Repetition, Repetition, Repetition...

Bare with me on this one..it's a bit of a "stream of consciousness"!!!

On the odd occasion I have time (very, very rare these days!) I'm partial to a round of golf, although playing as infrequently as I have recently has played merry hell with my handicap! This weekend saw me with a rare Sunday with no coaching and therefore gave the opportunity to savour watching the final round of The Open Championship, from Royal St Georges, on the Kent coastline. I love Links golf (the term given to coastal courses) as the course and most often the weather provide a real and very different challenge to the players. This year the weather was particularly horrible, with driving wind and rain, requiring the players to shape their shots in a very different fashion than they are normally used to. After four days of competition Darren Clarke came out on top, his ability to change his ball flight to a much lower trajectory than normal and his ability to read and flight the ball on the wind left him the clear winner.

So, how does this relate to tennis I hear you ask?! Well, in my role I am often asked about talent and in the golf example the commentators talked extensively about how "talented" Darren Clarke must be to be able to change his "natural" shot shape. And it got me thinking (and researching), Clarke isn't more talented than Mickleson or McIlroy or any of the other great players - he has simply practiced those types of shots enough times that when he needed them, they were there, in his muscle memory, waiting to be called upon. And so you should practice to (not golf - tennis obviously!)

"Perfect practice makes perfect" is perfectly true - it takes between 3000-5000 correct repetitions for a neural pathway to be created for a given skill or action, there's a reason the pro's have hit thousands and thousands and thousands of balls, high forehands thousands of times, low forehands thousands of times, ISO forehands thousands of times (you get the picture...)! Those correct repetitions mean that when they need that shot, it's automatic, a sub-conscious process, borne out through countless repetitions.

The process is called "myelination" or to most people - muscle-memory and it links nicely into my last piece about a single topic per lesson - repetition of a skill, under careful scrutiny until it is repeatable, before moving on to a new skill set. This process is covered very well in Daniel Coyle's "The Talent Code" and if any coaches haven't read it yet, you really should!

Anyway, the point of this rather rambling post (sorry about that!) is, make sure when you practice, you practice with purpose and full concentration on creating the correct feeling. Learning a new technique takes full focus (initially) and should be really mentally tiring! A good coach to make corrections when required and help you understand your errors is also handy! It is a hard but ultimately rewarding process - embrace it.

Cheers