gym during my lunch hour and then go to place tennis after work the same day, I tend to get pretty fatigued just because I don’t have the juice that I used to have. So you’ve got to work around those factors and work around your lifestyle basically.

The only thing that I would caution against is if you’re going to lift early in the morning, just make sure that you wait until at least an hour after you’ve been up and out of the bed. The reason behind that is overnight spinal fluid builds up in the discs, and it takes about 45 minutes to an hour for that spinal fluid to dissipate and go back to normal levels throughout the surrounding tissue. So you don’t want to be placing any compressive loads on the spine at that point.

Other than that, any time of the day is fair game. You could definitely go and lift, have a lifting session, before you go out and play tennis. That would be totally fine if that’s where your energy level is and if you’re up to it. I would personally probably prefer going and lifting after because that’s going to be more of an intense exercise for me, going and lifting weights than actually playing tennis. So you just have to kind of adjust it. There’s no better or best time of the day to lift. It’s just when you can get it in and if you’re getting a good resistance training session three to four times a week and working all the major muscle groups. You’re definitely going to see a lot of benefit from that, and that’ll be a great thing for you long-term.

Ian Westermann: Alright. So just one more question I have, and I’m sure it’s something that a lot of people are thinking, and it has to do with a specific I guess certain phrase that you used early on in that explanation where you said that the recommended amount of activity just in general to not have a crappy life basically was 30 minutes a day 5 times a week. Which for most people probably sounds like an awful lot. And then you said if you want to train yourself as an athlete to excel at a sport, it should be even more than that.

Now do you mean that in terms of the amount of time spent? So if I want to be a top level tennis player athletically or physically fitness wise, do I then need to spend an hour a day 5 times a week? Or is it more the intensity level or the resistance level within that time frame? Does that make sense? Is it more intensity or resistance? Or is it more actual amount of time spent?

Steve Beck: Sure. Definitely. The latter, I mean, really doesn’t come into it. You could spend 30 minutes 5 times a day walking around, and I would argue and I think that would be obvious to everyone that that’s not really going to help you improve on the tennis court, right. Going for a stroll after you eat a cheese burger and French fries to kind of work off the same calorie. No, it’s going to put you in somewhat of a calorie balance so far as what comes in and what goes out. Yeah, it’s going to burn off a little bit, but it’s not going to improve your on court performance.

So yeah, like we said the bare minimum for just maintaining some general health markers is going to be that 150 minute mark, that 30 minutes times 5 times a week, 30 minutes a day. Now if you want to actually improve, you’re going to have to obviously do some things that are sports specific. You’re going to have to do some functional training, and we’re going to have to incorporate some resistance training into that as well. So we add a cardiovascular element by doing either some high intensity interval training or some other kind of — something that really challenges your VO2, your oxygen absorption rate. Or we add in some resistance training element.

I can tell you from a personal standpoint that I spend four hours maybe five a week training. So that puts me probably above the median for what the population is, but I do some serious weight training into the gym. So even if you were just to do 30 minutes of resistance training or 30 minutes of hard running or serious cardiovascular work as opposed to that walking, you’re going to get a ton more benefit. So it’s not only — it doesn’t come down at the end of the day to the amount of time that you’re doing it, but it’s about what you’re doing with your time.

If you think about — what you see a lot of people doing in the gym, they go and stand on the treadmill and turn on the TV, and they walk for 30 minutes. That’s a really efficient way of killing time basically. It’s unfortunately — your body gets really efficient at that exercise, and it doesn’t get challenged, and it doesn’t really get any benefit from it. And so you’ve got to think about again at the end of the day what am I doing with my time in the gym or with any kind of fitness training that I’m doing, and what am I expecting to get out of that time. I hope that answers your question.

Ian Westermann: Yep, Steve. At this point I’m going to wrap things up because we’re out of time, but I want to thank you very much for spending your time with me and with the listeners of the show. Thank you to everybody who submitted questions, even if we didn’t read them and answer them specifically here on today’s show, I want to thank you very much for giving your feedback. I always appreciate that on either Facebook or Twitter. And Chris, Jacob, and John, thank you for your questions that we used today. And Steve, it’s been great having you here this week so far. I look forward to continuing our project together, and I’ll be releasing more details about that as we get closer to actually releasing. But in the meantime Steve, thanks again, and I look forward to putting out some free videos later this week to everybody listening on EssentialTennis.com

Steve Beck: Yeah. Thanks for having me Ian, and guys thanks for the questions. If you have fitness questions, like Ian said in the beginning, I’m on the forum a lot and I’m more than happy to answer those. Just post in the fitness question or you can send me a person message. I post as SteveO on the forums, and I’ll be glad to help you out with anything I can.

Ian Westermann: Alright. That does it for episode number 171 of the Essential Tennis podcast. Thank you very much for joining me on today’s episode, and I want to briefly mention the official sponsor of the Essential Tennis podcast, which is TennisExpress.com. Please check them out by going to EssentialTennis.com/Express. That will shoot you right on over to Tennis Express, and any purchases that you make, a small percentage will come back to help support the Essential Tennis podcast. So I thank them for their support, and I thank all of you that have been making orders through them through my link. I really appreciate that.

Real quickly in wrapping up today’s show, I want to read a comment from last week’s show from Paul in North Carolina. And he’s the one that asked the question in episode 170 about taking lessons and making the best use of your time on the court in lessons, and just a quick follow up comment here from him after listening to the show.

He said I’m going to follow your advice and A take a lesson once per week, B practice on my problem stroke 3 to 4 times per week between lessons. I guess that I just didn’t realize that it would take this long to develop muscle memory. Also I’ll admit to being a little embarrassed to go back to the same pro and work on the same stroke time after time. I keep thinking that whenever I turn around to retrieve balls, the pro must be rolling their eyes thinking, when if ever will this moron to what I’m trying to teach them. Your message however seems to be that good pros understand that it takes a long time and that so long as the student is A taking the pro’s advice, B working hard and improving, that they probably aren’t molling over the moron term during the lesson, or at least not very often. Thanks again Ian, and I’ll let you know how things go.

Yeah, Paul, listen. If you are working with somebody that has been teaching tennis for any length of time, this is what they do every day is they wake up every day and spend 8 hours on a tennis court with average joes, just your typical recreational level tennis player. And these are people that they’re not life-long trained athletes or anything like that. So it’s their job to help guide these players, recreational players, to improving their tennis. Anybody who has done that for any period of time trust me has built up a large tolerance of patience. They understand the process that it takes. This person is absolutely not thinking that you are a bad person or a bad athlete because you don’t pick it up your first time.

I could tell you many, many stories about spending dozens and dozens of hours with the same student at my last teaching job working on the same stroke, multiple times per week for months and months trying to improve one stroke. Just coming back over and over again using video analysis, I mean every possible way to help people improve and still just over and over again working on the same stuff.

What it comes down to is what you said, muscle memory, and it takes a long time to reverse that. It’s a habit. No matter what the habit is in life, doesn’t even have to be athletic or tennis related. It could be an eating habit or a social habit or something like quitting drinking or smoking or whatever. I mean we know that any kind of habit like that, it takes a long time and a lot of commitment to break. It’s the same thing with tennis technique habits. Not that it’s the same thing as quitting smoking. I’ll go ahead and say it’s probably not the same thing, but you get the idea.

So Paul thanks very much for listening, and I’m glad that the show was helpful to you. It sounds like you’ve got a good plan laid out there, and I’m looking forward to hearing back from you and seeing how your progress is. So thanks for listening and the rest of you thanks for listening as well. I really appreciate it, and I’ll be talking to you all again next week. Until then, take care and good luck with your tennis.