Is It About Feel or Mechanics When Developing Your Strokes?

[Slicerman]

It's like when a student is trying to change his FH: he currently uses a neutral stance and all power comes from his arm and he's got a death grip on the racquet. The coach is trying to get him to rotate his trunk and let the arm follow along and to loosen his grip.

It feels foreign and wrong. If he sticks with the mechanical execution, he will start to gain feel for the shot. As he gains feel, it will feed back into his understanding of the mechanics.

I think it's a feedback loop that involve both mechanics and feel [and other things as well]. I do think that mechanics is the logical starting point but very quickly engages that feedback loop.

Yeah. Very true. I feel like mechanics and feel are strongly interconnected. A lot of good mechanics is about natural momentum. Momentum can be felt through the body interacting with gravity. When I came upon this idea, my tennis became a lot more efficient.

 

[S&V-not_dead_yet]

Sure but what input can a coach give other than mechanics.

The coach can try to relate what it should feel like, which, admittedly, is a lot more difficult than demonstrating mechanics.

 

[sureshs]

this is the major problem with coaching at the moment.

I wasn't aware that there was a major problem with coaching.

 

[johnmccabe]

There are well documented personality differences: analytical vs. intuitive. No single teaching method will always be the optimal for different people 's learning outcome. One may argue best tennis players are all intuitive style and hence teaching feel is more important than teaching mechanics. That may or may not be true. Rec players come in all sorts of shapes and types. if a coach wants to change more people's tennis lives, he/she must be able to teach both feel and mechanics to different players at different stages of their development. I'm analytical type and learning mechanics helped me make more progress than most people I know in their first year. My wife is intuitive type and the same video about stroke mechanics that worked very well for me clearly doesn't work for her.