There
is no single concept more important than "clean contact". Without
clean contact, the student will never feel confident in their strokes.
The key to clean contact is the "linear interval". The linear interval
refers to the short time span from just before contact to after
the student feels the racquet strike the ball. It is impossible
to time contact or to even see the moment of contact. Careful studies
of players shoe that they are looking at a point just before contact
when their racquet strikes the ball. See the photos below to confirm
this. This is natural because the eye cannot process more than
about 4 frames per second and the moment of contact is less than
1/100th of a second. Also, the sped of the racquet even in amateur
rallies is so fast in a relative sense that the eye cannot resolve
it. For example, a racquet moving at 15mph (very slow) moves over
200 inches in one second. The strike interval is about 8 inches.
The racquet moves through the strike zone is less than 0.03
seconds, 8 times faster than the human eye can resolve. So there
is no need to tell the student to see the moment of contact; it
is impossible and this will only confuse them and hurt their confidence.
Since it is not possible to see the moment of contact, the racquet
must be forced to move in a straight line over a sufficiently long
time span that the player can be assured that the racquet strikes
the ball as intended. This can only be done if the student begins
the linear interval before the strike and continues it until after
the strike is felt.
To assist the
student in getting the feeling of a straight line interval, have
them hold their racquet in the contact position and then pull
it forward and backward in a straight line through the strike zone.
The natural
tendency is to move the racquet in a circle through the contact
zone. Since there is no way to know when the racquet will strike
the ball along this circle, the path of the ball is quite
unpredictable. On the other hand, if the racquet moves in a straight
line through contact, the the ball will go in the direction that
the straight line interval is moving. |
