Looking at my subconscious habits on the backhand side I can immediately see that my unit turn, slot position, wrist position at contact, and follow through all have fundamental flaws….
So where in the world should you start??
Unfortunately most players who are self guiding themselves fall into the trap of trying to “fix” it all at once.
Here’s a critical sub-principle to our discussion on Prioritization: You can only consciously focus on ONE swing change at a time.
We can’t multitask when it comes to swing changes…
Just like you couldn’t take in four movies simultaneously while they play on four different screens in front of you.
Sure, you could probably jump from screen to screen enough times to get the gist of all of them, but you can’t pay attention to all of them at once.
Focused, conscious, repetitive attention on a single change is EXACTLY what you need to change your habits.
Too many irons in the fire means nothing actually improves because your focus is bouncing around from change to change and nothing gets enough repetitive work to actually become a new subconscious movement.
Unfortunately a lot of well meaning coaches perpetuate that problem by indulging in “instructional whack-a-mole”.
They rightly identify all kinds of things wrong with a student’s stroke, and call them out one rep after another after another perfectly keeping the players attention jumping all over the place.
For many of you this kind of serve lesson is probably all too familiar:
“Make sure to keep your tossing arm up…..*hit*…..great, now be sure to bend your knees!…..*hit*…..you forgot to toss at two o’clock!!…..*hit*…..KEEP THAT TOSSING ARM UP!!”
Within that kind of environment no new habits can possibly be formed and so the stroke doesn’t actually improve.
Here’s the solution:
Pick the ONE, most fundamental element that when changed will positively impact everything else built on top of it and focus on that until you have a new habit.
Then move on to the next element.
Repeat.
When we work with our VIP students this principle is what the coaches spend most of our time talking to each other about before reviewing strokes with the player and showing them what they need to work on.
We all share what we feel is the ONE most critical element to change for their forehand, backhand, serve, and volleys before moving forward with any kind of drills or solution.
I’ll be honest, prioritizing stroke mechanics effectively takes experience and practice, but its absolutely something you can learn to do!
Watch our VIP coaching sessions and you’ll notice that we work hard to keep the focus really narrow and only to work on one thing at a time.
Do that in your own practice and you have a dramatically better chance of making changes that actually stick instead of reverting back to your old habits every time you play a match.
Does that make sense?
Thanks for reading.
I’ll be back with the third part of this four part series.
Yours Truly,
-Ian
