Visual Tennis:
An Alternative Approach

John Yandell

"Ok, I want you to prepare early, swing low to high, keep a firm wrist, rotate your hips, make contact in front, bend your knees, and keep your eyes on the ball, and while you're at it remember to stay relaxed!"

Does this sound like your last tennis lesson? You hit one ball, the pro says, "OK, not bad." Then the litany of information begins again. And that's just on your forehand.

Tennis is perceived as being a difficult game to learn. Any veteran student can reel off a half dozen or more "tips" about what he thinks he should be doing on each of his strokes--but probably isn't. But to what extent are these tips that every player hold so dear accurate or productive?

A brutally honest observer who watches enough traditional tennis lessons will conclude that despite hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and heroic efforts on the part of both teaching pros and students, significant improvement is extremely rare . In fact the more ardent the student, the greater the likelihood that he will become frustrated by his inability to assimilate and execute what appears to be the most basic technical information.

Tour pros, on the other hand, usually scoff when they are asked complicated questions about their strokes. In the words of Pete Sampras: " I can't really explain how I hit my forehand--it's just a natural feeling." It's a paradox: tennis students struggle to master mountains of input praying to hit just one forehand like Pete. But Pete can't even explain how he himself hits it and wonders why anyone bothers to ask him technical questions.

Is it that some players are just born "natural" and the rest of us are out of luck? If the standard lesson process is so great why do so few players ever improve and why are touring pros so contemptuous of its complicated methodology?

Is there anything the average player can do to escape tennis tip information overload and the paralysis that it can cause? The answer is yes. To understand the answer, let's begin by examining something that seems obvious, but is almost completely ignored in the tennis world. Let's begin by examining tennis instruction at the level of learning theory.

Every tennis writer, coach, and working tennis teaching pro has his own "theories" about how to teach the game--i.e., his extensive personal collection of "tips" about the various strokes. But what this type of "theory" never addresses are the underlying assumptions about how sports learning occurs in general. And in reality, the unexamined assumptions held by the vast majority of teaching professionals and well-known teaching authorities are actually false, and even counter-productive. It is almost universally agreed by learning theorists and researchers in sports science that sports learning is primarily visual and kinesthetic. Athletes learn by watching and by doing, by assimilating images or models of particular strokes and the feelings that go with them.

This is, in fact, how many top players have described how they learned to play. John McEnroe, for example, boiled it down to one sentence when he said, "I just watched Rod Laver and tried to do what he did." Pete Fischer, one of Sampras's early coaches, who switched him from two-hands to one, traveled all the way to Pennsylvania just to see exactly how Don Budge held his backhand grip.

Top players cannot relate to complex questions about technique, because their understanding is literally in a different language, the language of imagery and feeling--not words. The most fundamental problem with the tennis tip theory is that it attempts to convey information about physical movements through verbal descriptions : "Swing low to high, punch the volley, pronate your forearm on the serve, etc., etc."

To be of any value, the student would first have translate these words into internal pictures. But very few students are capable of doing this naturally. Instead, in an effort to follow the pro, they focus on his verbal descriptions and try to mechanically talk themselves through their strokes. In the process they make the game far, far more difficult and frustrating than it actually is or needs to be.

The Visual Tennis system offers an alternative: it is the only tennis teaching system that approaches tennis in the manner in which sports learning actually occurs. Top players have the natural, intuitive gift of picking up the look and feel of superior strokes. But the vast majority of tennis players need help.

Visual Tennis provides this by offering a simple, systematic process for accessing your own natural learning ability. The result for the student can be a quantum leap in the quality and consistency of stroke production, and a leap that can be accomplished on a very rapid learning curve.

Visual Tennis does this by teaching players how to construct clear physical and mental models for all of their strokes . These models are, at the same time, far more precise and far simpler than the typical aggregation of tennis tips teaching pros expound.

Visual Tennis approaches each stroke as a conceptual whole. It teaches players exactly what a given stroke should look like and what it should feel like physically . Most importantly, it teaches players how to visualize what each stroke should look like and what it should feel like inside their own mind's eye. We call this internal mental image a "kinetic image," a mental picture that also has a feeling component. A kinetic image includes not only the internal visual picture of what the stroke looks like, it includes an internal mental feeling of what it feels like to execute the stroke.

By creating the internal images, the system speaks directly to the body in the language it understands--pictures and feeling rather than words. In a literal sense the process imprints the stroke model directly into the body and the mind. The result is the creation of incredibly powerful and precise muscle memory patterns for all the strokes.

Beyond the basic learning, the visual tennis process gives the student a simple and systematic method for executing the strokes consistently when playing under competitive pressure. By pre-visualizing key images or "stroke keys" prior to execution the player blocks pressure, stays positive emotionally through positive mental imagery, and executes shots with a high degree of technical precision.

Over the past 10 years, the system has been tested and proven in work with players at literally all levels of the game: beginning children and beginning adults, club players at all levels, competitive junior players, adult league players, highly ranked NTRP and senior players, college players, and professional players up to the very top of the tennis world, including Grand Slam Champions Justine Henin-Hardenne, Gabriela Sabatini and John McEnroe.

In these articles I am going to focus on imagery for what I believe is the most overlooked, but actually, most important element in building stroke models: the hitting arm position. How your hand positions the racket head is the most critical element in the success of the stroke. Paradoxically it is almost completely overlooked in traditional lessons--despite their extensive and sometimes tortured technical analysis. But first, we'll see how the process actually works, using the example of a world class player, by examining the fascinating work I had the privilege to do with John McEnroe.