Mental Imagery in Developing
Stroke Patterns

John Yandell

In his two part series on mental imagery Archie Dan Smith explored how visualization can be a driving methodology in developing and improving every aspect of the game. (Click Here for Part 1. Click Here for Part 2.) The use of imagery underlies much of everything on Tennisplayer and also the teaching system I have developed over the last 40 years—wow it's been a long time.

But in this article I want to detail more specifically how I think visual and kinesthetic imagery can work in the most fundamental aspect of the game--developing or improving how you hit the tennis ball. I think this underlies the way great players develop their games as well.

Osmosis

Many tennis players have had this experience—spontaneously playing better tennis after watching great tennis. This is the osmosis effect.

It happened to me for the first time at age 12 after watching Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall on black and white television. I played afterward with my brother on our neighborhood courts and still remember, at the age of 12, the elation of hitting with more consistency and confidence than ever before.

Many great players also recall how watching other players has influenced them. John McEnroe put it this way: "When I was learning to play, I just watched Rod Laver and tried to do what he did." Ivan Lendl told me that as a junior he would play much better after ball boying matches for the top Czechoslovakian players: "Being on the court so close to the players I saw things, and then I would start to do them myself," he said.

Billie Jean King studied the first serve-and-volley player in women's tennis, Alice Marble, and copied her service motion. American Todd Martin told me he modeled his two-handed backhand on Jimmy Connors and improved his serve by studying pictures of the motion of Boris Becker from his first Wimbledon win.

As a junior player, Pete Sampras switched from a two-handed to a one-handed backhand, starting with a grip that Don Budge demonstrated to Sampras's coach at the time, Pete Fischer. When Sampras was 12, Fischer showed him 16-millimeter black-and-white films of Rod Laver in the 1960s. Together they developed Pete's game based on that type of attacking style, which they believed was the key to winning Wimbledon.

The osmosis effect is obvious in the history of junior tennis. The success of Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert was responsible for the acceptance and eventual dominance of the two-handed backhand, a stroke that previously almost no coach or teaching pro would teach.

Bjorn Borg started the movement to more extreme grips and heavy topspin--despite universal criticism of his strokes from the tennis establishment. The list of evolutionary jumps driven by the great players goes on and on up until and including today.

No Words

Yet top players are often puzzled or annoyed when tennis writers or teaching pros ask them detailed technical questions. Pete Sampras said, "I don't know how I hit my forehand--it's just a natural feeling." Yet Pete had spent years listening to Robert Lansdorp describe the forehand in words. But those words didn't stay in Pete's brain, only the feelings.

A teaching pro friend who had a chance meeting with a top pro player in an airport asked if the pro could show him how he hit his famous two-handed backhand. "Like this," the pro replied. Without a racket, he began to model his distinctive two-handed motion.

The teaching pro began to ask the player technical questions about his shoulder and arm positions, but the player cut him off. "I don't know about that stuff, man! I just do this," he said and went back to modeling his stroke.

Deeper

The reality is that the sports learning process isn't verbal. It happens at a deeper level. The question is for the average player is how to develop the same kind of sub verbal feeling for the strokes. And for the teaching pro the question is how to help students do this.

A fundamental barrier however is the structure of traditional lessons. (Click Here for an article I wrote called the Myth of the Tennis Tip.)

The pro is on one side of the net with a basket, the student on the other. The communication predominantly is in words, usually a succession of seemingly random and unconnected verbal tips. So lessons train players to think in words on the court inside their heads. So they try to talk their way through their strokes. That's a certain path to failure.

When I began working as a teaching pro in the late 1970's I used this same traditional methodology. At that point I had already begun developing stroke models with checkpoints, but as I stood on my side of the net with my basket describing the strokes, I was repeatedly frustrated that my students had such a difficult time following my excellent--so I thought--verbal directions.

Then one day I had a random, spontaneous revelation that changed everything. I had an adult woman student who was taking up tennis in her 40s. She was not athletic, but loved tennis and was dedicated to becoming a competent recreational player.

On her forehand she had a pronounced forward wrist flex right around contact and a low finish—virtually a horizontal followthrough. My checkpoint for the finish was (as it is now) "wrist at eye level and racket hand at the left edge of the torso."

Hundreds and hundreds of balls later, she was no closer to that position than at the start. And I asked myself why my checkpoints were so ineffective with her. I used them on my forehand and could make them all day.

What was the difference? Did she just lack some physical ability or was it something else? I stopped feeding balls, stepped back and did a forehand shadow swing to the checkpoints. And that's when it hit me.

As I swung I was seeing a mental image of the finish and the checkpoints. A kind of ghost blueprint in space. And I was swinging over that projected image. And this had been going on subconsciously for years without me even realizing it.

I went over to Katherine's side of the net. I put her in the model finish position. I had her close her eyes and instead of just listening to me describe the checkpoints I had her visualize them—how they looked and how they felt inside her own mind and body.

Then I asked her to imagine the image and feeling of the checkpoints with her eyes open when I fed her a ball and then swing out over them. I fed her the first ball and on that first swing she was half way to the checkpoints. 50 balls later she had her new finish and the ability to hit through the ball with a little topspin.

Wow I thought, I'd never seen or read anything about the use of mental imagery in actual stroke execution. And that was the start of the creation of my methodology.

My goal was to find a way to systematically create images and feelings for all the critical technical information players needed working on strokes.

But a question was what was "critical"? About that time there was an article on the cover of a national tennis magazine explaining that any player could develop a one handed topspin backhand in "only" eight steps. Extrapolating from that to develop all the strokes—7 or 8 of them—you'd only have to master 55 or 60 steps.

And this complexity was consistent with the way most lessons were taught—a large compendium of information that teaching pros used to bombard students with disconnected verbal "tips." If my new belief that the creation of internal mental images and feelings was the key to overcoming this complexity and confusion, the question was how many images did a player really need to develop a given stroke? And what were they?

This was the early 1980s and so I began taping pro matches on VHS cassettes—remember VHS? Then when there was a slow motion replay of a stroke I liked, I hooked the tape up to a video printer and did sequential still frame print outs.

About that time I also started working on a project with John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl to create a visual modeling tape, eventually released as The Winning Edge. (You can see the music video segments on Tennisplayer. Click Here for the groundstrokes segment.)

Then in 1990 I published a book called Visual Tennis that outlined my conclusions. (There was a second edition in 1999 which is still available, Click Here.) Basically any stroke could be taught by creating physical models and corresponding images of a few key positions, 4 on the groundstrokes, and a couple more on the serve.

In that decade I worked with hundreds of players at all levels using the system on my private teaching court in San Francisco. And also with the high school team I coached.

I taught them the physical model positions and the corresponding mental images/feelings. I used on court video to help them compare themselves to the models. I used ball machines so that I could be on the same side to help them master the models and so I could demo them myself.

The results were more than great and tennis people who watched my students play frequently surprised the players by asking if they had trained with me. Here is a quote from one of them: "I had played tennis my whole life and had reached a plateau. When I began working in John's system to my surprise I noticed fundamental improvements. I started competing with a far more widespread group than I could have before."

The Internet and High Speed Video

Then two things happened in the mid 1990s. The internet became mainstream. And high speed video filming became possible for live tennis.

Remember the "Mac Cam" at the US Open? This was the precursor of the modern shot spot system. It filmed the lines to create replays of the actual ball bounce on close calls.

The first time I saw it, my thought was these cameras are pointed the wrong way. They should be filming the players. At 250 to 500 frames per second, they could show the actual contact point on the strokes every time—and the critical split seconds before and after.

Then in 1997, collaborating with the USTA, I had my chance. 5 days on center court filming Sampras, Agassi, Hingis, Venus and many others. The film caused quite a stir at USTA Player Development and lead to meeting and working with most of their top coaches.

And it went on from there. We probably have done over 20 filmings at pro events and that footage has become the core information in creating Tennisplayer.

It became the basis for an ongoing, 20 year quest to improve my own technical understanding--because now there was a vast amount of empirical data at high frame rates. A lot better than making video prints off VHS.

My study of thousands of clips of the elite players lead to corrections, refinements, and improvements in my stroke models. I studied commonalities across the grip styles and swing shapes and codified what I learned. I compared backswings, windups, contact points, finishes.

This formed the basis for dozens of articles on Tennisplayer and eventually for my New Teaching Method series (still ongoing!) That series goes into detail about the variations among the top players and then extracts the core components for building all the strokes. (Click Here.) And how to use imagery and video in the process.

I also boiled down these commonalities in another series called Ultimate Fundamentals. (Click Here.) The first series gives a comprehensive overview and the second shows you what positions to develop regardless of the many differences among top players that are not fundamental.

But everything in my approach goes back to the insight that day on my teaching court with Katherine. Words and verbal tips only work if the player can translate them into the language of imagery and feeling, and most never do. The real magic path is to create the internal mental and kinesthetic pictures.

Over the years I validated the method with pro players including John McEnroe himself, Justine Henin and others, as well as college players and club players at all levels, and gave talks at dozens of teaching pro conventions. Next year I will begin offering a formal certification class.

The Physical/Mental Game Nexus

But there was another major insight that came out of this work--that once a player moved out of the verbal world and into the visual, the key components of the strokes became the bridge between the physical and the mental game. Stay tuned for how that can happen for you!