A New Year's Serve

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Forehand Iteration (I tell it then I try it)

The more the arm is bent, the shorter the backswing up.

The shorter the backswing up, the longer the extension of arm to straight.

The shorter the backswing, the more one may be encouraged to "scapularly retract."

The steeper the fall, the more one will be likely to use gravity in an easier flip.

The more the scapular retraction, the more the elbow points in a rearward direction.

So that more scapular adduction will be available to move the arm forward in the third of three-point sequence (hips, shoulders, arm).

Put another way, the arm, although taking a solo, has remained solid with the bod. The housing around the shoulder moves the arm, leaving the humerus alone in its rotator cuff to twist (wipe) or not depending on desire.

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We need another verb to describe this forward contraction of the scapular girdle. How about "husk?"

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Meanwhile, the sooner one points across, the better one's chance of establishing a clear parameter for arm motion independent of bod rotation.

How much should racket thus move in a typical shot, in feet or inches? That information would be useful.

To obtain it, one could tape a yardstick across the front of one's shoulders.

Why bother, though, when one's opposite arm is already pointing across, a useful benchmark.

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Desire can determine different follow throughs, e.g., 1) flatten shot out: finish over or around shoulder, 2) more topspin: racket tip spins low.

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And then there is this guy (https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...t%20500fps.mp4). I won't be trying this today, but really isn't the continued roll of the arm around the top of one's head the same basic idea as when racket tip spins low? "Continued roll" is the uniting principle. The only roll that matters is the roll that is happening when strings scrape the ball. But that scrape is more powerful when there is assured and continuing roll after the contact whether low or high.

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Building a Better Elevator to the Forehand Stars

One can make a resolution, could even call it a New Year's resolution, such as "I shall not think about tennis technique this summer," but when you have an idea, any idea, you'd better write it down, said the film-maker David Lynch-- "Otherwise, later, you'll want to kill yourself."

Well, if the idea is a political one, you can go with it to a political website. If it is a human idea, to a human website if you can find one. The idea here is technical tennis: As opposite arm points across, take bent arm up from three blended sources so no one source works too hard: 1) cocking wrist, 2) rolling humerus, 3) slightly lifting elbow.

The produced incline creates a better drop from the apogee one has picked, a hydraulic elevator ride straight down in which neither hand nor racket tip goes deeper than the other.

This parallelism-- racket tip and hand an equal distance from the court just before the flip, can become a personal goal to be achieved and maintained by slight leg compression on low balls, by slanted drop on higher balls, by sideways instead of downward elbow "opening out" on balls even higher than that unless one decides instead to hit a bent arm shot.

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"For there are two sorts of mind: one that matters and one that doesn't matter. Is that so? That is so, isn't it?" -- Aglaia in THE IDIOT, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The mind that matters, in tennis, is the one that creates, not imitates.

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When Roger Straightens his Wrist

https://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/phantom/Roger_Federer_HD_HS/index.html?dir=Forehand/RF_FH_Arm_Action&stroke=RFFHCenterArmActionSide_250fps.mp4

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Euphoria the Enemy?

The euphoria that comes from great new information given up by Brian Gordon must be worked through so that one can properly confront one's personal challenges in carrying out the Gordon program, straight arm division.

These could relate to old age or other physical shortcoming, more likely to imperfect understanding of what the person has been told.

A left-right-left foot rhythm can keep many players more continuously attached to the ground.

Setting up with racket way out toward right fence is all wrong. It doesn't take the hand sufficiently back. One needs space in which to generate maximum spin. Have short compact solid bod alternatives, but set up now with bent elbow and the two shoulder balls in the same plane.

Thinking from hand and not racket tip, the hand circles forward a foot from strings that lag behind due to the knees-driven flip.

This establishes one's spear.

Torso now accelerates the spear another foot so that one feels as if it or a needle is coming out of one's instep or right ankle.

A blend of arm wipe and arm slam next takes the hand three feet (one yard) to contact.

Which happens on or near a perpendicular line drawn from left shoulder to right fence. This shoulder is likely to have retreated-- doesn't matter. The imaginary perpendicular is traced by opposite arm pointing across which first is there and then isn't.

Well, how long is it there?

Until knees have pivoted. And disappears as torso fires.

But you can remember your left arm fondly and in fact pretend it is still there if you like.

If hitting the flattened version with no windshield wipe for more penetration, one can straighten wrist toward opposite fence after contact.

If hitting full topspin however, wrist straightens a bit later when racket has already started its backward journey toward left shoulder.

One could twist racket low down to one's side. Or up high around top of head. But for Rachel Maddow or anyone else with a healthy long neck, rolling the racket backward toward the shoulder before releasing the wrist is a good compromise.

[bottle]

Reader, if the following information so disturbs you that your hair falls out and your flesh suddenly colors in parallel stripes of purple, red, green, orange and chartreuse, simply use the old term for muscle memory. That would be "muscle memory." Do that and you will be fine.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27954/

Roger Federer, as an old tennis sage once observed, has good myelin.

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Forehands. Oh, I'm not going to use my arm. Oh, I'm going to use my arm.

If you are in the latter gang, you might consider this website: https://www.jaegersports.com/year-ro...-video-series/.

[bottle]

Just Remember This

The 500-mm diameter unmyelinated giant axon of the squid requires 5,000 times as much energy and occupies about 1,500 times as much space as the 12-mm diameter myelinated nerve in the frog.

[bottle]

Are Tennis Players Dumb?

They always are running around saying "Don't think," so I suppose they are.

I view them as gangstas or gang members. As the product of eight-oared crews, I guess I am too.

But now I am a tennis player just as for a year in Cambridge, MA I was a single sculler who didn't have seven other oarsmen and a coxswain working with me.

Yes, tennis is best as an individual sport, and there isn't anyone with you out there on the court, and as the character Lisaveta Prokofyevna says in THE IDIOT, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Delicacy and dignity are taught by the heart and not by the dancing-master."

But every time I play doubles I'm in a gang of two, and I knew a lot of gangstas when I taught English in two Massachusetts prisons, and I certainly always have my gang of nine close behind me.

Last Tuesday, as we made plans to deal with the loss of our coach, Whitey Helander, the captain of my crew reminded everybody that we beat every other crew in the United States except for one, Navy, and only lost to them by .2 second-- twice by the exact same margin as I recall, two years apart but once at 2000 meters and the other time at three miles.

I thought we lost to Harvard, too, but apparently Harvard went out of the Olympic Trials before we did.

Navy were the 1960 American Olympic team, with the intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Baldwin, rowing in the number four seat, my position. Lost badly in Rome to Kiel-Ratzeburg, a German unification gang even before the wall came down.

But the gang experience that sport or prison can afford one (the "behind the walls" and "not behind the walls" distinction that jailbirds make-- like the Montagues and Capulets, the Jets and the Sharks) is very enjoyable.

One doesn't have to know history or anything about democracy, just how to bump off the other guy or more politely, "win."

Great until you try to apply this principle to real life. It just isn't a rich enough frame of reference.

[bottle]

Hand Linearity? Why then any hand verticality?

Why does anyone need an overhead loop? Tony Roche disparaged "a big overhead loop way back behind you" (demonstrating with arm and racket in an Australian instruction video long ago). But why do we need any overhead loop at all?

I guess the idea is to make a lot of space in which to build up racket head speed. But why wave your wand up and down when you can just wave it back and forth?

Today's experiment proceeds from that daydream, assumption, rejection of narrow frame forehands for the big doofus that would be me. Nothing shameful in this. Oarsmen are not built like point guards.

The personal paradigm has shifted toward semi-open, neutral stance, and even the old-fashioned and often derided closed forehands. If these closed shots just have gone out of fashion but still have utility, the derision is undoubtedly foolish. In any case this different range of stances re-establishes neutral stance forehand as the mean, the choice where one learns the most.

One takes the elbow back pretty much on the same level where it started, and this is as much a part of unit turn as anything else. I just tried this in self-feed and it seemed very good, producing high balls with the bottom suddenly dropping out of them.

Elbow thus gets quickly located on inner edge of the slot but way back in the same plane as the two shoulder balls. So what is the setting of upper arm? 45 degrees down.

The next move, extension from the elbow joint or "dogpat" or "floating milkweed" or whatever you want to call it may feel level due to being behind you but actually slants down. The elbow is a fixed joint, not a ball joint, therefore extends in one direction. So if upper arm slants down, the extension goes down. But, again because of the slant and the way the racket tip is pointing somewhat sideways like a scythe, goes farther back just as much.

In an earlier post I posited five feet to ball. What have I got now? Six feet? How about keeping the five feet but just from a starting place one foot more back. That might do away with a needle coming out of one's instep which was an unpleasant image anyway.

New rap on hand travel: It comes one foot from pivoting knees, one foot from rotating torso, three feet from blended arm slam and arm roll.

The new rap is same as the old rap but perhaps correct this time.

I envision a big neutral stance step-out.

[bottle]

Baseball Announcers to the Rescue

Every once in a while a good baseball announcer will say something perceptive about hitting the ball.

Here it was. "Turn your hips with your legs. You don't want to move your head."

So here is the experiment. No moving of head through knees pivot and torso rotation. Not at all a classical idea. Mercer Beasley would have you use the pivot to dance onto the front leg.

Save forward bod press for the arm slam, which gets helped by your slowing overall bod rotation however you can.

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People Don't React

And it's true whether the subject is tennis, politics, history, math or anything else. This is how you can tell that they aren't there. Hanging out with Katharine Hepburn and her family had its advantages. You HAD to say what you thought.

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A Tight Whirl (Knees and Torso) Followed by a Broad Whirl

That's what I want to try.

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$6,500? That's What my Father Paid for it

https://www.amazon.com/Riversea-Sayb.../dp/B018P3LLGU

The building to which Kate and Dick and the rest of the Hepburn family escaped in 1938 as their own house floated down the lagoon toward the Old Saybrook lighthouse.

[don_budge]

https://estream.to/zqfuynes90bf.html