I can attempt to “coach up” a young athlete on the correct forehand technique with all kinds of words but I have found it is much easier to get them to feel coordinated movements than to try and explain it to them.  I always say “you cannot see yourself hitting, you can only feel yourself hitting.”  I recently gave an athlete homework to do rotational medicine ball throws against a cinder block wall and I thought what I explained to him would make a great blog post.

Rotational sports like tennis and baseball are all about creating power.  This power ideally is created from the ground up meaning it is generated in the lower half of the body and then transferred through a stable core into the upper body where it is directed out into the arms.  This is what happens when you swing a tennis racket or baseball bat.

For youth the very first step is that they must experiment with coordinating this ground up power movement pattern.  I could explain it all I want but it is so much more effective just to allow them to feel it.  Young athletes often do not know what it feels like to fire their muscles in the sequence needed to efficiently create the movement pattern, it just takes some time and practice.  You see the brain does not work in isolated muscles it works in whole movement patterns.  An athlete can work on leg, core and upper body strength in isolated exercises but all that new found strength does not transfer over into an explosive rotational movement unless that pattern is already coordinated.  Once they can coordinate the pattern it becomes very easy to get real world transfer into a rotational sport like tennis or baseball.

I use all kinds of foam balls and light medicine ball rotational throwing movements to let young athletes feel the movement pattern.  I use foam balls with young children and a lighter med ball with others because too much load will stress their systems, creating a compensated dysfunctional movement pattern.  Most of all I want a functional pattern because this is the foundation that everything will be built upon.  For that reason, I am more concerned with the movement pattern becoming coordinated than how much weight they are throwing.  Once they hit the right training age and own the movement pattern I’ll load them up to develop more power.

An added benefit to med ball throws compared to other rotational exercises is that there is a release at the end which leads to a young athlete being able to decelerate after the release.  This is incredibly important to injury prevention.  There are other exercises that can help in creating rotational power but without the release athletes do not learn how to decelerate their flailing limbs.  Just think you can hit a tennis ball really hard and the harder you hit it the better you need to be at decelerating all that momentum or you are bound for an injury.

Finally, this is fun to do and a great stress reliever.  Give a young athlete a med ball and tell them to throw it in a rotational pattern as hard as they can off the wall.  They get coordinated without even knowing it because the body loves efficiency and with enough practice finds that most efficient ground up coordinated movement pattern.  All the athlete needs to know is that slamming a ball as hard as they can off the wall is pretty fun because you cannot do it at home.

There are all kinds of acute injuries the knee can sustain while playing tennis like ligament and meniscus tears.  These types of injuries typically occur due to shearing rotational forces placed on the joint during deceleration.  In my humble opinion,I believe acute knee injuries are closely connected to the lack of reactive trunk stability.  So if you are interested in trying to prevent these injuries squats and leg presses will not get the job done.  Get the job done by spending time reactively training the trunk.

Take a look at the video below to see what I mean along with some really simple band exercises designed to get the trunk on board and prevent these types of injuries.

The concept behind sport-specific training seems to make perfect sense…If I want my son or daughter to be really good at tennis they should mimic movements similar to the sport for enhanced performance.  The truth is if you know a little about long-term athletic development and how the body of a young athlete functions it makes perfect sense how BAD sport-specific training really is for your child’s tennis career.

There are two main points for my argument…

First, children who are really good at tennis have to put in the time with repetition after repetition after repetition to become unconsciously-competent at their skills so they will not break down under pressure.  Think about how often the muscles, connective tissues, and joints get used in sport specific movements in the tennis training alone.  They get used so often children actually can develop muscle imbalances and asymmetries.  Now think about sport-specific training where a coach slaps some bands onto a racket and repeats the movement some more with an increased load.  Training like this is basically asking for an OVERUSE INJURY.  Instead, training should be designed to  develop overall strength on both sides of the joints and maintain symmetry and balance in the body.  Not only does this greatly minimize the chances of overuse injury but it also improves overall systemic strength, joint stability and coordination.

Second, children are still in the process of developing their athletic ability.  They are still learning how to coordinate athletic movements and muscles.  Their overall athletic ability, things like agility, power, and speed, are still developing and the best way to develop them is with a variety of training methods.  When you pigeon hole training to movements specifically found in the sport of tennis you are going to stifle their overall long-term athletic development.  The result is having young tennis athletes who are really good at tennis specific footwork patterns but cannot even coordinate a skill like skipping.  This is going to hurt their development in the long-term because when they have to make improvisations during points and just make outright athletic moves they will not be able to because their overall athletic skill has been limited to a few tennis specific movements patterns in their training.  This lack of overall athletic skill development also leave them susceptible to acute injuries like sprained ankles and ACL tears when they do try to make sudden athletic moves that their nervous system just cannot coordinate and handle.

If you want to improve your child’s tennis game with off court training shy away from sport-specific training and get them into an appropriate developmental program with a good coach who aims for balance to prevent injury and enhancing the development of athletic skills.  It might not be as flashy as all the sport-specific training but sticking with it will produce the best results long-term and reduce the risk of injury.  You cannot cook a great steak in the microwave, it takes time to slowly simmer on the grill.  The same is true for your child’s athletic development.