Kids learn bad technique from being forced to hit with too heavy racquet/ tennis balls (which is why kids start with small light racquets and foam balls). You can always tell the kid who used a heavy racquet too early because they swing like lumber jacks. It is like basketball - you can see the bad technique in the kids who shot too heavy of a ball too young.
This is not necessarily true. If a child is left to themselves, no matter how heavy or light the racquet is, a player has a high chance of developing improper technique in all or parts of their swing. Strength is a key but coordination is also a key. I learned tennis with a wood racquet that was regarded as being heavy.
In adults, you have ingrained muscled memory that is hard to overcome. For example, it is much hard to teach someone a good serve who has never thrown a ball because their weight shift and timing are really off.
Sometimes. An athletic person can adopt a good swing through practice, shaping, and repetition. What I mean by shaping is one who is practicing good form and executing their swing.
The trouble with kids and adults learning the game of tennis has to do more with the following:
1. Practicing with a faster feed then they should: This usually comes from our past capabilities like hitting a baseball or puncing a beach ball. We do not consider that the control of a racquet head in a certain grip is that hard. That is until we see the ball fly high into the sky or dump the ball repeatedly into the net.
2. Not ensuring good form is practiced and grooved. To many people (even here) we say "just do what comes naturally." Well, that could spell doom for a lot of people because they may have learned bad habits or bad form in other sports that they could bring in to tennis. Or a player just may not be mature enough with their coordination (both adult and kid).
3. Not practicing and just playing matches or they are just recreationalist.
4. Practicing one way (stroking the ball) and playing matches with another way (pushing).
When adults learn different activities, the muscle learn to fire a certain way. Tennis is unique enough were it places demands on the muscles both gross and stabilizing to fire a certain way to shape a stroke and contact the ball.
There is a lot being processed by the brain as it should. However, the naturalist claim that a player with all of these do's and don'ts are supressed to mediocrity because they have too much to think about. I dont agree with this.
It is true that in order to improve in tennis, one will have to work hard. This means you will need to process a lot of information under stress to make things "natural" or automatic. Most adults never allow their practices to go this far.
The human being has an amazing ability to adapt to its environment. Place the human under stress and what was once difficult becomes easy. This is the case with tennis. In the beginning, there is a lot to process. However, if one works hard at it, slowly the information that is being absorbed gets absorbed one by one and it becomes part of the player.
