Focusing on contact window

[forehand]

John, I'm an avid user of this great site you have created. Being pretty much addicted to tennis, I have also spent some time at a competing site which shall remain unnamed, but yeah; it's that One

I apologise for the length of the text, but I found it difficult to cut it down in length without reducing it to nonsense. Question for you at the end.

On that site I've read some intriguing, yet confusing articles regarding the use of the eyes and applying a fixed depth of focus during tennis. I'm sure you are familiar with the concept, but I'll try to summarise a bit for readers of this post that may not know what the heck I'm on about.

(Note that the following list is just an attempt to describe my understanding of a 3rd person's point of veiw. Whoa, some disclaimer this one!)

- When most people play tennis they tend to track the ball from one end of the court to the other, thus varying their depth of focus continously.
- By applying a fixed depth of focus the brain and eyes are allowed to work in a more relaxed state, not having to process each position of the tennis ball along its flight path.
- The fixed depth focus is defined as a window across the court from sideline to sideline at a distance in fron of you corresponding to your contact zone.
- The player should maintain focus on the window at all times, and be concerned with defending the window, not letting any balls get by.
- Information regarding what the ball is doing will be picked up automatically through what is referred to as parallell mode operation.

It is usually quite wise to concentrate more on what happens on your own side of the court rather than on the outcome of your shots or the grace of your opponent. I find at the times that I have a little success on the court, I'm not (conciously) concerned about what happens on the other side of the net. At the same time, it is hard to believe that I am altering the normal operating mode of my eyes at the same time.

What's your take on this, John? Do you think that this way of using the eyes (fixed depth focus) is in any way comparable to what pro or high level players are doing?

Fred

[johnyandell]

To be honest I am not familiar enough with Scott's work to have a true opinion on it. I don't know enough about how the eyes actually work for one thing.

His view is the opposite of Tim Gallwey's in the Inner Game. He advocated following the ball so closely that you could see the seems spin all the way across the court both ways.

I can say from our high speed filming that the top players appear to be tracking the ball into and out of the bounce. You can see that in the way the eyes shift downward as the ball drops to the court.

Myself I like to focus on seeing the spin at the top of the bounce. If Scott's fixed focus concept works for some people I say great, but again I don't have a firm opinion due to lack of knowledge and experience.

[vmiller]

Watching the ball is not one of my better skills, so this is a topic of interest for me.

I've read the articles that you're talking about and have experimented with watching the ball that way. What I've taken from it is to avoid focusing too intently on the ball right off the opponent's racket. If I do, I have trouble sticking with it all the way, especially on serves. That's just my experience though. I tend to see the ball better and can stick with it after the bounce when I focus in a way that I don't need to move my eyes much. I guess it's sort of like zooming out. When the ball gets close, then I zoom in.

I typically find myself using the "zooming out" for returns and John's suggestion of watching the spin for groundstrokes.

Vin