Tip of the Week: Pick a Target and Trust Your Swing
Watching tennis these days can be very confusing. Each player tends to have their own individual swing. There are some players who look similar but basically everyone puts their stamp on a specific shot. There is not one exact swing for each shot and every person.
What these means is that we should try to follow the basic fundamentals and let our natural swing do the work. I recommend picking a target before each shot, watching the ball all the way through the contact point, and swinging the way it feels most natural for you. This simple process will keep you from trying to analyze and assess things as you are hitting the ball and playing the point. By eliminating the extra thinking, it gives your body a much better chance of swinging freely and repeating the same swings over and over.
Remember that part of this process is also accepting that you will still miss some shots and make some errors. Accepting the outcome of your shot is one of the most important and difficult ideas for a competitive player. Human nature is to look for what went wrong and then try to fix it. Your mind will naturally adjust the next shot according to what happened on the previous one. If you feel you are making the same mistake a few times in a row, pick one key technique idea (watch the ball, follow through, or recover and get ready) and see if that corrects the error. Stay with the “pick a target and trust your swing” thought and you will likely have better results and less errors.
